A Babe in Bad Boyland In Slate, Ron Rosenbaum writes a vicious and hilarious deconstruction of Esquire magazine's celebrity profile of Angelina Jolie.

I particularly enjoy Rosenbaum's short essay because Esquire drives me nuts. (Deep, I know.) It's a magazine that wants to appeal to the prurient interest that every men's magazine tries to appeal to, and so it puts Angelina Jolie and various other gorgeous women on its cover. Nothing particularly wrong with that. But then it suggests that, well, unlike those other magazines, it's actually very highbrow about the whole thing. This inevitably leads to pretension; Esquire's website, for example, proffers a list of articles "for your perusal." For your perusal. Pretty funny.

The result of Esquire's pretensions to seriousness, Rosenbaum suggests, is the worst celebrity profile ever written.... Give Esquire some credit, though: It is a beautifully designed cover.

  ¶ 11:20 AM