Like a latter-day Marshall McLuhan (or maybe George Lois), Gerard Vanderleun does a bang-up job deconstructing Esquire’s new John Edwards cover.
I’d actually read Esquire and even the new Men’s Vogue magazine if there seemed to be a hint of balance in them. I was a big fan of the wonderfully haughty and elitist M Magazine in the 1980s, and I wrote about Esquire’s very early days in the 1930s in the last issue of Classic Style magazine, (article not online, alas), and I’d love to see a return to those sorts of magazines. But today’s PG-13-rated men’s mags are little more than either Playboy with the girls’ naughty bits hidden, or exercises in political correctness. Or both. For periodicals aimed at the mass market, they’ve done a thorough job of alienating half their buying audience, even as they wonder why their circulation figures have plummeted.
Incidentally, speaking of Edwards, Rob Port wonders if he’s ever read the Constitution, or if he doesn’t care what’s actually contained within it.
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