Wrapping up Monday's weekend news summary

CURRENT EVENTS

If it were earlier in the day and my eyelids not so heavy and the night not so warm and my neutrons firing just a little more rapidly, I would write something profound to accompany this link. Instead, I'll just quote Roger McShane, who does a reliably lively job of guest writing Slate's Today's Papers: If using torture is a political decision to be left to policy makers, pundits and the public, "why does the Times trot out the word torture when describing the actions of other countries?"

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Unmissable feature of the weekend: The Los Angeles Times dedicates a bunch of inches to an inventive, even radical antiabortion crusadette who poses as a 13-year-old impregnated by a 31-year-old boyfriend. Fascinating.

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Portfolio magazine will print no more. It lasted two years on newstands and less than four months in my awareness--I first read it in January when an economist friend linked this story on his Facebook page. It instantly earned the mag a bookmark. Tuning into the website just now, I read this: "More than any other story, Michael Lewis' take on what went wrong with Wall Street defined what Portfolio was all about."

I will turn to the NYT to conclude:

Despite cuts at Portfolio, some of the old Condé Nast ways remained. To illustrate a November 2008 article arguing that credit derivatives were “the elephant in the room” at JPMorgan Chase, the magazine spent what one staff member, who was not authorized to speak publicly, said was $30,000 to procure the services of a real elephant to menace a model at a photo shoot.

“There was an atmosphere of unreality to some of it,” said a member of the magazine’s staff, who asked not to be identified in an effort to remain in the good graces of a company that might provide a job. “We did good work here, some of it great, but at a certain point you knew that it was going to end.”