Ooh, two days of snarky articles about other publications from the fine folks at Slate, this time an absolute smackdown of an Esquire article by Ron Rosenbaum. A friend once told me that reviews of bad movies are always way more fun to read/watch than reviews of good ones, because it allows the reviewer to vent his/her spleen in a spectacular way. Which Rosenbaum does, to whit:
And in the history of fawning gentlemen's-magazine profiles, there is unlikely to be a more ludicrous example than the profile in the July Esquire of—yes—Angelina Jolie, which spends many thousands of words and invokes grave national tragedies to prove to us that Angelina Jolie is not just a good woman, not just an enlightened humanitarian, not just a suffering victim of celebrity, not just strong and brave, but, we are told, "the best woman in the world."
And then again later:
Because nothing matches the stately assurance of its own self-importance, nothing reaches what I'd call the "existential pompousness" of that final paragraph, with its last sentence devoted to a reprise of the "suffering" that Angelina Jolie undergoes and how she transcends it all in her uniquely saintly, best-woman-in-the-world way.
Wow. I'm starting to wonder if the brethren at Slate are feeling a bit jealous of their high powered comrades in the print media, and are now ... overcompensating?