There are many problems with Joel Stein’s cover story about Millennials—people born between 1980 and 2000. The most glaring substantive one is probably that, in his discussion of my generation’s relatively slow start and disappointment in employment, he finds plenty of time to talk about the widespread availability of social technologies, and none whatsoever to talk about the dramatic contraction of economic opportunity that has made it harder for Millennials to find jobs, and more dependent on their parents’ financial help and health insurance as a fallback, rather than as a lifestyle choice. I can believe that Stein would make that omission, but it’s difficult to believe that his editors let the piece into print that way.

But one thing I think is useful and clarifying about the article, even as I find it frustrating, isn’t in the text at all. It’s the way that it’s being sold to the public: namely, with a picture of a well-dressed young woman, gazing into her iPhone, seemingly taking a picture of herself:

Stein’s piece wisely acknowledges that the condemnation of Millennials that’s a common trope these days, and that makes his piece feel like trolling, is only the latest iteration of a generational cycle. And what might have made the article interesting rather than repetitive is a discussion of the way this cycle is different from the ones that came before.

One avenue the choice of cover suggested is that there might be a gendered component to the irritation with Millennials. Dependence, interiority, and the careful construction of fantasy lives aren’t solely the provenance of girls and women of course, but they’re traits that are coded as feminine. And technology and economics have made those traits much more visible when men and women display them. If a scrapbook was something you kept for yourself to archive your memories, Instagram is that scrapbook, except shared with everyone. If you kept one of those inspiration boards with ribbons sewn into fabric stretched over a board in your dorm room or your childhood bedroom, you’re probably doing the same thing on Pinterest. And where your parents might have paid your first and last month’s rent as a deposit—or if you were spectacularly lucky, bought you an apartment—a version of support that wasn’t necessarily obvious, though it could be deduced by a reasonably intelligent observer, their reduced circumstances and yours might leave you living at home, a much more visible sign of your economic interdependence with your family.

Neither Stein’s article, nor anything else I’ve read about generational research suggests that women are exhibiting the traits he calls out as negative out in greater numbers. If anything, Millennial men and women are coming into alignment in certain ways, whether it’s wanting equal flexibility in work so both men and women can balance their careers and family responsibilities, or using social networking tools (though men and women tend to gravitate to different services). If what irritates non-Millennials about the current generation of young adults, male and female alike, isn’t just that they’re self-absorbed, or entitled, or dependent, but self-absorbed, entitled, and dependent in feminine ways, that’s telling.

And it says a lot about the second half of Stein’s thesis, which is ostensibly about how Millennials could save us all. If what Millennials have to offer is lessons about genuine introspection, more reasonable expectations of work-life balance, and the need for a fair social safety net and reasonable return on the investment of getting a college education, that seems like a genuinely valuable conversation. It’s just too bad that it’s one implied by Time’s cover, rather than discussed in Stein’s article.

Boston Magazine’s Associate Art Director Liz Noftle gave The Atlantic Wire the story of how the magazine’s staff created the gorgeous cover for its issue exploring the Boston Marathon bombings. “The heart almost feels like it’s beating,” she explained of the decision to have the color of the shoes radiate outward:

I actually might have done without the heart, and just let the beauty of the shoes speak for themselves. My first thought was actually that the cover design reminded me of a mandala, the religious symbols that are maps of the universe, though obviously without the traditional four gates. There’s something to the idea not that you can find good in even the worse things, but that the full range of human experiences is represented in tragedy. And the full range of human experience is a humbling thing to see all at once.

In a truly amazing expression of honesty, Alex Bilmes, who edits Esquire UK, used the opportunity he was given as a speaker at a conference to explain how low his estimation of his readers are:

“The women we feature in the magazine are ornamental,” he said, speaking on a panel at the Advertising Week Europe conference in London on Tuesday. “I could lie to you if you want and say we are interested in their brains as well. We are not. They are objectified.” Bilmes, speaking on a panel hosted by Cosmopolitan editor Louise Court about feminism in the media and advertising, added that men “see women in 3D” in many different roles in life “but at certain times we like to see them sexy”. “[Esquire] provide pictures of girls in the same way we provide pictures of cool cars,” he said. “It is ornamental. Women’s magazines do the same thing.”

That’s a pretty sad set of ambitions for a magazine that published Gay Talese’s “Frank Sinatra Has A Cold.” And it’s a reminder for all that magazines like Esquire and GQ purport to serve sophisticated men, they’ve been pulled down by the lad-mag market rather than rising above it.

