With school back in session, students are pondering the great questions. No, not whether Katy Perry is a better act than Taylor Swift. We mean the BIG questions.
Popular Science lives up to its name. You don’t have to be a rocket scientist to understand it.
This month, PopSci talks about the future of driverless cars, a timely topic with companies like Google and Tesla developing the technology that will one day allow
commuters to sleep while the robot chauffeur takes the wheel. Some of the magazine’s little story bites are the best ones, delving into topics like what would happen if an astronaut were lost in space outside a craft, which is the premise of the new movie “Gravity” with Sandra Bullock. Turns out the astronaut would likely die after the eight hours of air runs out.
As science mags go, Discover is probably the most akin to your local TV news station. It is packed with stories that will startle you, freak you out and keep you up past bedtime. Take Discover’s cover story about toxins in your food. After reading it, you may never eat rice again, or sip apple juice, for fear of poisoning yourself with unsafe levels of arsenic. Once you’ve raised your blood pressure with that, how about what can seep into your body from plastic containers and how even honey can be bad for you. Don’t miss a frightening story about a giant plant in Borneo called Corpse Flower because it smells like dead bodies, or this feature: “How to Dodge a Cosmic Bullet,” about saving the planet from killer asteroids.
Popular Mechanics Editor-in-Chief James Meigs should make like an NBC exec and dump Jay Leno. The celebrity car enthusiast regularly pens a feature for PopMech titled “Jay Leno’s Garage.” But the item the comedian produced on his adventures purchasing vintage cars with his father is equal parts pointless and awkwardly written. Elsewhere, the magazine delivers an illustrated guide on how to avoid accidental death. Here’s one: “Avoid shark-infested waters.”
Scientific American, the grand-daddy of science magazines, is here to remind us that science is serious stuff. We’d actually never wondered why humans live longer than other primates, but a story promising to answer the question did pique our interest. (It may have to do with eating meat, which forced human genes to develop certain immunities.) A feature on Russia’s nuclear power exports might be more scary than that country’s role in Syria. We were reminded elsewhere that science is at the forefront of political debate in the US, both on the topic of evolution and climate change.
The New Yorker’s cartoon cover depicts Bashar al-Assad doing a cameo in “Breaking Bad,” mixing chemicals inside Walter White’s meth lab. Inside, a feature focuses on Assad’s key military backer — Iran’s special-ops chief Qassem Suleimani. A former CIA officer tells reporter Dexter Filkins that Suleimani is “the single most powerful operative in the Middle East today — and no one’s ever heard of him.” One possible reason for this: it was Suleimani, not the US, who brokered the deal to install Nouri al-Maliki to lead Iraq, Filkins reports. So who should be more embarrassed by all of this, the US government, or the press for not filling us in on this sooner? “Iraq is a failed state now, an Iranian colony,” says Ayad Allawi, for those of us who haven’t yet gotten the memo.
“We get to be home together a lot more now than we used to in the last few years,” Hillary Clinton tells New York, in what must be the most sleep-inducing quote to kick off a magazine feature in weeks. “We have a great time; we laugh at our dogs; we watch stupid movies; we take long walks; we go for a swim.” Excuse us, but we’ve got a hard time digesting this. Far easier was the mention farther down of the time Bill and Hillary crossed paths in Bogota while she was secretary of state. “They had dinner together — then owing to their massive entourages, returned to their respective hotels,” Joe Hagan reports. Now that’s the couple we know and love, thank you very much.
Time’s new managing editor, Nancy Gibbs, begins her inaugural letter to readers with the rather dubious assertion that “Time now reaches an audience its founders could only have dreamed of.” Sorry, but we can’t shake the idea Henry Luce might be a bit crestfallen to read the latest circulation numbers and ad rates. Likewise, we’re highly skeptical of her bald declaration that “we are living through the most immense transfer of power from institutions to individuals in history.” Still, she keenly observes “an abiding concern with how detached our politics feels from the reality of our lives,” and this issue has some strong features in particular on Google, education reform and e-cigarettes.