Esquire

As if the blog world weren't bleak enough with layoffs and a few well-compensated sites hoarding traffic and precious memes, now mainstream media outlets are chipping away at bloggers' quotas by doing their posts for them.

Esquire's Web site has a feature about the making of its current cover, which features Halle Berry posed like Bill Clinton from the magazine's December 2000 issue.

First, Esquire juxtaposes the two Platon-shot covers so readers can see how similar they are, which everyone knows is a staple of bloggers the world over. (Media Mob takes this personally.)  read more »

Earlier this month at a panel discussion at FIT, New York Magazine Editor-in-Chief Adam Moss fretted about the magazine's upcoming 40th Anniversary Issue cover. Referring to Esquire's 75th Anniversary publicity stunt-cum-new-new thing digital cover, Mr. Moss said:

It made us a little crazy... Because we have a fortieth anniversary issue coming out a week after Esquire's. We don't have an electronic cover. It just sits there.

So, how did that cover turn out?  read more »

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 »

As a companion to the magazine's 75th Anniversary issue, Esquire's Web site features a list of "75 Books Every Man Should Read." The display copy calls it, "An unranked, incomplete, utterly biased list of the greatest works of literature ever published."

The list includes a lot of the authors you might expect like Fitzgerald, Hemingway. Tolstoy, Mailer, and Melville, whose Moby-Dick is called "The first American masterpiece. And perhaps the greatest." More contemporary entries include Salman Rushdie's Midnight's Children and Don DeLillo's Underworld.

It's the great list for anyone hoping to catch up on a century or so of quality reading. The only thing missing, as far as we can tell, are women writers. (Update: Looks like Jezebel got there first!)

A single female author made the cut: Flannery O'Connor for A Good Man Is Hard to Find and Other Stories.

An up-and-coming writer named Brad Pitt has a piece on Vanity Fair's Web site in which he nominates Kenneth Roth, executive director of Human Rights Watch, to the magazine's "Hall of Fame." (Not, it should be noted, to the magazine's Best-Dressed List: International Hall of Fame.)

Mr. Pitt offers this bit of press criticism in citing Mr. Roth for the list:

At the heart of the group's effectiveness: meticulous field research, which creates an incontrovertible record of human-rights crimes, coupled with hardheaded advocacy. As The Village Voice noted, this is where the real investigative journalism of our times is getting done.

In October 2006, Mr. Pitt wrote Esquire's cover story about the drug war, green building, and the ultimate diaper-rash cream.

Looks like Esquire has finally forgiven Dave Eggers.

In 2001, writing in The New York Times 'Style' section, Anna Holmes offered a rundown of words and phrases banned by various publications. Among the offerings:

David Granger, the editor in chief of Esquire, forbids ''Dubya,'' ''at risk'' and ''Eggers,'' the last because he had a falling-out with the novelist David Eggers, who worked at Esquire before he was famous.

In its mammoth 75th Anniversary issue, the magazine lists Mr. Eggers as one of its "75 Most Influential People of the 21st Century." According to the text accompanying his photo, Mr. Eggers was selected "Because he's inspiring a generation of readers and writers."  read more »

Some of the gems from Rupert Murdoch's quote-icle in the 75 Anniversary issue of Esquire:

"Everyone can see that The New York Times is a magnificent paper in many ways, lots of ways, but you can also see that they choose stories, very often for page 1, based on an agenda. I think that Arthur Sulzberger, over the years, has made it very clear that he wants a very liberal paper, and that he wants a staff that reflects that community. For five years, he didn't want any white, heterosexual men hired. He was sending a clear message."

"I have one or two friends who know Barack Obama, but I've only met him once. I was very impressed. He struck me as very pragmatic, certainly ambitious, but a very decent human being. But after you meet politicians for the first time, you have to go away and pinch yourself, because, you know, they've been briefed and they say things you're going to agree with."  read more »

Today, Esquire presented its 75th anniversary cover. You know, the futuristic digital doohickey created by E Ink that they've been teasing since July.

The Boston Globe's Erich P. Schwartzel reports that "Copies featuring the E Ink technology will cost $2 more than the regular newsstand price of $3.99."

Hearst is shipping just 100,000 copies of the digital cover. Better get one quick since, according to The New York Times' Tim Arango in July "the magazine will run out of juice after 90 days."

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."

   read more »

To judge from the current crop of men's magazines on the newsstand, comic actors are hot right now—like, Ben Affleck hot!

First out of the gate is Esquire, which features Stephen Colbert on its August cover in a re-creation of the magazine's iconic April 1968 image of Muhammad Ali as St. Sebastian. Inside, Mr. Colbert—or his writing staff—offers a humorous take on America's most beleaguered minority: white men.