Whenever a contemporary men’s magazine, or someone employed by one, does something particularly stupid, I’m always reminded of this terrific piece Jon Zobenica wrote for The Atlantic in 2007 called “Are We Not Men?” which is all about the decline of the form. In it, he particularly cites the Playboy Advisor as an example of the kind of real talk that made that magazine refreshing—in fact, Zobenica argues, “I developed a respect toward women in part by reading Playboy as a young male.” He wrote:

In the October 1973 Advisor, a man on the verge of marrying a small-breasted woman wonders if he can honestly go ahead with the nuptials, given his fears of desiring more-ample women. To which he gets, in part, this response:

It’s not a question of honesty; it’s a matter of maturity—yours, not hers. A marriage is more than the sum of its anatomical parts; success depends on qualities of love, respect and compatibility.

In the February 1976 Advisor, a woman writes in that her boyfriend, who’s miffed that he can’t bring her to orgasm (though he claims he’s successfully done so with every other lover), has tried to pressure her into a threesome with another woman as a remedy. The response reads in total:

Your partner has come up with a rather novel excuse for experimenting with a third party (necessity is the pimp of invention or the mother of deviation), but we doubt that a ménage à trois would be the answer to your problem. While a triangle might show him by direct comparison that all women are different, it might also double his failure rather than his fun. Since you are more familiar with your response than he is, do what you can to increase your pleasure. Patience is not something that can be measured or corrected with a stop watch: By making orgasm the goal of your lovemaking, you may have changed the event into an endurance contest with no winners. Love for the moment, not the finish. Sex is a mystery, but when it works, it reminds us of what Raymond Chandler said: The ideal mystery is one you would read if the end was missing.

Thirty years on, in March 2006, Playboy was still at it, offering this response to a writer who defended (on grounds of “intimacy or commitment issues”) another man’s reluctance to label his partner a girlfriend:

You may be correct about his issues, but he should work them out on his own time rather than wasting hers. Labels may be confining, but after three months “girlfriend” threatens no man.

Now, he’s writing about the content rather than the pictures. But the fantasy, Zobenica argued, was in part about what you got to do with that pretty girl, and it didn’t involve driving her like a car. “When, at nineteen, and living in my very first apartment, I cleared out half my medicine cabinet and half my closet, and gave them over to the California blonde who’d just moved in with me, it felt as true to the life I’d seen and imagined as my red Camaro and my Brutini Le Sport shoes. This was no capitulation; this was part and parcel of the dream,” he wrote. “This was, it seemed to me, exactly what Playboy had espoused: finding a nifty chick and sharing the good life with her.”

We can debate the relative merits of cheesecake, and whether it actually counts as some sort of feminist appreciation for female forms. But I’m not going to assign Blimes credit for featuring women in their forties, or women of different races in his pictorials—and yes, that’s something he actually asked for. Claiming you’re able to make a broad range of women into fetish objects is decidedly less ambitious than aiming to make your readers see the full potential of a woman, and of themselves in a relationship with her.

To highlight a story about the return of dangerous, pre-crash practices to the housing market, Bloomberg Businessweek decided to publish a cover that didn’t just blame consumers rather than lenders for the rise of subprime lending and the treatment of mortgages as a way to get access to cash, but specifically portrayed consumers of color (and female consumers) for engaging in this behavior:

It’s awful as art, and as Ryan Chittum explains in a great piece at the Columbia Journalism Review, awful as journalism. “The narrative of the crash on the right has been the blame-minority-borrowers line, sometimes via dog whistle, often via bullhorn,” he writes. “Minority borrowers were disproportionately victimized in the bubble. But BusinessWeek here has them on the cover bathing in housing-ATM cash, implying that they’re going to create another bubble.”

Predictably, Bloomberg Businessweek editor Josh Tyrangiel has apologized in a statement to Politico, saying “”Our cover illustration last week got strong reactions, which we regret. Our intention was not to incite or offend. If we had to do it over again we’d do it differently.” It’s appropriate that they’ve apologized. But I’m fundamentally dissatisfied with these sorts of apologies, because they neither explain how the offending incident came to pass in the first place, nor the practices an organization will employ to make sure they don’t repeat the same errors in the future.

