With talk of a recovery more and more in the air, it’s time to get down to the business of business.
Aware that geniuses rarely stay in corporate cubicles, Inc. believes that our high jobless rate could be a good omen for clever, wannabe entrepreneurs. The magazine’s target readers are mostly out on their own, or plan to be. Its inspirational cover package, “Inside the Minds of Great Entrepreneurs,” tells why it’s normal for them to go for broke, regardless of any economic climate. One article aims to stimulate original thinking by showing how some solo business folks developed real-life versions of Hollywood fantasies, such as James Bond’s underwater car and Batman’s grappling hook.
Fortune is using its bright spotlight in hopes of chasing off the darkness of being unemployed. Its cover is all about jobs, with a prediction of a likely hiring boom for many. Its annual wrap-up, “100 Best Companies To Work For,” assures us that they’ll all be hiring, and lists their perks, pay and benefits such as Goldman Sachs’ 54,000-square-foot gym and sky lobby with a glass-tower reading room. Indeed, hiring is under way at the favored firms, Fortune reports in one of the cover package articles, “Over 150,000 Jobs Ready to Be Filled.” The issue also offers a good profile on Jack Dorsey, creator of Twitter, and his mission to make accepting a credit card as easy as sending a tweet.
Fast Company‘s cover story of two hip-looking Chinese techies that announces Beijing has its own answers to Facebook, YouTube and Twitter doesn’t offer anything new or surprising. Inside, though, play along with the clever thought experiment on how to explain the Internet to a 19th-century English street urchin. Now, that’s funny! Also funny are the cartoon bears that cuss out foul-mouthed comedian George Carlin. Fast Company fills us in on where the bears can be found: at Xtranormal, which allows users to make their own animated videos online.
As its clumsily constructed post-merger newsstand name suggests, there’s a lot going on within the pages of Bloomberg Businessweek. And that’s not necessarily a good thing for the business-focused weekly. To be blunt, there’s just too much going on and while some readers may appreciate the content overload, they’re bound to be dismayed by the eyestrain-inducing font sizes. That said, the magazine offers a few pieces worth a gander. That includes Susan Berfield’s article on cheap chic fashion house Forever 21’s rise. The article depicts a $3 billion West Coast clothing empire that has enjoyed a rapid ascent amid accusations of shoddy labor practices and a policy of shilling inexpensive trendy designer knockoffs.
Leave it to the out-of-sync New Yorker to ask, in bold letters atop its flap cover: “Should football be banned?” We’re not saying you’ve got to be a flag-burning, tree-hugging communist to ask this question, and we don’t mind that this sensationalist headline is way overblown compared with what’s actually being discussed. We’re just wondering, given the timing of Gang Green’s dramatic post-season run, how could this publication more aptly demonstrate that it’s hopelessly out of step with the spirit of the city in late January?
New York‘s essay on “The Remaking of the President” doesn’t do much to advance the chatter about what’s wrong with the Obama administration. Nevertheless, we get the succinct diagnosis that Obama “lost his storyteller’s touch . . . his apparent capacity to lift the country up and calm it down at the same time.” Fair enough, although we’re not sure how cheered we were to read that Obama has only recently recognized this problem. Elsewhere, we had to wince reading the saga of Travis, the menacing Connecticut chimpanzee, “from coddled infant to wine-swilling face mangler.”
In contrast, Time takes a sleep-inducing approach to news of the week, emphasizing that Tunisia has “nervous neighbors” as “the Arab world ponders the lessons of its first successful popular uprising.” Inside, it’s similarly sleepy: Geithner in China, concussions in kids’ sports and Natalie Portman in the movies. We must admit, however, that we couldn’t help but read the piece on the “Tiger Mom Manifesto,” which pictures Yale Law Professor Amy Chua drilling her two daughters in music lessons at her Connecticut home.
Whether it was an orderly process or not, Newsweek‘s flopped redesign has been pretty much tossed aside. Gone is the appetizer of arid updates on wars and plagues and riots in countries most Americans prefer not to hear of. Gone are the columnists, packed side-by-side into a gray, dozen-page section of opinion, with George F. Will sucking away all the oxygen. What we get is a grab bag: a six-way interview with top Oscar prospects; a breakout story on the upheavals at Apple and Google. This is a grab bag that we liked for a change.