Is it just me, or is this about the most insultingly inane interview ever? I’m not sure if there’s supposed to be some kind of “let’s make fun of celebrity journalism together!!!” irony, but if there is I ain’t pickin up on it.
Digging back into this chick’s previous “interviews,” I find this gem, from her interview with singer/songwriter Stew: "When I Googled you, I came up with recipes for beef stew. "
W. T. F.
Seriously, am I just irony-deficient*?
*Ha! Now that was funny.
No. The real Us magazine would not have just now “heard” about her lumpectomy. This is like the worst of all worlds – celeb “journalism” by lazy reporters not even able to keep au courant with the celebs.
Mind you, this is surprising only if you took the N.Y.T. seriously to begin with, which (quite apart from Jayson Blair) you should not have. For years now they have been running extremely fluffy articles of various types. It’s just that they camouflaged them slightly by giving them allegedly-highbrow tone.
So, for instance, they might not, eight years ago, have run an overt OMG-Sex-And-The-City-Rulezz!! article, but they’d gladly run a “think-piece” allegedly deconstructing “What the popularity of SATC Tells Us About The Zeitgeist” – which allowed designer-shoe-obsessed birdbrains to have their pop culture cake and wash it down with a tasty Cosmo of faux-intellectualism. Certainly nothing in the fashion section could have been called serious journalism, either. Arts? Not so much when it veered into the vaporings of Broadway show-tune types and other fabulosity. And I couldn’t tell you how many reams of newsprint they wasted on profiling whatever home-design-porn articles about how some more-money-than-brains Manhattanite had redone their terrace apartment in the Village.
So this isn’t really too new, or too low, a new low.
I have always read the “Questions for” columns as an ironic take off on the 5 or 10 questions for _______ fluff interviews in USA Today, Time, etc. That are all just so uniformly inane and wacky.
The Questions For page is meant to be silly and ironic - isn’t doesn’t quite work all the time, but no, it isn’t Us Magazine…
The NYTimes Magazine takes risks but ends up with great articles, too. The political reporting of Matt Bai, the writing of Michael Pollan, most recently on food, essays by David Rieff (Susan Sontag’s son), etc…
But YMMV
Those interviews are always weird.
Sometimes she seems to get personal, and really needles her subjects. I’m not sure what the tone of them is supposed to be.
But, that was in the NY Times magazine, too. . .not exactly the New York Times proper. It’s currently running a serial comic about two dogs who are squaring off in a chess match. There’s a fashion shoot in the NYT magazine every week. It’s where Safire’s column runs. I like the NYT magazine, but its tone has never been totally consistent.
However, it also has some stellar journalism at times.
Full disclosure: I live up the block from the editor of the NYTimes Magazine. Very nice guy - very quiet and he NEVER discusses work with “civilians” like me (I find that to be common - there are a lot of journalists in my town and they are usually very non-communicative about their work). But he has a very eclectic sense of taste in his real life, so I am never surprised at the quirkyness of some stuff in the Mag. But the good stuff is great.