David Granger

Yesterday on Salon, Sarah Hepola profiled writer Chuck Klosterman for the release of his first novel, Downtown Owl.

After hashing out Mr. Klosterman's rise from obscurity to admired and derided cultural critic, Ms. Hepola writes:

But Chuck Klosterman seems to be getting a little sick of Chuck Klosterman. Even his most distinguishing quality—his ability to ramble endlessly, but meaningfully, about the ephemera of American culture—is wearing on him these days. In his September 2008 column for Esquire, he writes, 'I find myself growing more and more depressed about all the things I used to love ... It's not difficult to be the cop in the car watching the meth lab, but you will drive yourself sad. You'll find yourself thinking, Maybe the meth lab will blow up ... But it doesn't blow up. It just sits there, falling apart and declining in value, while the people inside lose their teeth and get crazy high.'

He's no longer going to be writing his Esquire column, by the way.

Will readers really have to live without Mr. Klosterman's observations on everything from Snakes on a Plane to different lighting schemes used by television networks?  read more »

Are magazines dead? Not to Esquire editor David Granger, who talked to Forbes' James Brady on the occasion of his magazine's 75th anniversary. (Remember that lite brite cover? It's coming!)

When asked by Mr. Brady if the golden age of magazines had passed, Mr. Granger responds:

I completely reject that idea... Some of the best magazine journalism I know of is running right now in Esquire and The New Yorker and New York magazine and a lot of others. Cincinnati has a great [local] magazine, and there's a new one in Denver called 5280, for the city's altitude in feet, and there are plenty more.  read more »

Back in April, Esquire editor David Granger told the Observer he had no worries that the Internet would make magazines unnecessary, as, arguably, it has done with newspapers. But if magazines want to flourish in the Internet age they have to capitalize on the direct, textural experience they provide that the Internet can't.

“Magazines have to become more magaziney rather than less magaziney,” said Mr. Granger back then. “There are things you can do with your cover where the paper will actually fold into different shapes—this cool experience that will let you do novel editorial things, but it’s all very expensive.”

But he likely already had in mind something far more elaborate than an origami cover—like, a flashing, battery-operated cover!

The Times' Tim Arango writes today that Esquire will have an electronic cover for its September issue that will flash the words, “the 21st Century Begins Now."

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During Bill Clinton's spectacular meltdown yesterday--calling Vanity Fair's Todd Purdum a scumbag, sleazy and slimy--he also decided to drag just about everyone into the melee. He said:

"The editor of Esquire-- he sent us an email yesterday and said it was the single sleaziest piece of journalism he'd seen in decades. He said it made him want to go take a shower and he was embarrassed to be a journalist when he read it."  read more »

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In the next five years in Graydon Carter’s world, you’ll walk onto a plane, or a subway, or a soon-to-be-invented mode of transport, and you’ll tuck a little electronic book under your arm. Inside that little book, which will be very expensive at first but soon will cost $150, there’ll be a series of mylar “pages,” and there will be small buttons off to the side, and once you hit one of them, whoooosh, words and photos from Vanity Fair will suddenly appear.  read more »