Does Bloomberg Businessweek have people of color or women on its design staff, who could be among the first people to filter out ideas that they’ll later present to the editors? And if they don’t, are the white people designing the magazine soliciting input from staffers of color, or from reporters who might be knowledgeable about the racial dynamics of an issue that’s turning into a cover story? Are there people of color on the editorial team that’s responsible from picking among the cover options? And if not, are the people in that position going to people who can give them a gut check? If neither of these things is happening, why not? What are the internal editorial standards regarding cartoons, caricature, and race? If those don’t exist, why don’t they? If Tyrangiel wants to answer these questions, I’m more inclined to listen. If you want to walk a line and publish edgy covers, you have a particular obligation to think about where the line is. And if you want forgiveness, you need to actually look at yourself and your practices in a systemic way.

This morning, Newsweek editor Tina Brown and CEO Baba Shetty announced a change to the magazine that seemed both seismic and inevitable: the December 31 issue of the print edition will be Newsweek’s last, and the publication will continue as a tablet and web publication. “Newsweek Global, as the all-digital publication will be named, will be a single, worldwide edition targeted for a highly mobile, opinion-leading audience who want to learn about world events in a sophisticated context,” they wrote. “Newsweek Global will be supported by paid subscription and will be available through e-readers for both tablet and the Web, with select content available on The Daily Beast.”

That language, and the task at hand, sounds strikingly similar to the way David Bradley, the owner of The Atlantic, talked about his vision when he and the editors who worked for him re-conceived the magazine when Bradley moved it from Boston to Washington, cutting fiction and devoting more space in the magazine to long-form reporting on policy. In 1999, Newsweek actually discussed the question of how The Atlantic could adapt itself to the internet age:

Every magazine has its ideal reader, and for the “thought-leader” category The Atlantic belongs to, that reader is the lay intellectual. Reflective lawyers, like federal Judge Richard A. Posner, are ideal readers. So are military intellectuals such as Col. Harry Summers, author of “On Strategy.” But the number of such people is small–no more than a million Americans, by the estimate of John R. MacArthur, the publisher of Harper’s magazine, The Atlantic’s chief rival. And with a number of magazines carving up this constituency–not only The Atlantic and Harper’s, but also publications like The New Republic, Commentary and The National Interest–the commercial prospects for any one of them don’t seem bright.

How often does a thought-leader magazine spark a controversy outside its core readership? It does happen: Francis Fukuyama’s much-debated proclamation of “The End of History” first appeared in the National Interest in 1989. And in 1993 Foreign Affairs printed Samuel Huntington’s argument that cultural fault lines–based on differences of religion, language and tradition–would be the battlegrounds of the future. The Atlantic itself found broader readership for a 1993 article supporting two-parent families, perhaps less for its content than for its title: “Dan Quayle Was Right.” These are, however, rare events…

Still, every problem is an opportunity. Michael Kelly, The Atlantic’s new editor and formerly editor of The New Republic, argues that “It’s the smog aspect that makes [publishing] work for magazines like us. We have a culture of a ratcheted-up bombardment of everyone, a great wash of talk, blather, chatter… and it’s all sending the same message: ‘You have to pay attention to this right now. The zeitgeist is changing from what it was two minutes ago, and you don’t want to miss it’.” The Atlantic, he says, should be an “antidote” to media overheat, “the absurd topicality of everything.”

The Atlantic ended up embracing “the absurd topicality of everything” with not just its booming core website but news aggregator The Atlantic Wire. But it also revitalized the magazine’s buzz quotient by thinking somewhat more narrowly about what kinds of stories “lay intellectuals” would want to read. Where once that might have meant the same broad subject palatte that magazines like the New Yorker and Harper’s still publish, The Atlantic doubled down on the kind of stories about the future of family and foreign policy, and the snappy cover lines, that Newsweek said served the publication well in 1993.

