Charles Kaiser on standout journalism in the latest New Yorker and this week's winners and sinners

David Remnick's New Yorker and Robert Silvers' New York Review of Books are the two American magazines with the best cruising speeds—the places you are always most likely to find in-depth journalism produced by some of the leading practitioners of the craft.

Three articles in this week's New Yorker are particularly arresting: Connie Bruck's huge (12,450-word) profile of multibillionaire casino owner Sheldon Adelson, Frankie Fitzgerald's medium-size report on the sharp shifts within the evangelical movement (only available in the print magazine), and Paul Goldberger's concise report on the latest additions to the Beijing skyline.

Fitzgerald's piece is the most encouraging, because it documents the broadening concerns of a new generation of evangelicals, who are moving beyond abortion and gay marriage to give equal importance to world poverty and global warming. "What they aspire to is nothing less than an end to the culture wars and the polarization of American politics," Fitzgerald reports.

Some of her other findings:

• Half of all evangelicals have substantial differences with the religious right.

• If the new, younger leaders are successful, "they will either change the Republican party beyond the recognition of Karl Rove or doom it to electoral defeat."

• During this year's primary season, 30 percent of evangelicals voted for John McCain on Super Tuesday, one-third of evangelicals in Missouri and Tennessee voted Democratic, as well as 43 percent of the evangelicals in Ohio, who also voted for Democrats.

• While evangelicals ages 18 to 30 care more about abortion than their elders, they are less bothered by gay marriage, more concerned with health care and the poor, and more likely to champion environmental causes.

The bottom line: This mostly below-the-national-radar realignment could be the most significant shift in American politics of the past 40 years.

Connie Bruck's profile of the 74-year-old Sheldon Adelson reveals that while he is the owner of two of Las Vegas' giant casino resorts, the Venetian and the Palazzo, what took him from huge wealth to mega-wealth was his success in penetrating the Chinese market. He has opened mega-casinos on the island of Macao, a move that seems to have been made possible in part by a telephone call to Tom Delay, who may have bottled up an anti-Chinese resolution in Congress at a crucial moment during Adelson's negotiations for a Chinese gambling license.

"By the end of 2006, Macao had become the top gambling center in the world, with gaming revenues exceeding $6.9 billion, a quarter of a billion dollars more than those on the Las Vegas Strip. In 2007, revenues climbed to $10.3 billion," writes Bruck.

In 2008, Forbes estimated Adelson's wealth at $26 billion, making him the third-richest man in America, behind Warren Buffet and Bill Gates.

Adelson divides his time between using his wealth to influence American elections and trying to engineer the restoration of Likud's Benjamin Netanyahu as Israel's prime minister, because of Adelson's fierce opposition to direct peace negotiations with the Palestinians. So far that effort has included last year's launching of Israel Hayom, or Israel Today, a free daily that functions as Netanyahu's mouthpiece; according to one report, Adelson is planning to invest $180 million in that paper alone. Meanwhile, he has largely insulated himself from any criticism in Israel through huge philanthropic contributions. Nahum Barnea wrote in his column in Yedioth Ahronoth, "I saw a gambling tycoon from Las Vegas who bought my country's birthday with three million dollars. I thought with sorrow: Is the country worth so very little?"

From Beijing, Paul Goldberger reports on the city that urban planner Edmund Bacon described in the 1930s as "possibly the greatest single work of man on the face of the earth."

No more. Now the skyline is flecked with dozens of new skyscrapers: "Most of them are mediocre, and some are ridiculous ... but a handful are among the most compelling buildings going up anywhere in the world." The ones in the latter category include:

• Ole Scheeren and Rem Koolhaas' new headquarters of the Chinese television network CCTV, a "vast structure of steel and glass" that will contain more office space than any other building in China, and nearly as much as the Pentagon."

• A nine-tower development by American architect Steven Holl. Its residential towers "have identical aluminum facades in a grid pattern, with square windows set back and edged in bright colors that Holl says he took from Buddhist temples." They are linked together by spectacular glass-enclosed bridges in the sky.

• A non-skyscraper: the National Center for the Performing Arts, by the French architect Paul Andreu, "an ovoid of reflective glass set in an artificial lake and designed to look as if it were floating on water." There isn't even a door, "lest the purity of its shape be disturbed ... You descend to a sunken plaza beside the pool, walk through a tunnel under the water, and ride up an escalator to find yourself inside."

Magazine issues like this one are a powerful reminder that the mainstream media still has an indispensable role in the national conversation. As long as there are editors as talented as David Remnick and Bob Silvers, perhaps it will be able to defy the Internet and continue to thrive for a few more decades.

Winner: Jon Perr, of crooksandliars.com, for demonstrating that a key Republican talking point after the Supreme Court's habeas corpus decision—that 30 former Guantanamo inmates have subsequently "taken part in anti-coalition militant activities"—is nothing more than an "urban myth."

Winner: The indispensable Sarah Lyall, for her brilliant profile of British television writer Russell T. Davies, the man who created Queer as Folk and then figured out that the venerable British sci-fi franchise Dr. Who was the best way to pursue his goal of promoting gay liberation on mainstream television.

Winners: The management of the Washington Post, which hosted an elegant farewell for the participants of its recent buyout program, unlike the ...

Sinners: New York Times, which marked the departure of 100 staffers with nothing at all.

Winner: Jonathan Capehart, for an excellent column explaining why Sam Nunn would be the worst possible choice for vice president by Barack Obama.

Winner: Ex–New York Times scribbler James Sterba, for this concise explanation of why the new two-page index of the New York Times is one of the worst ideas it has ever had:

I was against the removal of the period from The New York Times(.) on the masthead. I was against the removal of "Special to The New York Times" from under bylines. Those were, however, tiny and relatively innocent cosmetic alterations.

But what has been done to the first three inside pages of the first section is radical surgery. You have cut into the news hole and replaced it with eyeliner. Your new "Inside the Times" and "On NYTimes.com" amount to a gratuitous waste of space to ape the six o'clock TV news telling people what you are going to tell them later.

Please! All the information contained in these new features could be contained succinctly in a single column (agate type would be okay with me). These features have "graphics" written all over them. They suggest a graphics person created this airy, pleasing-to-the-eye format—which I find not pleasing at all. You know as well as I do that people become graphic artists instead of reporters because they prefer to look instead of read. They care what something looks like, not what it says.

We all hope that Internet surfers will eventually discover that thin, recycled blather is not a substitute for originally reported news. We also pray that when that time comes the great newspapers will not have dumbed themselves down so much that when readers wander off the Internet desert, they find something original to read and not just nice-looking graphics.