The Week

About a year or so ago, my brother very kindly set me up with a multi-year subscription to The Week magazine. The Week is a weekly (surprise) magazine that takes advantage of the Fair Use provision in 17 U.S.C. 107 that some misguided fools don’t believe exists. Each issue highlights the top issues of the week around the world, often by summarizing or excerpting stories from the newspapers, journals, weblogs, TV shows, etc. that produced the original stories. Controversial news stories often include quotes from journalists with opposing opinions. Seeing the coverage reproduced like this makes the strong political bias of news sources like the Wall Street Journal quite transparent.

While I would never pay money for a conservative opinion magazine like the Weekly Standard, it’s nice to see what some conservative writers are writing about without directly funding them. A common risk for strongly liberal or conservative observers is to have their opinions only reinforced and never questioned by reading opinions written only by like-minded individuals. Fortunately, The Week chooses news sources wisely, so you rarely have to endure quotes from slack-jawed hacks like Coulter and Limbaugh. I’m sure the Left has it’s own set of clueless wonders, but my political leanings probably cause me to see only the right wing troglodytes for what they are.

Maybe that’s a good test for someone who claims to be a Moderate. Ask them to name who they think are the top three well-known, but least truthful, commentators from both the Left and the Right. If they pause in listing names from one side, that’s likely where their bias lies.

Of course, The Week isn’t only about controversial news topics. There are also excerpts from book, movie, and theatre reviews, and even a few choice highlights from tabloids. One of my favorite bits is the real estate page. Each week they pick a theme, like log cabins, houses with a safe room, or Italianate homes, and they show three examples of the best, and usually extremely pricy, homes of that style that are currently for sale. The page also includes a Steal of the Week, which doesn’t typically follow the theme, but is typically a very nice home that is for sale for only a few hundred thousand dollars. From my perspective in the San Francisco Bay area, the Steal of the Week looks like an unbelievable deal. The catch, of course, is that the house is almost always located in an obscure little town far from the major city benefits that I’ve come to depend on.

The Week is a fantastic magazine, and while I really didn’t need another weekly periodical to add to my burgeoning To Read stack, I still read each issue nearly cover to cover. While it’s a relatively thin magazine, it contains far fewer ads than virtually every magazine outside of Consumer Reports.

I would point you to a story on The Week that appeared in the March 21, 2005 issue of BusinessWeek, but unfortunately it appears that you have to have a print subscription to BusinessWeek and then have signed up for the free online subscription.