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Both Time and Newsweek play to the moral values crowd with cover pieces that look at the development of the Nativity story. But they also deftly nod to the reality-based community by suggesting that, as Time puts it, “There is no specific physical evidence for the key parts of the story.” Both pieces are framed around what’s perceived as a growing debate between those who take the Bible literally and those who question its historical accuracy, and see in it traces of the pagan culture of the Roman Empire. This is the seventh time in the last decade that Time has put Jesus on its cover — usually during the month of December. (Newsweek doesn’t make its covers available online.)
In non-God related news (sort of), Peter Beinart argues in the New Republic that Democrats who don’t recognize that the fight against Islamic extremism is the defining moral and political question of our time, on a par with the fight against Soviet Communism, need to be marginalized. But, as critics have pointed out, Beinart takes it as an article of faith that the current struggle is comparable to the Cold War, which is something that significant numbers of liberals, not to mention millions of people around the world, don’t accept. Maybe he needs to make that case convincingly before the purge begins.
The Economist reports on the sharp decline of the dollar, which could have catastrophic consequences for the world economy. America has traditionally been able to borrow large sums of money at low rates on the strength of the dollar’s historic stability. To address the problem, says The Economist, we need to cut the deficit, and reduce “furious consumer spending.” (Lucky there aren’t any big holidays coming up which are used by corporations to get us to buy stuff for everyone we’ve ever met.)
And The New Yorker attempts to unravel the mysterious death of one of the world’s leading experts on Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. Richard Lancelyn Green was at work on an exhaustive biography of Holmes’s creator and needed access to his archives, which were about to be auctioned off to private bidders by distant relatives of the writer. Green was working to avert the sale and soon came to fear for his life, speaking cryptically of “the American” — a Pentagon expert in nuclear doctrine — who had it in for him. But there’s also the suggestion that Green, who had become disconsolate over the idea that he might never get his hands on the archives, killed himself and made it look like murder.
Unlike Holmes himself, The New Yorker, sadly, fails to solve the case in the story’s final page.
— Zachary Roth
