Last night we finally picked up the New Yorker. Jonathan Lethem???s story was weird, and frankly if the New Yorker didn???t run an excerpted version of Fortress of Solitude, which admittedly made us cry back then, there???s no way, no way, it would have gotten into this issue.
Lizzie Widdicombe had another classic Talk of the Town piece. Just because she???s good doesn???t mean we resent her any less for regularly publishing in the New Yorker 18 months after graduating Harvard.
And Malcolm Gladwell was back to his pre-Tipping Point days in his piece on I.Q. tests. In other words, we enjoyed him again. But apparently we were mistaken.
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Not that any of these celebrities had plastic surgery, of course, because we would never insinuate something like that (which would draw the attention of attorneys). But what a difference a nip makes. And yes, there’s the requisite cameos from the Jackson clan.
Thirty pages of plastic surgery tales? We wouldn’t even expect that much from New Beauty, and those are the glossy pages where a sad story of body dysmorphic disorder skewed with a celebratory slant is most fitted. But we’re talking New York Times shopper Alex Kuczynski, whose true-life tome Beauty Junkies hits bookstores in October like a scalpal does the hairline. Kuczynski’s story is a common one: Girl goes in for skin therapy; girl walks out with eye lift, collagen injections. plumped lips, and a forehead that even an Upper East Side townhouse explosion couldn’t furrow. What social status observing scribe hasn’t been in that situation? But Alex learned her lesson: She’s quit “beauty treatments” cold turkey, abandoning the hollow world of age upkeep for the hollow world of a Vanity Fair excerpt, coming at you in September.
Face Off [Memo Pad]