Wright Thompson on Steve McNair

wow, couldn't disagree more with the critiques. this was a powerful piece. 8)

 

Vanity Fair has not changed one bit in this respect. The celeb profiles are still predictable and unreadable.

 

Maybe it's me, but I'm finding all celeb profiles to be predictable and unreadable. Who truly gives a shit about these people in show biz, beyond the work they produce? Are our lives that empty that we need to peer into theirs, and do we really want to devote a lot of our precious time to vapid, overpaid folks when there are so many hard-working others who actually have interesting tales and do valuable work? (Thus, I'm feeling pretty much the same about most sports profiles, too.)

Thanks. Feel better already. But I dropped Vanity Fair two years ago, and will let lapse an Esquire subscription that I only got because it was so damn cheap ($5?) to begin with. A big ol' profile of Ben Affleck on the cover recently? No thank you.

 

Agreed on the celeb fascination Joe. Don't buy most of that crap and don't understand why people do. Vanity Fair's OK and I'll read it when it's around, but I'm keeping my Esquire subscription.

 

But aren't features on star athletes essentially celebrity profiles? Can't there be interesting Wright Thompson- or Gary Smith-like pieces on Hollywood actors or TV stars like there can be in sports? Couldn't you be asking the same question of sports fans who pick up magazines to read about their favorite players? That's a tricky road you're going down, at least when it comes to those who write about sports, to some degree.

I just get bored with the, "We had lunch here ... Tom ordered the Monte Christo; I had a BLT ... They we cruised around in his Buick ... blah, blah, blah."

 

Vanity Fair and Esquire have to do the celeb profiles to pay the bills (the meeting for lunch, they're wearing blue jeans and a smirk, does get old. Rolling Stone also does that all the time). But I keep both subscriptions because pretty much every month, there's one or two incredible stories in each one. Vanity Fair's had some amazing stuff on Madoff. And this month, the Palin story got the publicity, but Michael Lewis has a fascinating story on AIG and the guy who might be to blame for, basically, the collapse of the world economy.

http://www.vanityfair.com/politics/features/2009/08/aig200908

And Lewis had a great story on Iceland's collapse a few months ago. They do have some celebrity stuff that is sometimes interesting, often it's the stories about older Hollywood. There was a great one on the making of the Godfather in their Hollywood issue.

And esquire's the same. They'll have the occasional groaner celeb profiles, but there's usually one or two tremendous nonceleb stories each month. Having to wade through some mundane stories - and not-so-mundane pictures - of Halle Berry, Angelina or Megan Fox is a fairly small sacrifice.