Far be it from me to praise, in general, Maxim’s Hot 100 list, which in its 2013 edition, as always, is overwhelmingly white, overwhelmingly extremely young, and overwhelmingly homogenous in the body shapes of the women it celebrates. Not to mention that there’s something exceptionally depressing about the declaration of pop singer Miley Cyrus, this year’s holder of the number one slot that, “It’s every woman’s fantasy to be told she’s No.1 on Maxim’s Hot 100! So crazy!”

But the inclusions of two women on this year’s Hot 100, and the reactions they’ve provoked, are revealing, both of ways that Maxim might want to expand its brand, and of the limits its placed on itself by teaching men to see women in certain and very specific ways. First, there’s the inclusion of Kamala Harris, the California Attorney General who Maxim manages to compliment in a way that’s actually less condescending than President Obama’s remark that Harris was “the best-looking attorney general in the country,” a comment that foregrounded her looks rather than her expertise. “The current Attorney General of California cracks down on hate and financial crime like a bawss and created the Environmental Justice Unit in San Francisco,” Maxim wrote, next to a portrait of Harris in a smart pantsuit. “She makes following the law super sexy!” Then, there’s Hoda Kotb, the anchor who runs a tipsy, entertaining morning segment on Today, of whom Maxim wrote: “Ms. Kotb brightens our everyday and occasionally puts up with our fearless leader, Dan Bova, on Today. We’ll always want a morning cocktail with the Egyptian goddess!”

It’s all well and good to see Maxim acknowledging some older women, and writing up nominations that acknowledge that a woman’s expertise and her personality, rather than simply her inert body, can contribute to making her extraordinarily attractive. But apparently, not all of Maxim’s readers are on board for a more expansive definition of beauty. Breitbart columnist Ben Shapiro, in the course of making the legitimate complaint that the inclusion of Kotb and Harris tilts the list left—someone like the substantive Fox News anchor Megyn Kelly, who’s a rising star in the larger Fox organization, might have been a good choice—defaulted to juvenile complaints about their looks.

“As if Maxim’s Hot 100 wasn’t already bizarre enough this year – Miley Cyrus at #1? Really, Maxim? – clocking in at #79 is Hoda Kotb of the Today Show (she is 48 years old) and at #54 is Kamala Harris, attorney general of the state of California and President Obama favorite. Maxim ranks Kotb above Alice Eve (#84, a former Maxim cover girl) and Rebecca Mader (LOST), among others,” Shapiro wrote. “As for Harris, she absurdly ranks above Rachel McAdams (The Notebook, #55), Emmy Rossum (Phantom of the Opera, #56), Eva Mendes (#57), and Brooklyn Decker (#59).”

As much as its ludicrous to watch Shapiro bluster as if there’s some sort of objective, codified standard for women’s looks that Maxim has failed to uphold, his complaints actually make a valid point about the world that Maxim and its fellow American lad-mag derivations have wrought. Kotb and Harris do genuinely stand out on the Hot 100 list because the roster of women is otherwise so consistent. If you spend years teaching your readers that to be attractive, a woman has to fall within a very narrow range of waist-to-hip ratios, pick from a very small selection of hairstyles that have been deemed acceptable in advance, and present herself in a range of ways that suggest that her primary characteristic is sexual availability, of course some of them are going to be surprised when you tell them that everything they’ve learned over the years is incomplete. I’d never venture to suggest that giving over 2 percent of the Hot 100 to different kinds of women indicates that Maxim is on some sort of substantial maturity kick. But if the magazine were to decide it wants to serve readers’ brains as well as their salivary glands, Maxim might need to give them, and itself, a rather gentle learning curve.

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.

Buzz Bissinger’s long, strange chronicle of his shopping addiction, particularly to Gucci, which was published yesterday in GQ makes the case for many things, including higher taxes on anyone who can afford to blow $638,412.97 on luxury clothes, mostly from Gucci, over a period of three years, and gag orders to keep parents from hopelessly embarrassing their children. But in between Bissinger’s tossed-off mentions of the medication he’s taking to treat bipolar disorder, his meandering and inconclusive discussions of his evolving sexuality (some of which seems shockingly at the expense of his wife), and his cluelessness about the extent to which his Gucci personal shopper must be having a high old time taking him for a very expensive ride, there’s a kernel of an interesting idea, particularly appearing in a magazine that does a lot to set the standards for men’s fashion.

