Devotion, Contempt, and Circus School
I hate football. Genuinely, constitutionally, with the kind of conviction that doesn’t soften for World Cups. It is, as far as I can tell, the organized religion of people who prefer their metaphysics simple and their beer cold. And yet I spent an afternoon reading 11 Freunde, the German soccer magazine, and came away reluctantly impressed.
The best piece in the October 2014 issue—In Good Times and Bad, written by five people: Andreas Bock, Karol Herrmann, Jens Kirschneck, Philipp Köster, and Stephan Reich—is a long love letter to fans of small clubs, the ones who show up in the rain every weekend for teams that will never be famous, that will probably be relegated, that offer nothing except something to believe in. It’s not sports writing. It’s writing about devotion as a way of life. By the midpoint of the magazine I hit interviews with coaches and managers I’d never heard of discussing squad economics and tactical systems, and my brain quietly closed the door. But that first half earns its place on a shelf.
InStyle’s October issue is not really a magazine. It is a catalog with journalism hidden inside it at irregular intervals, like loose change in a sofa cushion. Four euros for the privilege of carrying two hundred pages of luxury ads home. The Giorgio Armani spread came with a black cardboard VIP card that I immediately removed and put in my wallet. I feel considerably more important now. Cate Blanchett looked at me from one of the fashion shoots with exactly the right amount of contempt, which I appreciated. The low point was a Philips electric toothbrush ad in which a blonde model pressed the device between her thighs with an expression that made the product’s purpose ambiguous. If you’re marketing a vibrator, market a vibrator. Don’t dress it up as dental care.
Die Zeit Wissen: Ratgeber Pubertät is a guide to surviving adolescence, published by one of Germany’s most serious newspapers—which sounds like a joke until you read it. There’s a piece called Crash Test for Body and Soul where actual teenagers describe how they’re getting through it: one stands in front of the bathroom mirror, one goes to the gym, one goes to parties, one goes to circus school. Real strategies, not pamphlet platitudes. Nothing here is as bad as the average teen celebrity magazine, where puberty is treated primarily as an opportunity to discuss crushes on pop stars. Here it’s treated as what it actually is—the worst and best years running concurrently, with no manual and no exit.