Ordinarily I wouldn't bother with something like this, but if Monocle aspires to be "a comprehensive global briefing," it seems to me that making mistakes on basic, widely known, and easily verifiable facts is a bit of a problem. This is from a sidebar to an interview with the head of Al-Jazeera's New York and Washington bureaus:
Soon after [September 11], President Bush launched an attack on the Taliban regime in Afghanistan. While this received widespread support, the expansion of the campaign into a "war on terror" was less popular. The Iraq War -- which Obama voted against and Clinton and McCain voted for -- continues to be a crucial issue in the election campaign.Of course, Obama wasn't in the Senate when the vote to authorize the use of force in Iraq took place. (Even if he were, it's not even clear he would've voted against it.)
This may seem like a quibble in the scheme of things, and I confess that I haven't read enough issues of the magazine to render anything like a solid judgment, but to me this is indicative of the problem with Monocle -- it is an utterly, almost unabashedly superficial magazine. I mean this primarily in the sense that its "briefings" and "reports" have very little depth. They blend together to create the sense that you're reading a magazine comprised entirely of what would be front-of-the-book pieces in another publication. It also happens to be the case that Monocle is preoccupied with stuff. I lack the Wallpaper point of reference or the design chops to dig deep, but I read about a lot of nice, cleanly designed Scandinavian and Japanese things. It was hardly groundbreaking stuff and more like reading annotated Ikea and Muji catalogs.
The whole thing basically felt to me like a mashup of Vanity Fair's Fanfair and New York's Strategist sections. Which is to say, not good. In any event, this guy has a much more informed and comprehensive take.