Bissinger writes:

Some of the clothing is men’s. Some is women’s. I make no distinction. Men’s fashion is catching up, with high-end retailers such as Gucci and Burberry and Versace finally honoring us. But women’s fashion is still infinitely more interesting and has an unfair monopoly on feeling sexy, and if the clothing you wear makes you feel the way you want to feel, liberated and alive, then fucking wear it. The opposite, to repress yourself as I did for the first fifty-five years of my life, is the worst price of all to pay. The United States is a country that has raged against enlightenment since 1776; puritanism, the guiding lantern, has cast its withering judgment on anything outside the narrow societal mainstream. Think it’s easy to be different in America? Try something as benign as wearing stretch leather leggings or knee-high boots if you are a man.

Whether stretch leather leggings look good on Bissinger is one question. But the other, more relevant one, is how does men’s fashion relate to men’s bodies and men’s sense of their own sexual self-presentation? And how will men’s fashion and male body image issues change, particularly as men start to have an experience that’s been most squarely the provenance of women: being objectified?

There’s something fitting about the fact that Bissinger’s screed dropped the same day as these new Gillette spots which, in the interest of getting men to buy new shaving products, is encouraging men to start acting rather like women. Specifically, the company wants men to start worrying about how much of their body hair they can retain and still be sexually attractive to women like Kate Upton, who apparently doesn’t like back hair, New Girl’s Hannah Simone, who likes a smooth stomach, and a third lady who wants her gentleman friends to go completely bare:

This is a natural expansion of Gillette’s business, of course. Once you’ve got women removing as much hair as is humanely possible from their bodies, you’ve got to start targeting other people, and other body parts if you want to crete new markets.

These business interests have real consequences, of course. Hair removal is one thing—razor knicks and skin irritation aside, it’s not as if there are long-term health consequences to shaving your legs or chest, or a lot of Olympic swimmers would be in a fair bit of trouble. But what about steroids, or heavy lifting regimens among teenage boys who are still growing? Men’s sizing for things like suits is more nuanced than sizing for say, women’s dresses, but how will more off-the-rack sizing, and popular cuts of clothing, shift to accomodate new expectations of male body size?

Body image expectations and grooming requirements have long been more stringent for women than for men, but women and women’s fashion have responded with a great deal of innovation, and flair, and fun. Men seem to be at an earlier point in this cycle, when the standards are rising, but fashion norms haven’t yet broadened as dramatically as they are for women. Someone other than Buzz Bissinger will come up with something more insightful to say about what it means for men to get pulled more aggressively into an alternately enamored and antagonistic relationship with fashion and their bodies—and what it means for that relationship to expand to include men who aren’t worried about trying to fit into tight-fitting made-to-measure Italian suiting. But Bissinger is not wrong to argue that there’s powerful, unexplored territory out there when it comes to men, fashion, and the presentation of their sexuality. He’s just missing the fact that it’s not just his personal style, but powerful business interests, that are going to push that discussion forward—and in ways that he and other men might find as difficult and uncomfortable as women have for years.

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.

This post discusses plot points from the April 20 episode of The Americans.

“None of the agencies are working to share the information,” Phillip in his guise as Clark tells Martha in last night’s episode of The Americans. “Each one wants to be the hero.” His weary description of bureaucratic breakdown and self-interest is a perfect framework for the episode. Interagency communications troubles have created the problem that Elizabeth and Phillip have to solve tonight, stopping a KGB agent who isn’t available to have his orders countermanded. Stan and Nina’s relationship is first enabled by the needs of one bureaucracy, the Federal Bureau of Investigation, and then complicated by the workings of another, the Rezedentia. And Elizabeth and Phillip, after a thawing in their marital Cold War, are forced to reckon with the extent to which their relationship is a bureaucratic arrangement rather than an organic, living thing—and to confront the possibility that they may need to engage the legal bureaucracy to dissolve their union.

