![]() ![]() Buying the Globe, however, ups the guilt quotient a thousandfold. Usually this guilt is manageably mild and stems from both the opportunity cost (oh insidious concept!) of time spent reading it as well as from supporting a culture of vapid celebrity worship (oh well). Globe $2.35 Any celebrity magazine is, of course, a guilty pleasure. ![]() Here are the results, from worst to best: (The Globe’s cover story on John Kerry’s “Sex Disease Scandal-It could keep him out of the White House” turns out to refer only to the fact that he may have had an STD while he was serving in Vietnam.)įun (10 points): Is the magazine juicy, playful, and irreverent, but still gripping? (Kate Hudson gave birth to a boy, not a girl, In Touch!) I also frowned on particularly misleading cover questions-the answers to Star’s “Justin: Cheating on Cameron?” and “Nude Apprentices? Will they pose for Playboy?” are both revealed inside to be, simply, no-and, worse, misleading cover statements. The best I could do was dock points when a magazine published something that, in the course of the last few months, was subsequently proven false. Are Demi and Ashton planning a June wedding? Is Sandra Dee drinking herself to death? I have no idea. Reliability (10 points): This category was, admittedly, somewhat hard to score. A welcome byproduct of the testing was that I finally exhausted my seemingly limitless ability to wring enjoyment, diversion, and procrastination from the lives of the stars and am looking forward to reading something without pictures and exclamation points, preferably a dry philosophical treatise. I spent the last four months reading all of these magazines every week in an attempt to pick the one (OK, two) worth buying regularly. With the exception of People, they focus exclusively on celebrities-primarily youthful ones-and their tone is more upbeat, irreverent, and less credulous than their tabloid counterparts. Glossies ( Us Weekly, In Touch, People, and, after a recent extreme makeover, Star) are printed on shinier, thicker paper stock. Tabloids (the National Enquirer, the Globe, the National Examiner) are printed on newsprint and run not only sensationalistic stories about celebrities (the majority of whom reached the apex of their fame decades ago), but also pieces on the particularly bad, bizarre, or heartwarming behavior of “real people.” They are padded with health tips, crosswords, and photos of readers’ babies and, unlike the more legitimate magazines, will pay sources for gossip about the stars. Between tabloids and glossies, there are seven weekly gossip magazines from which to choose my opiate. Superficiality, envy, cattiness, schadenfreude, mockery, and melodrama: I normally try hard to deplore them all-except when I’m buying a celebrity gossip magazine, in which case they are just the ticket. ![]()
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