1. “Does Kim Kardashian belong on the cover of a fashion magazine?” we asked on the cover of our own Fall Fashion issue, then tried to answer, inside the magazine, with Benjamin Wallace’s profile of the spokesmodel, reality-show star, and frustrated fashion-world arriviste (“Kim at the Zoo,” August 20). “The cover choice is groundbreaking in its embracing of reality-star culture,” wrote Alexandra Serrano at Trendhunter. “Many now-iconic fashionistas had similar experiences when making their way to the realm of celebrated figures, such as Victoria Beckham and the Olsen twins. It is commendable for Wallace and New York to include this Über-stylish multidisciplinary power celebrity.” At nymag.com, many readers sided with Kardashian over those (in fashion and out) who routinely criticize her. “People really have an unhealthy hatred for someone who seems to be a nice girl who isn’t stepping on anybody else to be successful,” wrote one commenter. “I say let her be.” Of course, a few readers weren’t quite so sympathetic. “Personally, I think people tend to dislike her not because of her pneumatic chest and ‘prodigious’ booty, but because everything she does and says comes off as completely calculating and inauthentic. She just seems so self-absorbed and vapid. It’s a turnoff for me,” wrote one. “As a female consumer with a brain, I would not want to buy her clothes, curvy or not,” wrote another. “She is not a good role model. Yes, I know she is successful in her own way, but I want no part of it. As garish as Beyoncé’s clothes are, I would buy from B’s line a thousand times before I would ever consider Ms. K’s.” Maybe so, wrote another, but that isn’t the only relevant comparison: “I’ll take her over Paris Hilton any day. At least she can poke fun at herself.”
2. “Please get to know the trill bitch @janepratt 2012 that I know and love so much,” tweeted Cat Marnell, erstwhile wild-child beauty editor of Pratt’s xoJane.com, of Carl Swanson’s profile of the beloved founder of Sassy and Jane who had hired her, published her confessional drug memoirs, then fired her for refusing to go to rehab—a not-unusual “story arc” in the first-person world of Pratt’s magazines (“It Happened to Me,” August 20). Most readers agreed that, Pratt’s personal nuttiness and oversharing aside, she is a brilliant editor. “Jane has amazing vision,” wrote one commenter at nymag.com. “I still remember finding the first issue of Jane at a gas station in Dunwoody, Georgia. I read every issue. Thank you, Jane.” “I thought Sassy was the sh*t as a young girl,” wrote another. But a few commenters found the fawning a little much. “Anyone who’s over 30 and still whining about the closure of some two-decades-dead teen magazine (yes, even the most alternative, feminist, nonconformist one) needs to get over it.”
3. “If you’re sacrificing time away from my family and myself for the benefit of winning championships, then winning a championship should happen every single year,” Vanessa Bryant, wife of Kobe, told Vanessa Grigoriadis in a story about the high-fashion lives of NBA wives (“The Belles of B-Ball,” August 20). To a lot of readers, the comment seemed to reveal a crude calculus. “I get the feeling Vanessa is justifying Kobe’s infidelity under the guise of being a hard-core basketball fan who just happens to reap enormous financial benefits when her husband brings home that championship money, but maybe that’s just me,” wrote Brande Victorian at Madame Noire. “On some level, the public has to understand where she may have been coming from instead of jumping to the worst possible conclusion,” wrote a more sympathetic Joye Pruitt at Bleacher Report. “Mrs. Bryant has long been accused of being a gold-digger/trophy wife to the famed basketball superstar and the latest quote release, without knowing the context of the question asked, just throws gasoline on an already wild fire.” At nymag.com, another reader also advised withholding judgment—about Bryant and the other wives featured. “There are some anxieties that I wish these women would be able to articulate to serve my curious needs, especially about race, poverty, and new money (because some of them front like they were born in Balenciaga). It would help to have some background on where these women came from and the influence of their nouveau riche status, y’know, apart from the labels and diamonds.”
4. The first of the couples in “Kiss Me Again” (August 6–12) was not in fact a couple, as we learned after publication. We profoundly regret the mischaracterization—theirs and, as a result, ours. A more minor correction: In Matthew Shaer’s story on the history and technology of book-pulping (“Dead Books Club,” August 20), we improperly described a discovery related to the lost Shakespeare play Love’s Labour’s Won; it was only a reference to the play, not a piece of the text, that was discovered inside a copy of the 1637 text Certaine Sermons.
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