Herman Cain And Tina Brown: Where Are They Now?

Herman Cain And Tina Brown: Where Are They Now?

by Matt Haber

Some drunk Irishman once said “There are no second acts in American lives,” which is true, but not if you’re English. Then you get more acts than the last Lord of the Rings movie. Tina Brown edited Tatler, then Vanity Fair, then The New Yorker, then Talk, then something called Newsweek.

Here are some of the things you’d learn reading the October 24, 2011 issue of Newsweek: Paul McCartney, 69, is “a famous British hunk” and newly married to Nancy Shevell; Occupy Wall Street, a movement led by “the young and angry,” is “not exactly the Arab Spring”; Madeleine Albright “like[s] to knit”; Robert Bork thinks Joe Biden isn’t “a very thoughtful or intelligent man”; Designer Haider Ackerman is the “The ‘It’ Boy of Paris”; Lars Ulrich’s favorite mistake was telling Quentin Tarantino he couldn’t use “Enter Sandman” in Kill Bill. Let’s compare then with today!

THEN…

“In Benghazi and Tripoli, I meet a lot of young people like Huda Abuzeid: Libyans who had been forced to leave, were educated to high standards abroad, and are now back to build a new country… But nation building, especially in a place that was ruled by fear for so long, is ‘not going to be easy,’ admits Mazin Ramadan, director and senior adviser to Ali Tahouni, the new finance and oil minister. Ramadan settled in Seattle in 1984 to be part of the high-tech boom and came rushing back when the revolution started. ‘Libyans don’t imagine an Iraq-type scenario here,’ he says. ‘They imagine it will be like Europe, France, the U.K. I have even heard they want it to be like Switzerland.’” — My Walk Through the Valley of Death, by Janine di Giovanni.

NOW…

THEN…

“What’s Wrong With Rick: The Texas governor went from frontrunner to roadkill in a matter of weeks. His hunt for the way back.” — Peter J. Boyer

NOW…
Peter Boyer leaves Newsweek for Fox News.

THEN…

“When Newsweek ran its first Green Rankings two years ago, climate change was high on the agenda. The U.S. House had passed a cap-and-trade bill to put a price on carbon, the world’s biggest economies were about to make history with an agreement to cut greenhouse-gas emissions… Since then, green momentum has seriously stalled, at least in the public sector… If governments are hesitating, the globe’s big companies missed the memo. Top-ranked companies are approaching green projects with increasing tenacity, even in this weak economy.” — The World’s Green Giants, by Ian Yarett

NOW…
“We are announcing this morning an important development at Newsweek and The Daily Beast. Newsweek will transition to an all-digital format in early 2013. As part of this transition, the last print edition in the United States will be our Dec. 31 issue.” — A Turn of the Page for Newsweek, by Tina Brown.

THE TAKEAWAY
It’s really hard to maintain a print newsweekly.

Related: Bin Laden or Jared Leto: Whose Career Was Hotter In 2000?

Matt Haber has actually never read Newsweek until this week, but he hopes to find a stack on the street someday in 2021, if there still are streets then.