“We have to stop an assassin,” Elizabeth says when she explains their assignment. “They need to straighten things out at the Center. Ordering hits, then countermanding them?” Phillip asks her in the understatement of the year. Part of his reaction is to the Center’s apparent incompetence—how do you hire an assassin and not retain the ability to stay in touch with that person? And part of it is that the organization is acting emotionally rather than rationally, making one decision and then changing its mind. It’s hard to devote your life to fulfilling the missions you’re given if they can alter at a moment’s notice, forcing you to be as dedicated to one goal at one moment as you were to its antithesis a moment before.

And the KGB’s display of incompetence is juxtaposed with the FBI’s reaction after three of its agents are murdered by the explosives expert Phillip and Elizabeth could shoot, but not neutralize, given his penchant for time bombs. Stan and his colleagues are personally shattered by the news, and how could they not be? Working for a large bureaucracy doesn’t actually strip the component employees of that organization of their humanity or capacity to react. But they don’t allow their feelings to dramatically shift their mission or operational playbook. You don’t go to war over the loss of three men, however badly you might feel about their deaths in your personal capacity as a functional human. If the Soviet Union and the United States are locked together by the idea of Mutually Assured Destruction, a concept that’s more promise than threat, the United States just demonstrated a command and control that could help it avoid self-destruction.
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For the last three years Vida, a non-profit dedicated to women in literature and associated literary arts like poetry, has published a census that tracks the number of women writing for significant literary publications like the Boston Review, Harper’s, and the New Republic, the number of women writing reviews, and the number of women whose work is reviewed by those publications. The purpose of those numbers is simple: to expose how significant the byline gap between male and female reviewers is, and to make clear the differing levels of attention that literary work by men and women receive by the publications where a good review can make a significant difference in an author’s reputation or sales. But the hope is more ambitious: that by forcing editors to see the results of their commissions and subject selections in the aggregate, they’ll change their practices.

But when the third set of results was published yesterday, the news was discouraging. In 2012, the Boston Review, Harper’s Magazine, The New Republic, The Atlantic, The New Yorker, and The Times Literary Supplement all published reviews by fewer women than they had in 2009. Of the publications that published more women in 2012 than in 2009, Granta, The New York Review Of Books, and The New York Times Book Review, published fewer women in 2012 than they had in 2011. Gains were followed by reversals, proof that gains were ephemeral rather than systemic, more likely the result of a random fluctuation than a renewed commitment to bring a diversity of ideas in the door by diversifying the authors who would offer them up.

The numbers invite some discouraging potential conclusions. Is listing numbers of women authors published and reviewed—or the number of women writing and directing and producing episodes of television and movies—a pointless enterprise because the people who run literary magazines and studios and television networks are unshameable? “Three years is enough time to create change, even if it’s a little change. I’m tired of conversations. What else is there to say? Editors don’t give enough of a damn to change the status quo,” wrote the fiction writer Roxanne Gay. “There’s nothing to really say at this point. The gender (and racial) inequity exists. It is stark. Counting is useful for reminding us.” When editors like the New Yorker’s David Remnick, who wrote the Forward’s Elissa Strauss “You are right. It’s certainly been a concern for a long time among the editors here, but we’ve got to do better — it’s as simple and as stark as that,” do they not actually mean it? Or do they not know where to look for women to commission? Because if the latter, I’m sure the Collected Wisdom Of The Internet could drum up some suggestions.

My guess would be that the problem is less malign, but more insidious. I’d be willing to bet that every editor of every publication on this list is, in theory at least, committed to the principals of gender equity. But I’d also be comfortable laying money on the idea that they’re equally convinced that their subconscious biases, reliance on familiar authors, and processes to sort submissions and identify new contributors are sound and don’t in any way work to produce byline inequality. They’re probably uncomfortable with the idea of quotas and target numbers, in part because they want to have faith in their own processes. In other words, they can acknowledge a problem without thinking that it’s their problem. And making that connection is what’s important.

