Magazine notes

New Yorker fact-checkers, where are you? In the big lead story in this week's issue, Jon Lee Anderson's profile of Venezuelan president Hugo Chavez, we find this:

World Bank or International Monetary Fund austerity packages in return for debt renegotiation are central to neoliberal programs.

I really don't have the inclination right now to go into the multitude of ways in which this is incorrect. But anybody with any knowledge of the subject would have told any fact-checker that there's no way that sentence should ever appear in a news magazine.

Vanity Fair runs its annual boring listing of the "50 leaders of the information age" (in fact, there are 64). The list includes five women (Meg Whitman, Marjorie Scardino, Oprah Winfrey, Martha Stewart, and Paramount's Sherry Lansing) and three non-whites (Oprah Winfrey, Jerry Yang, and Sony's Nobuyuki Idei). Everyone else is a middle-aged white guy. At least we don't need to see another of Annie Liebowitz's equally boring photos of them all lined up at Sun Valley.

Posted by Felix at 1:28 EST