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Ten reasons to hate that Internet haters story

Tue, 23 Apr 2013 18:58:00 +0000

How much do I hate the essay on Internet hatred by Stephen Marche in the May issue of Esquire? Let me count the ways.

1) I hate that Marche makes no mention of his January profile of Megan Fox, a dazzlingly hyperbolic spasm of drool roundly mocked by Internet haters for, among other things, kicking off with a ludicrous Aztec sacrifice parable. ("Megan Fox will not go willingly to have her heart cut out.") It is annoying to get lessons in civility from someone whose current claim to fame is authorship of a terribly written profile about a not particularly interesting sex symbol that was illustrated with titillating photographs of a half-dressed actress.

2) I hate the title: "There Are No Saints Online ... but the Internet will be cleaned up yet." This is incorrect. At least one episode of Roger Moore's classic "The Saint" television series is available on YouTube. Plus, my daughter and mother are both online, and they're very nice people.

Get ready for bracket wars!

Tue, 05 Mar 2013 18:01:00 +0000

March comes in with 16 or 32 or 64 possible winners, but goes out with just one.

Basketball teams, yes. But also literary fiction, sexy animated characters, classic TV comedies and even cupcakes.

That's because March, trapped in the lull between the Oscars and summer blockbusters, between the end of "Girls" and the start of "Mad Men," has become the month when we collate, rank and quantify -- with brackets.

So later this month President Obama will fill out his NCAA tournament bracket on ESPN, and all the talk will be about bubble teams and buzzer beaters, Cinderellas and which 12-seed will upset a higher-ranked five. But for weeks now, in conference rooms and over cocktails, the media world battles over the newest and smartest pop culture brackets. It's true: I saw the best minds of my generation, destroyed by trying to pick a winner of a third-round best meme battle, between Michelle Obama's mom dancing and Taylor Swift singing with a goat.

This competition is serious. It is not friendly. And like the boom in oral histories of 10-year-old movies and TV shows that lasted from 2010-12, there's something about it that defies explanation.

Esquire responds to criticism of Osama feature: “Lots of words to sort through”

Tue, 12 Feb 2013 15:29:00 +0000

Esquire's interview with the Navy SEAL who shot Osama bin Laden asserted in its headline that the fighter "is screwed," and described his family's struggle after their insurance was cut off by the U.S. military, after the unnamed SEAL left the service.

The Department of Defense-operated newspaper Stars and Stripes (which has editorial independence from the military) has called these facts into question, writing: "Like every combat veteran of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, the former SEAL, who is identified in the story only as 'the Shooter,' is automatically eligible for five years of free health care through the Department of Veterans Affairs. But the story doesn’t mention that."

“I killed Osama bin Laden”

Mon, 11 Feb 2013 15:54:00 +0000

Esquire has published a profile of the man who shot Osama bin Laden, though the SEAL is never named in the piece. Author Phil Bronstein notes that he developed a relationship with the shooter, drinking Scotch together, and learning some startling revelations about the day bin Laden died.

Some of the things Bronstein learned include:

Bin Laden's shooter will be leaving the military shortly with "No pension, no health care, and no protection for himself or his family." (His health insurance ceased at midnight the day he left the service.) He's obsessed with protecting his family as a consequence of his role in the death of bin Laden and "he has trained his children to hide in their bathtub" and his wife in marksmanship.
In order to further protect his family, the shooter is officially separated from his wife (though they live together) and the family is considering removing his name from the deed to their house. As his wife puts it: "Essentially deleting him from our lives, but for safety reasons. We still love each other."
The military considered various options when it came time to kill bin Laden. "They were either going to bomb the piss out of the compound with two-thousand-pound ordnance, they were going to send us in, do some kind of joint thing with the Pakis, or try what was called a 'hammer throw,' where a drone flies by and chucks one fucking bomb at the guy." The government hoped both to minimize collateral damage and to make certain bin Laden was dead.
Another Navy SEAL tackled two women he believed to be in suicide-bomber vests in order to allow the shooter a clear shot at bin Laden. "He thought he was going to absorb the blast of suicide vests," says the shooter. "He was going to kill himself so I could get the shot. It was the most heroic thing I've ever seen."
The film "Zero Dark Thirty" has some accuracy issues, per the SEAL: "The tactics on the screen 'sucked,' he says, and 'the mission in the damn movie took way too long' compared with the actual event." He had praise, though, for Jessica Chastain's character, based on a real CIA operative.
It wasn't just a desire for greater safety that led the SEAL to leave Seal Team Six. "I realized that when I stopped getting an adrenaline rush from gunfights, it was time to go."

That “White People” TNR cover has been done before

Fri, 08 Feb 2013 17:19:00 +0000

This time it's the New Republic, not Newsweek, who is trolling us all with sensationalist cover art. In its forthcoming issue, TNR names the GOP "The Party of White People," and has cleverly published the cover in all white to make a point that, hey, the GOP is jarringly, awkwardly white:

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But, as Salon's resident "white person" expert Joan Walsh points out, it's been done before -- and 20 years ago, at that. Who knew that American politics were (and continue to be) so whitewashed?:

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At that rate, you know who else is overwhelmingly white? The journalists who write cover stories for the New Republic:

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White people ... they're everywhere.

Is Megan Fox really Hollywood’s ideal mother?

Thu, 31 Jan 2013 20:00:00 +0000

For a woman who says she's not interested in her career right now, Megan Fox sure is doing everything a woman in Hollywood could do to raise her profile. The 26-year-old actress, in just the four months since the birth of her son, Noah, has managed to leverage motherhood into the pinnacle of celebrity success. And nowhere is that more evident than in her cover story in the new U.K. edition of Marie Claire. In her interview, she trots out all the most beloved of maternal party lines – including the classic I-have-the-very-best-job-in-the-world line. The sultry Ms. Fox, who was also recently the subject of the most slobbering fanboy cover story in the history of Esquire ("The symmetry of her face, up close, is genuinely shocking … It's closer to the sublime, a force of nature, the patterns of waves crisscrossing a lake, snow avalanching down the side of a mountain, an elaborately camouflaged butterfly") declares that acting "isn’t my job anymore" because "my job is to be with" her baby. Noah.

Before Nora was Nora

Fri, 29 Jun 2012 00:00:00 +0000

The following originally appeared on John Blumenthal's Open Salon blog.

Nora and I worked at Esquire at the same time -- she as a columnist, me as a lowly fact-checker. It was 1973. We'd passed each other in the halls occasionally, perhaps rode an elevator together, but she had no idea who I was, and I wasn't quite bold enough to tell her. Not that she would have cared.

Esquire was my first editorial job, and I was lucky enough to serve under the magazine's legendary editor, Harold Hayes, who plucked me out of obscurity from a job as a house painter and whale's tooth polisher on Nantucket Island. Esquire paid me exactly $65 a week, which, even in those days, was chump change.

One day, Nora stalked into the fact-checking area -- a large room containing the four of us who made up the overworked department. It wasn't hard to discern that she was unhappy. For some reason, she chose me to snap at. I forget what it was about, but I snapped back, and she strode angrily out of the room.