There’s nothing more American than capitalism, so kick back with a hot dog and some baseball, while your portfolio provides fireworks.
Fortune offers a couple of treats in its latest issue, a workmanlike feature on LinkedIn that will interest those on the tech periphery, and a sober examination of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. In the latter, veteran editor-at-large Shawn Tully does some heavy lifting in examining how the quasi-government mortgage giants are squeezing out private lenders and, possibly, inflating another housing bubble. The two features are as tasty as a couple of cannolis — and a lot better for you. But then there is the magazine’s quartet of tired, non news-driven columnists, an upfront section that is a PR executive’s wet dream, and an overall lack of courage. They are a cap-gun lacking any pop. In our opinion, leave the gun, take the cannolis.
It’s not your father’s Forbes anymore. This month’s “Celebrity 100” issue delivers a not-so mainstream take on the riches of country singer Toby Keith. Think Taylor Swift is bigger? Over the past five years Keith’s made $270 million while she’s made $220 million. He outranks Jay-Z and Beyoncé for product-placement dollars and owns a piece of Swift’s label, Big Machine, as well as a restaurant chain and a mezcal brand. Another offbeat but fascinating feature comes from Jeff Bercovici about the publishing industry’s search for the next blockbuster franchise.
Harvard Business Review says leadership based on instilling fear without gaining the trust of your followers is a recipe for dysfunction. The brainy magazine’s feature dispelling the Machiavellian mantra that it’s better to be “feared than loved” makes for a good read. Elsewhere, Carly Fiorina pens a column pressing readers to invest in one woman — a noble cause, indeed. Too bad, it’s hard to forget that floundering PC maker Hewlett-Packard lost roughly half its stock value under Fiorina.
You have to admire the mind-numbing depths Bloomberg Markets plumbs. This month’s cover story on South Korea lures in the reader by mentioning Samsung’s smartphone cred and Gangnam Style glitz to march through the country’s economic history and end with its new emphasis on entrepreunerialism. The blow-by-blow of JPMorgan’s emails on the Whale Trade is less successful, as no smoking guns are revealed — or else they are so buried the reader hasn’t got a clue.
We must admit that, for the first time in memory, we were actually startled to see the cover of this week’s New Yorker, which depicts Bert and Ernie, cuddling on the sofa, watching the Supreme Court on TV. It’s one thing to joke about these two Muppets being gay on a blog, or at the water cooler or on the “Daily Show.” But here we have a supposed bastion of journalistic probity peddling a claim about a pair of children’s icons. Poor Bert & Ernie, getting dragged into a rather childish and irresponsible conversation because a mob of editors decided they’d make great fodder for a political gag — a gag about some rather historic news, by the way, that also deserves much better than this. At least Bert & Ernie can take comfort in one thing: they’ve got a lot more class than the New Yorker.
For journalists who believe there are important and urgent questions surrounding the case of Edward Snowden, take a tip from New York’s Frank Rich: you’re a bunch of “worrywarts.” Nevermind that the US government has been lying about widespread spying on its citizens, Rich says. It’s not really a story because those citizens don’t care, as they’re too busy outing themselves on Google, Facebook and Twitter. Rich is what we might call the hoary, twinkly-eyed ironist. Gather ’round, kids, and let him tell you all about how there’s nothing new under the sun. He’s seen it all, he’ll give you the whole history lesson. He’s right about all of it, of course — we’re a nation of exhibitionist zombies, and we’re probably hopeless. But call us crazy, we still prefer journalists who at least fool themselves into pouring their energy into digging up dirt and convincing us why it is, indeed, something to worry about.
Time promises on its cover to tell us “Why Americans are wired to be happy — and what that’s doing to us.” Now, anybody who has done a minimal amount of research on the subject knows that Americans are wired for anything but happiness. Indeed, this cover story is so profoundly laden with uninformed and contradictory claptrap we don’t know where to begin. How about the observation that the pilgrims to the New World were “pursuing something — and happiness is as good a way of defining that goal as any.” Well, to be fair, it did seem that among certain pilgrims, “happiness” was getting considerable competition from “witch burning.” On the next page, we learn in a graphic that numerous impoverished and war-torn nations in Central America, Africa and Asia rank well above the US in happiness — a genuinely interesting fact that doesn’t get addressed in the story. Consider this: “Despite growing up in a country ravaged by war, 80 percent of Somali youth say they were happy.”