Newsweek has an advantage that The Atlantic didn’t have in 1999 when Bradley bought it: a strong web arm of the publication that boasts established internet-native writers (rather than traditional print journalists who are in the midst of transitioning to learning to write comfortably for the web) who do a mix of reporting and commentary. But it also has two deficits. First, it remains a very general interest magazine, which means it’s competing with everything, even when it can’t necessarily do, say, food coverage better than a specialist magazine like newcomer Lucky Peach, which caters to exactly the kind of wealthy, sophisticated readers the new, digital readers Newsweek would like to lock down. And even worse, unlike The Atlantic’s brand at the time of its reinvention, which may have been somewhat dry, but was definitely positive and respectable, Newsweek has degraded its own editorial reputation in a mad, and as it turns out final, rush to sell issues and generate traffic. “Final Newsweek cover: Why Barack Obama is the Worst Gay President to Ever Breastfeed Muslim Rage,” MSNBC’s Chris Hayes tweeted this morning. Certainly, Newsweek has had covers in the past that look unattractive today: the July 30, 1945 cover with the tagline “The Jap: How Long Can He Take It?” is less than attractive. But the magazine has seemed exceptionally cheap lately, recycling sexually provocative stock images for shock value, in marked contrast to, say, its shattering cover photo for the feature on Martin Luther King, Jr.’s funeral, or fanning Islamophobia rather than substantively dissecting the attacks on American diplomatic facilities.
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When men’s magazines name their sexiest ladies, the interviews that accompany them are normally an exercise in eye-rolling. But Mila Kunis, who is on the cover of this month’s Esquire, gives much more interesting answers to somewhat more interesting questions than is the norm, discussing everything from her family’s immigration from Ukraine (they are Jews and wanted to avoid rising anti-Semitism as the Soviet Union dissolved), to being threatened with blacklisting when she refused to do a magazine cover that made her uncomfortable for the promoting of Max Payne. And it’s particularly interesting to hear her talk about her political involvement, especially given the way some of her skepticism about Esquire itself comes out:

I want to follow up on an answer you recently gave to Glamour. You said you engaged in political street art. Uh, political street art?

I can’t really go into detail because I’m going to get into trouble.

Why would you get into trouble?

Because it’s illegal.

Can you be vague about it then?

It has to do with the Defense of Marriage Act. It’s my friend’s issue. I’m supporting him.

[She goes off the record.]

Yeah, you could be arrested for that.

But I’d be arrested for something I believe in… . Good luck including something about gay rights in Esquire.

Of course I could include that.

Okay.

Do you consider yourself political?

I find it all to be incredibly entertaining. I went to the White House Correspondents’ Dinner with Wolf Blitzer. It’s weird: You get invited by people you don’t know — and I never wanna go again, because I had the most incredible experience. Ever. I watch CNN or MSNBC all day long, every day. So I meet with Wolf, and I was like, “Oh, my God. There’s Wolf Blitzer.” Like two drinks in, I just start talking. “So, about Ahmadinejad’s nephew …” Wolf was surprised I followed politics.

Politics can also be incredibly demoralizing.

The way that Republicans attack women is so offensive to me. And the way they talk about religion is offensive. I may not be a practicing Jew, but why we gotta talk about Jesus all the time? And it’s baffling to me how a poor person in Georgia can say, “I’m a Republican.” Why?

Some people don’t like to hear celebrities talk about politics.

I don’t think I’m a celebrity. I’m a working actress. I think there’s a difference.

It’s nice to see an actress remind a magazine that she doesn’t take off her opinions or convictions along with her top, and that her choice of career doesn’t somehow prevent her from being an engaged citizen with serious commitments.

My pals at the Mary Sue posted Ms. Magazine’s inaugural 1972 cover next to the one the magazine is running for its fortieth anniversary this month. And as much as the comics-lovin’ gal in me is excited to see Wonder Woman back in her role as cover woman, I couldn’t help noticing some of the differences between the covers, which in subtle ways have a lot to say about where feminism was forty years ago and where it is now. Take the 1972 cover:

The billboard calls for “Peace & Justice In ’72,” rather than making specific feminist demands. She’s in a landscape where the war in Vietnam and the blasted landscape it’s produced are in danger of intruding on the American main street, and Wonder Woman rushes to catch a war plane before it crashes, perhaps into that schoolbus. In this reading, feminism is part of a much larger left movement, but the implication is also that it has a larger role to play. The cover lines may be about paid housework and body hair, but Wonder Woman, as the personification of feminism, is solving not just any problems she might have as a super-powered lady, but the problems of everyone else. This was a time when people still talked about misogyny as a root cause of war, something that seems awfully distant from our mainstream political discourse now.

Flash-forward forty years:

Wonder Woman’s striding through the streets of Washington, the capitol in the background. Unlike the cover forty years ago, when the women on the street were dwarfed by the Amazon striding above them, Wonder Woman appears to be following a group of multi-racial young feminists carrying signs about the War on Women and voting in 2012. The movement’s survived into the next generation, and its constituency is broader than it was back then. But its theater of operations has gotten smaller: institutional feminism is part of the patchwork of the left, but nobody’s claiming that feminism will get us out of Afghanistan. Part of it, I think, is that in those forty years, feminists have had to spend a lot of time consolidating and defending our early gains, instead of pursuing new goals. It’s hard to to move into new arenas when we’re still trying to hold on, for example, the right to choose.

