Remember a few years back, when President Clinton was embroiled in the Whitewater Lewinsky Cigar Insertion Spectacular? Remember when the government lawyers were deposing him (I still have the whole thing on tape; I vowed I would actually sit down and watch it one day, but 8 years later that is starting to seem downright unlikely) and he memorably answered one question by saying, “That depends on what your definition of the word ‘is’ is”? Good times.

I was thinking about that today while I was reading a two-week-old Newsweek (dammit, I paid for that subscription and I am going to read every single issue; two weeks is the closest I’ve come to catching up since May) and I saw a brief piece about determining whether or not Iraq is engaged in civil war. Every time I hear this debate, I think, “Is this really that hard to agree on? It’s like having a prolonged, heated debate over whether or not a baby is sleeping. A debate over whether a thing is or is not a duck seems like it should be shorter. At this point, it’s harder to figure out whether or not Marvel Comics is engaged in Civil War.”

According to this Newsweek article, it turns out the debate is ongoing because the CIA says it all depends on what your definition of “civil war” is. Never to be outdone by the Clinton administration, Bush’s guys have gone behind closed doors to craft a secret way to tell when a civil war is a civil war, and then they classified the definition.

So, do you want to break it to them or should I?

“I’m telling you, it’s a duck. It has feathers and webbed feet and a bill and it quacked and tried vociferously to convince me it was wabbit season.”

“Nope. Sorry. Not a duck.”

“Then what the hell is a duck, then?”

“Can’t tell you. Top secret.”

“Great. Whatever. We’re going to go have some roast Classified, then. You’re not invited.”

The plan appears to be eliminating ducks by calling them manatees. 

Later in the same issue of Newsweek, I read about this fascinating new gaming phenomenon called World of Warcraft. You may have heard of this game from the two out of every three people you know who have been playing it since it came out nearly two years ago. If not, you probably heard about it on your local news, when three guys worldwide got so into the game’s virtual world that they forgot to pay their bills and every Action News Team in the country did the Cover Story, “The Video Game That Can Kill Your Child.” I hear next week’s Newsweek piece on Napster is going to be a barnburner. Music, right through your modem. How will this affect the Spice Girls’ sales?

I am, in fact, carping about the timeliness of a two-week-old article.

As a news consumer, I’m looking for a very specific product that I don’t think exists anymore, if it ever did. In the digital age, Time and Newsweek and the like are all written and edited under the assumption that the reader already actually knows all the latest news. She checks the headlines online; she watches Jon Stewart; she reads that goddamn ticker on the bottom of, well, everything; she has all those bases covered. That hole pre-filled, the magazines try to set themselves apart by offering news analysis and slices of life and deep background. They give you something beyond the news, which is to say not really all that much of the news.

But what is there for the man who subscribes to a weekly newsmagazine because he wants, desperately wants, not to have to check the headlines twice a day? Or ever? Is there a Factual Summary magazine? Just What Happened? Your Dry Bullet-Pointed Narrative?

Ooh! Do they still put out that Scholastic Weekly Reader? I’ll bet that would do the trick.