This Week on the Newsstand, April 13th

EW... It's Tina Fey!
Entertainment Weekly promotes Tina Fey (she's a mama now), 30 Rock (despite being funny, critically acclaimed and picked up for a third season the show's ratings are dismal) and her new movie, Baby Mama (she's starring in it and co-wrote it). Is it just me or do New Yorkers and Lesbians really love Tina Fey? I mean, she's funny but she's not the funniest out there. I guess because she's also smart and uniquely attractive in combination with her comedy it makes her so valuable.
TIME to Raise Obama
TIME profiles Barack Obama's mother, Ann Soetoro, the woman who raised him, who had anything but an ordinary life. She was born in 1942, five years before Hillary Clinton, and moved a lot through her childhood from Kansas to Washington to California to Hawaii. In Hawaii at the University of Hawaii she met Barack Obama Sr. in a Russian language class and married in February 1962 after only meeting a few months earlier in a wedding that no one was invited to; she was three months pregnant with Barack. Obama Sr. left to get a Ph. D. in Harvard, and then focused his attention on Kenya, she filed for divorce in 1964. She then returned to college where she met her second husband, Lolo Soetoro. They followed him to Indonesia where Obama attended a Catholic School. In Indonesia she became intrigued by the culture and cared deeply for the poor. To compensate for the lack of black people in his life, she brought home books about the civil rights movement and music from black artists. In 1971 OBama was sent back to Hawaii to live with his grandparents as he attended an elite prep school. A year later his mother joined him to work on her masters in anthropology. In 1980 she filed for divorce again and then she returned without Barack to Indonesia where she did fieldwork and worked for the Ford Foundation. Her work lead to her to help build the microfinance program in Indonesia. She passed away in 1995 of Ovarian and uterine cancer.

She shaped Obama's life in that she wasn't "ideological" and she was "suspicious of cant." While she moved constantly, Barack chose to put down his roots in Chicago, desiring for stability that he perhaps was missing. Just like his mother "gazed at different cultures" he figures out "how to move a crowd of thousands of people very different from himself." And while his mother was helping the poor in Indonesia he was a community organizer in Chicago. All in all it's a fascinating portrait of his mother and how her life and work helped shape her son.
Divorces in NEWSWEEK
Newsweek looks at alumni from Grant High School who graduated in '82 right when the divorce rate really spiked. The classmates recall their experiences and how they felt when their parents divorced -- ranging from being embarrassed to having to fill out forms and wondering if people are judging you because your parents have different last names to growing up too fast. But it seems like divorce is almost genetic and kids of divorced parents are likely to get divorced later themselves. Others that have gone to get married (and remain wedded) did so later in their mid to late thirties. As someone who doesn't plan on getting married and someone whose parents remain married (as well as my uncles marriages) I am fairly unfamiliar with divorce directly. It's just odd because speaking to several friends or peers and I hear about their parents it takes me a while to realize that their parents are divorced. I mean I don't object to divorce, if you're unhappy with who you are married to why would you stay with them, but on the other hand I think people tend to give up so easily these days because we're used to instant results. If something is broken instead of fixing it we throw it out. Better yet we don't think ahead enough and instead concentrate on the gratifications of the present. I think we thought about more about that than maybe people would think more before they make their vows.