*******
Ed hates tater tots
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But not Napoleon. (Is that movie old enough to be making a comeback yet? 'Cause Ed's ready to be obsessed with it again.)

1. NY Times
Newsweek Retracts Account of Koran Abuse by U.S. Military
By Katharine Q. Seelye and Neil A. Lewis
5/17/05
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/05/17/politics/17koran.html?adxnnl=1&oref=login&adxnnlx=1116345692-Uhi544VlVUHeUxsYY+MPcA

After a drumbeat of criticism from the Bush administration and others, Newsweek magazine yesterday went beyond an apology it issued Sunday and retracted an article published May 1 that stated that American interrogators at Guant??namo Bay, Cuba, had tried to rattle Muslim detainees by flushing a Koran down a toilet.

The original article was blamed for inciting widespread protests and riots in the Muslim world, where desecration of the Koran is viewed as an incendiary act, and where at least 17 people were killed in the ensuing violence.

"Based on what we know now, we are retracting our original story that an internal military investigation had uncovered Koran abuse at Guant??namo Bay," the statement from Newsweek said.

MORE ONLINE

2. Media Week
Rolling Stone's Dana Upped to M.E.
By Stephanie D. Smith
5/17/05
http://seattlepi.nwsource.com/pop/223500_powers10.html

Will Dana was promoted to managing editor at Wenner Media's Rolling Stone, the company announced today.

Dana had previously been deputy managing editor of the magazine. He served under Rolling Stone editor and publisher Jann Wenner (who is also chairman of Wenner Media), along with Rolling Stone's deputy managing editors James Kaminsky and Joe Levy. Dana has been with Rolling Stone since 1996, primarily contributing to the magazine's political and national affairs coverage.

???Will has held senior editorial responsibilities for nine years, and demonstrated an exceptional understanding of Rolling Stone??™s core editorial values, as well as top rate skills, creativity and drive," said Wenner. "I couldn??™t be more delighted.???

3. NY Sun
In Search Of the Perfect Little Magazine
By Gary Shaprio
5/10/05
http://seattlepi.nwsource.com/pop/223500_powers10.html

"This is an old subject at Princeton," the university's chairman of the Council of Humanities, Anthony Grafton, said at the opening of a symposium last week called "The Perfect Little Magazine." He stood in the majestic octagonal rotunda of Princeton's former library, as shafts of late afternoon sun illuminated the shelves, including one containing free samples of literary magazines such as the second issue of Green Light, an on-campus publication devoted to "People, Politics, Prose, Princeton."

Mr. Grafton referred to a predecessor, critic R.P. Blackmur (1904-65), who came to the university in 1940 to help run Dean Christian Gauss's Creative Arts Program, and whose career included editing the little magazine Hound and Horn. Mr. Grafton distributed a chart from Blackmur's article in the Sewanee Review on "The Economy of the American Writer," comparing magazine circulations to overall population in America. The chart showed the Virginia Quarterly and the American Scholar holding steady at about 3,000 and 5,000 readers in a country of 131 million in 1944.

Panelists took up the word "perfect" in the program's title. "I think the whole point is not to have to try to be perfect," said Threepenny Review founder Wendy Lesser. In trying new things, it's all right to make mistakes for good reasons, she said. Joyce Carol Oates, who with her husband publishes a literary magazine called the Ontario Review, described once having used the wrong typesetter or printer, one "who had only done menus for Chinese restaurants." Another issue had "what looked like bloody fingerprints on some of the pages," a collector's item she said was best forgotten.