New this week in Newsweek

This past weekend I decided that I wanted to read the current (November 16) copy of Newsweek cover to cover. This may sound insignificant, unimportant, or uninteresting, but it's something that not only do I never do... I'm not sure I've ever done it at all. In the past, I've read some of the articles, flipped through the stories while eating breakfast, or simply opened it straight to the political cartoon page... but I'm not sure I've ever read every word of every story.

My family has had a subscription to Newsweek for quite some time now -- before that it was Time, or maybe it was both... but they've been piling up in our magazine basket for several years now. I don't know exactly why I'm never drawn to them -- it's partly an issue of time, I think. I also currently get Entertainment Weekly, People, Glamour, Allure, and Real Simple [before you protest, they were all free and I only have them for a limited amount of time. Oh, and I always give them to friends before recycling them] and I barely have time to read those as it is. On top of that, there's reading for school, for my bookclub(s), for fun... Yeah, I just basically never make it to reading Newsweek.

But I had a few quiet minutes on Friday, and it was just sitting there staring at me, so I started flipping through it, then I started reading it, and then I started reading all of it. I actually haven't finished at the time I'm sitting here writing this, but I certainly plan to read the rest. I can't say if this is indicative of a new pattern - if I'm going to be able to read every word of all the Newsweeks from now on, but I certainly have gained a new appreciation of the magazine as a whole, and a new knowledge of how interesting it can be to really read in depth.

The magazine's cover story is about lessons we can learn from Vietnam - and how they can be applied to Afghanistan. The story is really quite interesting, though I don't see what made it timely enough to make it the cover story; but I particularly enjoyed John Kerry's subarticle. He had a very striking conclusion that I think is worth sharing: "One of the architects of the Vietnam War, Robert McNamara, confessed decades later that he knew victory was no longer possible well before the American death toll had reached half its eventual total. He offers a horrific lesson that the time to voice concerns is now." It seems clear to me that America's involvement in Afghanistan is far from over, and I hope to follow its events and debates closer than I did with events in, say, Iraq. I was too unappreciative at the time of what was going on in Iraq to keep up and as such generally don't know what was/is going on there.

I have always admired John Green and other individuals who are very well versed in current events -- people who understand the innerworkings of what's making headlines well enough to explain them to others and debate them intellectually. I guess my reading Newsweek this weekend is, in part, an attempt to follow in those footsteps. Next semester I'll be taking a Modern US Policy/Diplomacy class, which I'm sure with further my understanding of the crazy world of political happenings.

The Newsweek issue had many other interesting stories - lots of chatter about the Berlin Wall Fall anniversary, about the recent elections in favor of the Republicans and what that means for the country, etc, etc. But I'm not going to go into that now... If you're interested, you can read for yourself!

If anyone out there happens to read this, I'd love to hear what YOU read in the realm of magazines, websites, RSS-feeds, newspapers, etc. How do you keep up with current events -- or do you not care at all? Let me know!

Cheers :)