I don’t think Vida should stop its count any more than I think Martha Lautzen should stop measuring how many women are making film and television. And I certainly plan to keep writing about those numbers, if only so any time someone is upset about one person or another getting or not getting an opportunity they can say they didn’t know there was a larger context at work here. But for those numbers to break through to the people who have the power to change them, we apparently need something more than those figures. It may not take a Ladies Home Journal-style sit-in, but maybe we could at least start with some specific asks for editors. Do we want parity by a set date? A goal of a certain percentage change per year? I’m open to all suggestions. Because three years of stagnation is a sign that we need different tactics.

GQ has named Beyoncé Knowles the sexiest woman of the millenium, an assessment with which I have no quibble. But what’s most interesting about the resulting profile of her, written by Amy Wallace, and the interview for which took place on the condition that Wallace consent that it be recorded by Knowles in an inversion of the normal agreements between source and subject, is that it’s all about Beyonce’s experience of being watched, often by herself. There are stories of Beyonce watching DVDs of every performance she’s ever made. There’s mention of the autobiographical documentary she’s making for HBO. And then there’s the intense, almost unnerving, archiving Knowles appears to be doing of even her most private life:

Anytime she wants to remind herself of all that work—or almost anything else that’s ever happened in her life—all she has to do is walk down the hall. There, across from the narrow conference room in which you are interviewing her, is another long, narrow room that contains the official Beyoncé archive, a temperature-controlled digital-storage facility that contains virtually every existing photograph of her, starting with the very first frames taken of Destiny’s Child, the ’90s girl group she once fronted; every interview she’s ever done; every video of every show she’s ever performed; every diary entry she’s ever recorded while looking into the unblinking eye of her laptop.

“Stop pretending that I have it all together,” she tells herself in a particularly revealing video clip, looking straight into the camera. “If I’m scared, be scared, allow it, release it, move on. I think I need to go listen to ‘Make Love to Me’ and make love to my husband.”

Beyoncé’s inner sanctum also contains thousands of hours of private footage, compiled by a “visual director” Beyoncé employs who has shot practically her every waking moment, up to sixteen hours a day, since 2005. In this footage, Beyoncé wears her hair up, down, with bangs, and without. In full makeup and makeup-free, she can be found shaking her famous ass onstage, lounging in her dressing room, singing Coldplay’s “Yellow” to Jay-Z over an intimate dinner, and rolling over sleepy-eyed in bed. This digital database, modeled loosely on NBC’s library, is a work in progress—the labeling, date-stamping, and cross-referencing has been under way for two years, and it’ll be several months before that process is complete. But already, blinking lights signal that the product that is Beyoncé is safe and sound and ready to be summoned— and monetized—at the push of a button.

Given how invasive paparazzi already are, I can’t imagine inviting more documentation into, say, dinner with a spouse or boyfriend. But I wish the profile had gone longer on this point. Because there’s something fascinating about a woman responding to the relentless commodification of her life by taking very direct control of the process. If you have an archive of every commercial photograph ever taken of you, you’re not going to be surprised when something surfaces. If you have better footage of yourself than anyone could ever put on the market, you have enormous control of what your final image is. And if you’re going to be nitpicked to death, becoming your own most careful critic and curating your image is a way to satisfy yourself, rather than satisfying someone else, even if the standards you’re striving to meet remain enormously high. I’m not sure I could live up to the standards Beyoncé sets for herself, and I wonder if they represent a capitulation to some really horrible cultural norms. But I admire her discipline.

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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There are a lot of weird things about this Entertainment Weekly list of actors who have had two or more signature roles on television. It treats a number of minor roles like they’re iconic, like Lisa Kudrow’s turn on her one-season-and-cancelled post-Friends show The Comeback. It doesn’t give equal weight to co-stars on shows who have gone on to do equally impressive work: why should Married With Children‘s Ed O’Neill make the list for Modern Family, but not his TV wife Katey Sagal for Sons of Anarchy? And strangest of all, it’s chock-full of white people. Apparently, there isn’t a single actor of color who’s had two defining roles on television. To give Entertainment Weekly a hand, here are ten actors of color who easily could have earned a spot on this list—who I came up with off the top of my head.

