Dead Tree Week
Some of the best reading happens in transit or waiting rooms, which is basically the same state of mind. I picked up a few magazines this week, so here’s what was worth the ink.
Esquire ran a Megan Fox cover story that Vice immediately declared the worst interview ever written—a strong position, not entirely wrong. The interview is terrible in the particular way celebrity journalism gets terrible when it disappears up its own pretension, all purple prose and no actual questions. Fox herself comes off fine; the writer is the problem. But Sante D’Orazio shot the photos, and she is still absolutely devastating at 26. Whatever generation you belong to that only gets hard for Taylor Swift and Justin Bieber’s haircut—I don’t understand you, and I don’t want to.
I first picked up Bitch in New York, probably in some record shop in the Village, and liked it immediately. It’s a feminist pop culture magazine that manages the rare trick of being politically serious without being terminally joyless about it. This issue covers comic artist Gabrielle Bell, abuse in the gaming industry, and American hipster culture—handled with actual intelligence, not the sledgehammer approach that treats the words "men" and "fucking" as hate crimes requiring immediate demolition.
Claudelle Deckert, a German soap actress who spent a season crawling through the Australian jungle on a celebrity reality show, has now posed for the German Playboy. Nicely tanned. I’ve definitely seen better, but I’ve also seen a lot worse. Good for her.
Highsnobiety—originally a Berlin streetwear blog that decided having a print magazine would make it cooler—released issue six. Larry Clark is in there, along with Boys Noize and Kimi Hammerstroem, with the usual combination of photographs, features, and interviews. It looks exactly like you’d expect a Highsnobiety magazine to look.
The new Forbes is the young achievers issue, which is specifically designed to make you feel like a failure at whatever age you currently are. The cover star is David Karp, who is 26 and invented Tumblr, which is now worth $800 million. Also featured: Rachel Hoat, who loves the internet, and Jennifer Fan, who does something with stocks. I closed the magazine and went back to the internet like a normal person.