Sexy is in the eye of the beholder — and these men’s mags have a lot to behold.
Details puts Ben Affleck on its cover, and inside we get an interview that’s pretty bland. He denies, for example, any drama behind his recent banishment from playing blackjack at casinos. The interview is coupled with sultry photos of the actor sitting backwards on a chair in a pair of Red Wing boots, flexing his biceps under a white T-shirt. While such a spread appears well-targeted for this magazine’s allegedly closeted readership, elsewhere we wonder exactly who they’re courting — for example, when they quote Jennifer Aniston on the subject of her fianceé Justin Theroux’s eyes, and how they “just knock me out every day,” citing an interview in Women’s Wear Daily.
GQ gets caught running a puffy profile of bestselling pulp novelist Nicholas Sparks just days before an explosive lawsuit accused the author of being a racist, homophobic and anti-Semitic bully. “What does Sparks know about ladies that the rest of us don’t?” the magazine naively asks. The rest of the piece is playful, blissfully ignorant of new allegations about how he has run a private high school he founded. Nevertheless, it does nail Sparks on his seemingly principled stance against writing anything that he doesn’t expect to sell like hotcakes. “I could, theoretically, do a novel set in the 1800s,” Sparks says, as if that’s the most boring idea imaginable. Eat your heart out, Jane Austen.
In an issue focused on “mentors” dedicated to “raising the next generation of good men,” Esquire visits with former Defense Secretary Robert Gates, who recently took the helm of the Boy Scouts of America. Unfortunately, the article fails to press Gates on the vexing controversy the 104-year-old organization faces on its stance toward homosexuality. That’s too bad, because Gates makes a great case that groups like the Boy Scouts are needed more than ever in a country that’s consumed by an obsession with money at the expense of much else.
M delivers a fairly fluffy profile of New York Times Executive Editor Dean Baquet, with a photo spread that shows him mugging for the camera through his rimless glasses and brandishing his French cuffs while on the phone. Nevertheless, for all of those wondering how Baquet really feels about the less-than-ideal circumstances under which he succeeded Jill Abramson, he makes it plain: “Someone gave you the greatest job in journalism, but the circumstances weren’t ideal.
You didn’t have quite the coronation you would have liked — but you got the greatest job in journalism — I can handle that.” So we can all rest easy that Baquet is resting easy.
The New Yorker adds to a pile of lengthy, yet ultimately unsatisfying, stories about the never-ending saga of SAC Capital, whose honcho Stevie Cohen remains untouched by federal prosecutors as his former employees head to prison. This time, we get an exclusive interview with the wife of convicted insider-trader Mathew Martoma, who — surprise, surprise — insists her husband is innocent. “I don’t have the answers, but you know it is my goal to find them,” says Rosemary Martoma, whose husband faces nine years behind bars.
New York’s cover story is about drones, and the cover illustration depicts a Dr. Seuss-style drone that’s equipped with white-gloved tentacles that are doing everything from dropping bombs to delivering pizza to pointing a camera with a big, bulging eyeball. Inside, the story is likewise oddly incongruous. There are light sections about recent hoaxes, such as a taco-delivery service, juxtaposed with sections about families getting blown up in Pakistan. Still more jarring, we must say, was a piece by liberal columnist Jonathan Chait defending football from his own kind. Having quit himself following a stint as a running back in junior high, Chait nevertheless attacks scary stats about high-school football deaths, saying they actually occur at lower rates than in boys basketball, lacrosse, gymnastics and water polo.
Time devotes its cover to the Ebola scare, with some riveting photos of victims and aid workers in Liberia. “The dead, unmarked and unmourned, are burned in huge funeral pyres each night, the smoke going unseen into the dark,” correspondent Aryn Baker writes. We have a hard time believing the “unmourned” part, especially looking at the photo on the opposite page of a 28-year-old man grieving over his dead father. Elsewhere, check out a nicely rendered profile on Iran’s very angry Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei. And long overdue is a piece on a particularly sticky issue when it comes to pot legalization: dangerous, doped-up drivers.
