Media

This week’s magazines are all business

With Forbes up for sale and the holiday season about to begin, we’re giving you something to digest besides your turkey. Here’s a look at what some business magazines are serving up.

Forbes tempers its typically aggressive capitalist bent with a special philanthropy issue. In an interview, Bill Gates admits he initially didn’t want to meet Bono. “I was kind of amazed that he actually knew what he was talking about,” Gates says of the Irish rock star. A bit more surprising is the profile on hedge-fund billionaire Paul Tudor Jones, who actually seems genuinely passionate about solving the US education crisis. “We are losing the space race,” according to Jones. “This time the space is between our kids’ ears.”

Fortune, naming Elon Musk as its 2013 Business Person of the Year, rhapsodizes somewhat oddly how Musk’s genius is most closely akin to that of Steve Jobs. “What Musk and Jobs really have in common is a rare form of design thinking powered by unfettered conviction.” Well, sure, this applies to Steve Jobs and his iPods and iPads. But Musk is not just designing stuff, he’s trying to solve the energy crisis and colonize Mars. The Tesla is a sleek machine, but where’s the mention of Musk’s affinity with Google’s Larry Page and Sergey Brin, who are busy building self-driving cars and stopping human aging?

Bloomberg Markets delves into a subject close to its owner’s heart with “The Billionaires Issue,” and it couldn’t get more lurid than this. Among those profiled is Bulat Utemuratov, an “ally” of Nursultan Nazarbayev, the “president” of Kazakhstan. The article briefly notes the Borat-spoofed Central Asian dictatorship’s “contentious” human-rights record of torture, censorship and corruption before blandly compiling an encyclopedia entry on how this apparatchik has amassed a fortune. “I have nothing to hide,” the post-Soviet billionaire tells Bloomberg, which doesn’t bother to check.

Harvard Business Review seems a bit out of focus as it puts a cat on its cover to lead with an only semi-focused story on “focused leaders.” This would be enough to drive away most casual browsers, and seems especially inept given that it also has a feature on “How Google Sold its Engineers on Management.” Unfortunately, the Google story is also a bit dull, finding that a good Google manager is “a good coach,” who“empowers the team and does not micromanage.” More interesting is the fact that Google in 2002 experimented for a few months with having no engineering managers at all.

It’s official: Nikki Finke has been broken like a once-proud mustang, and she has made a strapping cowboy out of a 30-something rich kid who likes to be driven around Hollywood in an Aston Martin. Of course, New York doesn’t actually come out and say this in its story on the ruthless Hollywood gossip monger’s headline-making relationship with Jay Penske. Nevertheless, one is taken aback how vulnerable Finke comes across as she talks about her on-and-off boss. Penske, who for his part appears to have treated Finke like dirt out of raw fear, has discovered she retains some of the characteristics of a human being, after all. It’s not yet clear whether either of them has the capacity to deal with this fact and somehow carry on in human fashion. “I really can’t imagine not having Jay in my life,” Finke tells reporter Benjamin Wallace. Penske, meanwhile, refused to be quoted — the kind of thing he gets away with every day, it seems. Poor Nikki.

The New Yorker runs a fairly nauseating story about the latest in the New York art world, which of course, more than ever, is being fueled by billionaires looking for investments and tax shelters. “You see paintings by dozens of artists you’ve hardly heard of selling for more than a million,” says dealer David Zwirner, who has ridden the crest of this trend to become the second-most powerful person in the art world. “One of the reasons there’s so much talk about money is that it’s so much easier to talk about it than the art.” Possibly even more nauseating is the air in China, as its unregulated factories belch their filth into the sky, as Sting would say. On bad days, “you cannot see to the other side of a four-lane road,” Ian Johnson writes. “It used to rain black rain,” says a resident of the city of Handan. “The cabbage was all black, so we had to peel off the outer layer.”

Nancy Gibbs, Time’s managing editor, pens a cover story on the ObamaCare debacle that’s little more than a bitter regurgitation of all that we’ve been forced to digest this month. Instead, check out the feature on “What Boys Want,” which spotlights some startling stats on the plight of boys vs. girls in the US these days — for example that 81 percent of suicides in the 10-to-24 age range were boys. Now, 43 percent of college students are male, down from 58 percent in 1970. “A culture of sexual liberation and empowerment for girls and young women has left boys (and their parents) largely at sea,” says author Rosalind Wiseman.