1. Bill Cosby: This is the most obvious, egregious omission. Both shows may bear his name and be knit together by Cosby’s iconic status. But he absolutely deserves separate credit for his work as Cliff Huxtable, Hilton Lucas, Chet Kinkaid, and his work on the Electric Company alone. Cosby didn’t just create great roles for himself—he put his shoulder to the borders of characters available to African-American actors on television and pushed, hard.

2. Andre Braugher: This omission is just as embarrassing. Even if you left out his role as nuclear sub Captain Marcus Chaplin on ABC’s Last Resort, which is still trying to find its place in the ratings, there’s Braugher’s turn as natty, lone-wolf detective Frank Pembleton on Homicide, belittled car dealer Owen Thoreau, Jr. on Men of a Certain Age, and Detective Marcellus Washington on Hack.

3. CCH Pounder: Pounder’s a tremendous actress who plays one of the best female characters of the Golden Age of television, the constantly and inexplicably overlooked Claudette Wyms on The Shield, where she got to be the rare person, much less woman of color, who brings justice to a white anti-hero. And while genre television never gets the credit she deserves, she’s wonderful and enigmatic as Mrs. Frederic, the caretaker of the magical Warehouse 13 in the SyFy show of the same name.

4. Lance Reddick: I could write a whole side rant on the under-appreciation and underemployment of actors from The Wire (when, oh when, will Michael B. Jordan be the absolutely gigantic star of screens of all sizes he deserves to be). But at least Reddick has consistently found work, whether he’s playing supremely menacing in Lost, or now as the head of the titular division on Fringe, a role that’s let him be alternately work-obsessed and movingly self-sacrificing.

5. Margaret Cho: Cho’s career has been erratic. But All-American Girl, which she created, was an important exercise in moving the default for young women on television away from white, and in illustrating the limitations of what American network television is willing to accept on its airwaves. And while women’s television, like genre fiction, tends to get dismissed as unserious, as legal assistant Teri on Drop Dead Diva, Cho gets to have a sexual appetite, to be hypercompetent, and all without being stripped of her Asianness.

6. Rockmond Dunbar: Before Parenthood came on the air, Soul Food, Showtime’s adaptation of the movie of the same name, was one of the best dramas on television that had confidence in its characters to be interesting simply for who they were. As Kenny Chadway, watching a man try to make a small business pay has never been so fascinating in its details. Now, as Sheriff Eli Washington in Sons of Anarchy, it’s fascinating watching him try to impose order on the show’s increasing violent, dissolute band of white bikers. And this isn’t even to mention his work on Prison Break.

7. Lucy Liu: It’s unfortunate that Liu, a warm, versatile actress got stuck playing a Dragon Lady stereotype on Ally McBeal. But it’s been awfully fun to see her play with that image, first as a cop on Southland, and now as the rare woman to get to embody the Watson archetype on CBS’s Sherlock Holmes drama Elementary. The folks who have to put their dignity in hock to open up space for other folks to follow should get to reap the benefits sometimes, too.

8. Dennis Haysbert: Is it really so easy to forget the war hero he played on The Unit? Or the president on 24?

9. Grace Park: As Sharon Valerii in Battlestar Galactica, Park had one of the hardest and most interesting roles in that series—how to play someone who felt, deeply, that she was human, but was forced to reckon with the reality of her identity as a sophisticated robot. She’s doing less interesting work in Hawaii 5-0, but as Kono Kalakaua, she’s one of a number of actors who are defining the relationships between cops we see on television as operating along something other than the black-white binary.

10. Harold Perrineau: There’s Oz, where he plays paralyzed inmate Augustus Hill, through whose eyes we see a notorious prison. Lost, where he plays Michael Dawson, a father trying to raise his son under hugely trying circumstances. The all-too-quickly-cancelled The Unusuals, where he played a hypochrodriac cop partnered with Adam Goldberg. And now he’s highly professional gangster Damon Pope on Sons of Anarchy.