The Oldest Move in the Book

There are exactly two ways to make headlines without doing anything in particular: die, or take your clothes off. Kourtney Kardashian chose the latter for a recent issue of V Magazine, joining a roster that includes Miley Cyrus, Lady Gaga, and Selena Gomez, all of whom have appeared in various states of undress in its pages.

If you don’t know who Kourtney Kardashian is, congratulations—you’ve kept something clean that most of us have had ruined. I lost my own Keeping Up with the Kardashians virginity some years ago and there’s no recovering it. You learn which one is which, you learn the children’s names, and at some point you find yourself reading about a nude photo shoot and feeling almost proprietary about it, which is precisely the trap they’ve built.

The photos are fine. She looks good—three kids and whatever a Kardashian-level wellness budget looks like, apparently doing the job. The accompanying interview covers makeup, children, and sisters, in roughly that order of depth. It exists to fill the space between the photographs, and it performs that function adequately. Whether the issue is worth tracking down probably depends on when, exactly, you lost your own Kardashian innocence.