Via Poynter:

For the first time in its 103-year-history, Condé Nast has named a black editor to head one of its magazines.

Keija Minor is now editor-in-chief of Brides, the world’s largest weddings magazine. She succeeds Anne Fulenwider who left Brides earlier this month to become editor-in-chief of Marie Claire. Minor had been executive editor of Brides since November 2011, and was acting editor-in-chief after Fulenwider left. Before Brides, Minor was editor-in-chief of Uptown Magazine, a luxury title targeting African Americans. She was also editor-in-chief of Gotham.

In addition to Brides, Condé Nast publishes GQ, Vanity Fair, Wired, and Vogue among other titles. In its press release, Condé Nast praised Minor as being a gifted editor but it did not tout the fact that she is the first African American to helm one of its publications. Other news organizations did.

Minor’s promotion is exciting news, and not just because it represents a milestone for Condé Nast, or because if you want to get more women and people of color in an industry, it’s nice to be able to point to someone as proof they might be able to ascend to the same heights as white people and men. As a University of Nevada at Las Vegas study pointed out six years ago, African-American women are almost invisible in bridal magazines, from the advertisements to the covers. It’s a form of erasure that suggests that the bridal industry doesn’t see black women as potential customers, an assumption with a whole host of other implications about African-American women and marriage. Hopefully, Minor can play some role in correcting that imbalance, her role a reminder that African-American women don’t just have weddings, they can help shape the ideal of them.

Fuera de Serie, a Spanish magazine, has created an international uproar with its latest cover, in which it photoshops First Lady Michelle Obama into a French painting, and ends up portraying her as a slave woman, with her right breast exposed. If the cover had been published in America, it’s easy to imagine the quarters from which it might have come, and what the image would have been intended to convey. But the full context is much more complicated—and much more revealing—than that.

I don’t think the intention of the cover is to be racist, or to denigrate Mrs. Obama in any way. In the editor’s note introducing the issue in which the story appears, Fuera de Serie explains, roughly translated, that the author, “in order to understand the manner in which Michelle has seduced the American people, the journalist Pablo Scarpellini details the secrets of the woman who has not only conquered the heart of Barack Obama.” The title is “Michelle: Granddaughter of a Slave, Lady of America,” which suggests her as a powerful symbol of the American experience, though it’s off by a couple of generations. The article itself may turn out to be less positive, but that kind of language doesn’t indicate a desire to sell a vision of Michelle Obama as a slave. Marie-Guillemine Benoist, who painted the work Obama is photoshopped into as a commemoration of the French abolition of slavery, was explicitly a feminist, and her work, when it was first exhibited, was interpreted as humanist.

But while the generations between her enslaved ancestors and Michelle Obama may seem distant to the editors of Fuera de Serie, but I’d venture to guess that it is a nearer shadow to Michelle Obama herself, and to many, many Americans. The state of African-Americans is such that the prospect of being harassed or killed by representatives of the state, of facing major challenges to economic self-determination, is not something that seems so broadly outlandish that it can be invoked without conjuring up the specter of real and ongoing harm. This image of Michelle Obama could only be liberating in a world where there aren’t a lot of people who are vocal about their desire to put the first black First Lady back into what they believe to be her place. History’s ghosts are powerful. Those who dare summon them should be clear about what they want, and be prepared for the consequences.

The good folks at Eater have chronicled all of the different ways in which the stock photo of a woman either eating or being fed asparagus (the hands could be her own) that Newsweek put on its cover to illustrate its 101 Best Places to Eat in the World has been used by other publications, and handily illustrates the latest one:

The cover’s been called food porn, which is absolutely true. But more to the point, it’s not actually much of an illustration of the story itself. The asparagus look just fine, but they also don’t appear to be cooked, which is a little odd since the story is about restaurants. And orgasm is one of the most-used and least creative metaphors for the experience of eating really fabulous food.

It might have been hard to choose between restaurants, chefs, and dishes, and it would have been more expensive to do a shoot at one of the restaurants in the piece than to use a stock photograph. Given Newsweek’s financial woes—Barry Diller’s IAC took sole control of the company, and he has said he plans to invest less in the magazine, cost considerations might have been reasonable. But even under those circumstances, there are a lot of photos in the Getty library and others, probably even of some of the people, places and things mentioned in the cover story. Newsweek could have gone less sexy and more specific, but that might mean trying to sell a cover package on its actual merits.