Then there's GQ's Comedy Issue, which places endomorphic comic phenom Seth Rogen on the cover and teases a package including Jack Black, Sarah Silverman, Kal Penn, Flight of the Conchords, Tina Fey, David Sedaris, Ricky Gervais, Seth Meyers, Chris Rock and Don Rickles.  read more »

In July, Esquire writer-at-large Scott Raab wrote a story called The Battle of Newark, Starring Cory Booker, which begins in latter-day New Journalism style:

Nearly 275,000 souls live in Newark, New Jersey—twelve miles from New York City—served by a grand total of one movie theater, where Cory Booker, Newark's mayor, sits on a Sunday night, hand-holding with a leggy Jersey City beauty and surrounded by various City Hall colleagues watching Will Smith in I Am Legend trying to save Manhattan from zombie hordes by devising a cure for the plague that has zombified them and wiped out most of the human race. Goddamn zombies.  read more »

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The July issue of Esquire debuts a new culture column by Stephen Marche—a Ph.D.-possessing smart guy, former college professor, and Toronto-based novelist who apparently loves The Hills as much as he loves early modern drama. In zany Esquire fashion, the column’s laid out as if it were thought up on a typewriter and pasted into the mag 'zine-style, with little clippings of relevant pictures interspersed with the text. (The column is not online yet.)

The subject of this inaugural column? Skulls.  read more »

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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This week, Esquire.com posted the magazine's most recent "What I've Learned" interview with Gore Vidal.

While Mr. Vidal's interview was as erudite and prickly as the great man himself (samples: "'You got to meet everyone—Jackie Kennedy, William Burroughs.' People always put that sentence the wrong way around. I mean, why not put it the true way, that these people got to meet me, and wanted to?"; "Everything’s wrong on Wikipedia"), the most interesting part was the behind-the-scenes story in the form of an email from interviewer Mike Sager.  read more »

“It would be like instead of re-imagining Eustace Tilley, David Remnick decided to behead him,” David Hirshey said. He was talking about Esquire’s decision to discontinue Dubious Achievements, the beloved, mischievous year-end roundup of folly that has been running in the magazine since 1962. Like a blooper reel but real, Dubious was an annual assessment of all the awful things that had happened in the world during the preceding 12 months.  read more »

Johnny Depp will likely never drive around L.A. bumping into people and things in a convertible Mercedes. Instead, the Sweeny Todd star, 44, looks forward to the time when he can achieve some semblance of anonymity. In Esquire’s January issue, on newsstands Friday, the actor imagines what that freedom will be like, saying, “I'm sure it will be a possibility someday again. Maybe when I get old. They get tired of you,” he told the highbrow lad mag. “‘Didn't you used to be Johnny Depp?' That will be the clincher." Apparently, he leaned the value of privacy from his friend and mentor, the late Marlon Brando, recalling how the screen legend told him: ‘“That's your world and it's nobody else's business. It's not anybody's entertainment.”’ (He does, in the end, throw the paparazzi a bone by revealing that he likes to enter restaurants and hotels through the back door.)

"It'll definitely make you a little weird if you're constantly being stared at," Mr. Depp went on. "I don't want to be a product. Of course you want the movies to do well. But I don't want to know ... who's hot now and who's not and who's making this much dough and who's boffing this woman or that one. I want to remain ignorant of all this. I want to be totally outside and far away from all of it." [AP via HuffPo]

Byron Dobell, one of the most respected and accomplished editors in New York magazine publishing history, is also a painter, and his seventh solo show, “Recent Works,” is currently on view at Chelsea’s First Street Gallery (526 West 26th Street). Mr. Dobell, who’s 80 (but doesn’t look a day over 65!), worked as an editor at many important magazines in the city, including Time, Esquire, New York and American Heritage, and edited writers like Tom Wolfe and David Halberstam before they were household names. But 17 years ago, Mr. Dobell left the media world to pursue a lifelong passion: portraiture painting. Over the years he’s painted many friends and colleagues, including New York magazine founder Clay Felker; Tim Forbes, chief operating officer of Forbes, Dominique Browning, editor in chief of late House & Garden, and feminist icon Betty Friedan (the Friedan piece now hangs in the Smithsonian’s National Portrait Gallery).

At his Recent Works’ opening last week, Mr. Dobell dressed in a sharp navy jacket, an eye-catching tie and round, thin-framed spectacles. The room was noisy and bustling with his friends, mostly graying folks from the magazine business, who braved the biting cold to make it to the party. They held their hands behind their backs and considered Mr. Dobell’s small, sketchy “Life Study” chalk drawings of his less famous models lounging, seemingly in mid-air. There are also serene landscapes inspired by his travels to Scotland, Rome and New Hampshire. In some paintings, little trees sway in front of fuzzy bushes swirled with strands of India ink.  read more »

While John Grisham's Playing for Pizza and Alice Sebold's The Almost Moon top the New York Times' best sellers list, we're poking our heads into BookCourt in Cobble Hill to see what Brooklynites are tucking into their totes.

Out in the Manhattan suburb (sorry, it's true!), where baby strollers, daddy-actor types and yoga-obsessed writers run rampant, it's not surprising that Tom Perrotta's new book The Abstinence Teacher tops the hardcover fiction list. After all, the guy wrote Little Children, the most angsty-cool anti-parenting guide ever written. In his new book, Mr. Perrotta abandons the kiddie playground for school to examine how a single sex education teacher will battle a herd of evangelical Christians trying to get her to ditch the old banana/condom demo and take on an abstinence curriculum. In The Abstinence Teacher, Mr. Perrotta continues "writing books for people who don't much like books—satires for nice people, fuck books for prudes," according to Benjamin Alsup at Esquire. Fun! But you could also follow Mr. Alsup's advice and just wait for the movie.  read more »