The Periodical Table

Our weekly review of the magazines laying around Beachwood HQ.

Amiable Dunce
I just can't get past the fact that even while he was president, Ronald Reagan called Nancy "Mommie." I mean how creepy is that? He did so in writing too, according to Nicholas Lemann's account in this week's New Yorker of The Reagan Diaries. In conjunction with a dip into The Education of Ronald Reagan: The General Electric Years and the Untold Story of His Conversion to Conservatism, Lemann offers a fairly rich portrait of someone who is utterly and undeniably an inscrutable simpleton.

ALSO: New Yorker editor David Remnick's devastating piece on how the Six-Day War shaped Israel's political culture is a stiff dose of reality to those whose sympathies lie with the tiny Jewish nation, the Palestinians' horrific blunders notwithstanding.

Rudy's Republic
I have absolutely no interested in reading The New Republic's cover story about "Why The GOP's Future Belongs to Rudy" Giuliani, by former Washington Post political writer Thomas Edsall, now of The Huffington Post. Just another piece of useless punditry posing as reporting that will be forgotten by next week with its assertions never held to account.

ALSO: The magazine features a story about the guy who is taking care of our veterans because the government isn't, in another in a decades-long attempt by the magazine to prove it's not liberal, this time assuring us that it really does support the troops.

RECOMMENDED: Cass Sunstein of the University of Chicago turns in a terrific and terrifying review of Philip Zimbardo's The Lucifer Effect: Understanding How Good People Turn Evil. Zimbardo's argument turns on the idea that perpetrating evil is not a matter of one's predisposition to do harm, but situational response largely due to our instinct to obey authority.

One of the most famous examples of this phenomenon tested by social scientists was the shock experiment of Stanley Milgram, which caused Milgram to state that "if a system of death camps were set up in the United States of the sort we had seen in Nazi Germany, one would be able to find sufficient personnel for those camps in any medium-sized American town."

Guilt's Goals
Soccer goalies facing penalty kicks often end up prematurely leaping in the wrong direction as a strategy to outguess the kicker. But according to Psychology Today, "A study reveals that the optimal goalkeeper strategy is to stay centered - at least until kickers switch their strategies, too. So why don't they? Unlike most situations, the researchers say, goalies feel more guilt for failure after inaction than after action."

ALSO: Words I never thought I'd see in large print in this far-too-sedate magazine: "AJ=The intern in my office whom I want to fuck." They left it off the web version of the story.

Newspaper Trade
You know things are bad in the business when the trade journal for the Society of Professional Journalists includes "Tips For Throwing a Mixer." I don't see it online here, but trust me, you're not missing anything.

Green Scene
I pretty much skipped the entire issue of last Sunday's green architecture-themed New York Times Magazine, though it was kind of interesting to see how Ed Begley Jr. lives.

The Game of Life
In last week's New Yorker, the story of Milton Bradley and his game Life was so surprisingly boring I barely got through the first page. On the other hand, Connie Bruck's profile of Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa is fascinating even to, I think, only the mildest political junkie.

ALSO: "Chinese universities may not have produced Great Wall specialists, but a small community of wall enthusiasts has developed outside academia. They tend to be athletic - a rare quality among the Chinese intelligentsia. And the Great Wall attracts obsessives. Doug Yaohui, a former utility-line worker, left his job in 1984 and doggedly followed wall sections on foot for thousands of miles across China."

- "Walking the Wall"

AND: It turns out God isn't that great.