tabloids
Credit where it's due, people: the
Post's cover this morning (click to enlarge) is simply a work of tabloid art. Sure, it's easy to sell papers when there's big news. But on a slow day, can you pull off a cover that combines revulsion, a perverse obsession with strange diseases, and a mythical monster? That's the news business at its finest. It's a heartwarming narrative: freaky baby born with freaky condition, doctors stumped, he
begs for salvation, and it's finally
delivered! Something we can all get behind. The
Post is actually far more subtle than its tabloid ancestors:
More »
this thing looks like that thing
We understand the
insatiable need for the media to compare Obama to Lincoln, we really do. There's no need to rehash the potential similarities all over again, because
Newsweek is devoting their
cover story this week to doing exactly that. On one hand, comparing a president-elect to a another guy from Illinois who did the job well makes all the sense in the world. And above all else, Lincoln was a good man. On the other hand, there are elements of this comparison that are wildly
not suggestive of BO:
More »
this thing looks like that thing
The urge to draw, literally, a link between Abraham Lincoln and
Barack Obama would have been irresistible to editorial cartoonists even if both men were not Illinois legislators, outspoken against a foreign military adventure and exploitive of their hardscrabble upbringings in the national hinterlands. Who better to juxtapose with the country's first black president than the commander-in-chief who emancipated American slaves (even if Obama's ancestors were not among them)?
More »
this thing looks like that thing
Sure, it was kind of a McCarthyite move by freshman Minnesota Congresswoman Michelle Bachmann,
calling Barack Obama "anti-American" on MSNBC's
Hardball. But you know what else it was? A chance for editors across the country to gleefully brandish their pattern-matching skills and knowledge of Canadian classic rock. Hence all of the references to Bachman-Turner Overdrive (hits: "Takin' Care of Business," "You Ain't Seen Nothing Yet") in the screenshots above,
all courtesy Eric Spiegelman. As usual, the
Daily Show adds that extra dash of awesome.
this thing looks like that thing
This here website (among many others) has been asking the same question for years.
Is Details magazine gay? I mean, yeah, they pretty much are with all their fancy fashion ads and fancy men who are always gracing the cover. This month's bois are the dudes from teen soap
Gossip Girl, and look! The cover is eerily similar to the fellas'
Out cover appearance from back in March. (Heck, when
New York Magazine featured the show, they included the ladies.) Note in these two gayish covers that resident twink Chace Crawford is sandwiched in the middle on both. Heh.
Subtle. Click for larger comparison.
this thing looks like that thing
It took years and years and the attention of a new movie, but someone finally uncovered a smidge of plagiarism in the fired
Vanity Fair Brit's
How to Lose Friends and Alienate People.
Daily Intel found near-identical passages from the book and a
New York Times article by John Tierney. Young was unruffled, saying it wasn't plagiarism but loose English journalistic standards at work:
More »
this thing looks like that thing
At left is the wicked (and blessedly dead) Grand Moff Tarkin, high-powered henchman to Darth Vader, from the 1977 space documentary
Star Wars. At right is Republican Vice Presidential nominee
Sarah Palin speaking at a campaign rally in Colorado yesterday. Note the similarities. We're not sayin', we're just sayin'.
[Palin image via Splash]
headlines
We were told
Ted Kennedy, who's battling advanced brain cancer, had
mere weeks to live. We were told there'd be a macabre video salute to the man in lieu of an actual appearance in Denver. So when he actually showed up on stage at the DNC to deliver a genuinely rousing speech, well, it was an emotional moment. So emotional that the major tabloids of both New York and Boston could not come up with original headlines.
More »
silly
When we first saw the photos of
Gossip Girl stars
Chace Crawford and
Ed Westwick lounging on the grass between takes—as louche and laissez-faire as two successful young men in the primes of their lives can be—something about the photos struck as familiar. But we weren't quite sure what it was until today, when a helpful tipster pointed us in the right direction. It's straight out of
Brideshead: Revisited!
More »
this thing looks like that thing
A blogger
recently "reviewed" uber-book-publicist
Sloane Crosley's book of essays,
I Was Told There'd Be Cake, on her personal blog. "I too am a twenty-something year old self-absorbed, middle-class angst who can relate to quite a few of Sloane’s shenanigans. Oh you know, the standard white-girl fare..." Cute, whatever. But! This very same blogger, we notice, can relate to quite a few of Sloane's shenanigans: she's written essays in the past month on her blog about a.) being a
bad vegetarian, b.)
being a pack rat, and c.) spending a childhood playing the
videogame Oregon Trail. Coincidentally, Crosley's book features essays about each of these subjects. Hatecrush alert! Let's compare and contrast:
More »