This Week in Magazines: Obama's Tough Calls, Real Missions for James Bond, and the Sex-Subprime Scandal

The United States is the biggest prisoner of the Guantanamo Bay prison camp. How do we free ourselves? As Stuart Taylor Jr. underscores in Nov. 24 Newsweek's "Obama's 250 Tough Calls," the questions facing Barack Obama aren't quite as easy as his supporters may assume.

Taylor, a strong legal affairs analyst of generally conservative bent, suspects the new president will renounce "all brutal interrogation methods," well beyond those the current administration defines as torture. And, Taylor believes, Obama may both discontinue "the failed system of 'military commissions" created to try suspected terrorists and announce that we'll close the camp within a year.

Fine. But the 250 detainees may include distinctly dangerous folks who can't be convicted of crimes, such as an estimated 15 supposed al Qaeda leaders. Do we release them or hold them in lockups elsewhere? Taylor is not really sure, pointing to the argument that perhaps some should be held without charges for a longer period but also given more due process to help determine if and when they should be released. Some critics of our policy, including many terrific attorneys who've worked their butts off on a pro bono basis to assist detainees, will counter that holding any of them without charges will just accentuate the notoriety of this whole endeavor; that it's somehow more dangerous than letting them go and, well, just morally and legally wrong.

"This is a worthy debate, and it will be a real first test of Obama's resourcefulness---not just as a politician, but as a student, and former professor, of the law," Taylor concludes.

Meanwhile, Newsweek's cover story, "Obama's Lincoln," may leave even some skeptics with the belief that there is a lot to Doris Kearns Goodwin's "Team of Rivals" notion as an influence on Obama's upcoming cabinet and other administration personnel choices. And most will surely learn that that the key Abe Lincoln lines quoted by Obama at his election night celebration ("We are not enemies, but friends...") were actually written for Lincoln by his fierce rival, William Seward, who wound up as Secretary of State.

---In Nov. 24 Time's "Bourne-Again Bond," film critic Richard Corliss calls Daniel Craig's James Bond in Quantum of Solace a "near mute: a cyber- or cipher-Bond with a loyalty chip implanted in a mechanism that's built for murderous ingenuity...He's a brute acting on instinct" Rambo of Her Majesty's Secret Service."

So it's pretty unclear if this version of 007 could handle Foreign Policy's "The List: Five Real Missions for 007." Back in the real world, it would love Bond to:

*Infiltrate the nuclear weapons programs of India, Pakistan and North Korea. Who's got a hydrogen bomb?

*Spy on the guys running China's People's Liberation Army Navy. A lot of analysts believe that a focus on landing craft and amphibious assault ships suggests preparation to one day invade Taiwan.

*Cozy up to the bosses of Russia's natural gas industry and discern their aims in Central Asia. This involves getting accurate data on the actual gas reserves of Gazprom, the state-run energy monopoly, and the extent of Russian investment in Central Asia. This would make it easier for European countries and others to get access to supplies in places like Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan.

*Figure out which tribes to bribe in the mountainous Pashtun regions of Afghanistan. Who really is connected to the Taliban and might we buy them off? Are there Pashtun leaders who can be persuaded to turn against the Taliban? It's not the magazine's notion but maybe hedge fund zillionaires George Soros and Ken Griffin can be flown in to help negotiate.

*Enter North Korean leader Kim Jong Il's inner circle and figure out their succession plan. This is all the more relevant after rumors that Kim, 66, may have suffered a stroke during the summer. My only question is whether a 007 foray here would necessitate a bad haircut, ill-fitting brown suit and Elton John-like pair of dark shades. The Seville Row look won't cut it.

---There was no shortage of analyses on Barack Obama and race during the campaign and just after his win. But if you want a really, really esoteric musing on race, try, "The Creature from the Black Lagoon: Marilyn Monroe and Whiteness" in Cinema Journal by Lois Banner, (subscription required) a professor of history at the University of Southern California and a frequent author on women and gender. "Despite the many studies of Monroe, no scholar has full examined her whiteness," Banner writes early on. Let's just concede the point.

This turns on the fabled Monroe image from the film Seven Year Itch, her skirt aflutter as she stands over a subway grate after exiting the movie The Creature from the Black Lagoon. Banner gets into everything from "The Creature from the Black Lagoon" as a symbol of Cold War fears of communism; the claim of Monroe's whiteness as symbolizing racist beliefs in the superiority of whites; Monroe's iconoclast image and marriages to Joe DiMaggio and Arthur Miller; Monroe the exhibitionist; the inconsistent history of white as a favorite color in design and culture; white as a color symbolizing rebellion; and the view of minorities toward Monroe in her heyday. Ultimately, Banner is distinctly sympathetic and concludes in not quite fit-for-cable-soundbite-fashion:

"Marilyn Monroe's whiteness drew from ancient and ongoing traditions of white women as representative of racist ideas of white superiority, in an era of black rebellion, and as sexualized objects of hegemonic masculinity, in an era of male anxiety over corporate conformity and women leaving the home for work....A rich historical symbolism existed with regard to the color white, and Marilyn's whiteness drew from both ancient and modern definitions of white, connected to social class, sexuality, gender, and race."

---C. Wright Mills was a late left-leaning sociologist whose 1956 tract on the nexus of the political, military and economic elite, The Power Elite, remained an undergraduate staple for decades. His many fans include sociologist Irving Louis Horowitz, who edited and wrote several books on Mills. But the History News Network website includes broadsides at Horowitz by another editor of Mills' writing, John H. Summers, who accuses Horowitz of tons of mistakes. Such as? Well, In "The Academic Who Claimed to Honor C. Wright Mills Betrayed Him," Summers gives no small weight to Horowitz asserting that Mills finished his Columbia College teaching career as an associate professor when in fact he was a full professor. "This information anybody could have discovered by consulting his appointment card at Columbia or his entry in Who's Who in America," writes Summers. There are other examples of what's, at minimum, imprecision. You've got to love some academics brawls.

---December Bon Appetit pays homage to Quebec City and its supposedly decadent eating habits, dating to 20- and 30-course meals in the 17th century. "There's a reason the clergymen were fat---what they were eating was incredible," says one current hotel chef. Elsewhere, if you're a "crustophobic" (fear of pie crust), there is blunt counsel on what to do to avoid store-bought crust. The magazine swears its three tips will work. Good luck.

---So the economy is tanking and, informs Nov. 24 BusinessWeek, applications are up for graduate schools of business, with the magazine's own ranking placing the University of Chicago's atop the list. The reasons for the applications hike appear to involve so-called Millenials, those born between 1980 and 2000, seen here as "strong-willed, passionate, optimistic, and eager to work," and showing a greater interest than previous generations in going to B-schools at a younger age.

Oh, the issue also boasts "Sex, Lies, and Subprime Mortgages," about a less-publicized bit of sliminess in the home loan disaster we have just endured. Before the bubble burst, "the deal-making turned frenetic. Multiple wholesalers began inundating mortgage brokers with offers for the same applications. Some brokers chose to exercise their power by asking for something extra in exchange for their business: sex." One California mortgage broker says "minimally trained and minimally dressed" wholesalers often tried to woo brokers. Perhaps the Treasury Department will now regulate skirt lengths throughout the industry.