McSweeney's, Number 5, 2000; and Vanity Fair, June 2006.
Back in the summer of 2000, when they were getting set to launch their fifth issue, the gentle hapless crew over at McSweeney's figured that maybe the problem was that they just hadn't been being hip enough with their earlier covers. They studied the competition — places like Esquire and Vanity Fair and the like, and figured, Hey, maybe that's the ticket: Put some bigtime sexy celebrity on the cover, somebody huge and charismatic and irresistible, somebody like, you know...Ted Koppel! They weren't being entirely cynical. I mean, the issue did include a conversation with Koppel (Sarah Vowell, as a matter of fact, discussing with him his lifelong passion for Marcus Aurelius). But putting Koppel on the cover like that was surely meant as a kind of gently joshing joke, as much at their own expense as anything else, a flagrant exhibition of their own mainstream cultural cluelessness.
What then to make of this month's cover of the actual Vanity Fair? The fact that the editors there, in offering Anderson Cooper up as the studmuffin du mois, apparently intend no joke of any kind may in fact be an occasion for some serious concern.
Lawrence Weschler is the author of Mr. Wilson's Cabinet of Wonder and Everything That Rises: A Book of Convergences. He is also the curator of the Convergences contest currently transpiring at McSweeneys.net.
