Five Ways Ben Affleck Interviews Nicholas Kristof and Sheryl WuDunn!

Tom Scocca: OK, so my September copy of Glamour arrived the other day.

Choire Sicha: You know what I’m going to ask you, right?

Tom Scocca: Are you going to ask me why I get Glamour magazine?

Choire Sicha: Okay yes that!

Tom Scocca: According to the sheet of paper enclosed with a previous copy, I am getting Glamour magazine to make up for the cancellation of my Domino subscription. This is a fine explanation except for the fact that I never had a subscription to Domino.

Choire Sicha: What’s that, you ask? What is Domino editor Deborah Needleman up to? “HomeGoods is making it easy and fun to discover your home design personality with the newly launched HomeGoods StyleScope. Created by founding editor-in-chief of Domino Magazine, Deborah Needleman, this unique personalized look into individual style provides users with a home decor style type and helpful, easy to follow design tips.”

Tom Scocca: Tip No. 1: eliminate clutter. Such as inexplicable stray magazines.

Choire Sicha: That is some good advice. So. Your substitute subscription comes, a substitute for a magazine you never subscribed to.

Tom Scocca: And at an address that not even my college alumni magazine has found yet. I was wondering if someone had gotten me a prank subscription to Domino, but that’s not the Conde title someone would get me as a prank.

Choire Sicha: Cookie would be, of course. (I’ve considered it!)

Tom Scocca: I know you have, you swine. That’s not funny. So, gosh, this thing REEKS.

Choire Sicha: Of lady-cologne?

Tom Scocca: Quite. Oh, wait, isn’t September the issue that’s supposed to be ostentatiously huge?

Choire Sicha: It is! For instance, my September Vanity Fair came yesterday, and it was not that small actually.

Tom Scocca: I did not realize this was the September issue till I looked at the spine. It is 296 pages. And it is very confusing. I brought this up in the first place because I wanted to talk about an article in it. But the article is not in the table of contents! Not on the first table of pre-contents, the “Cover Reads,” in which the cover lines get page numbers appended to them (“5 DINNERS ABSOLUTELY ANYONE CAN COOK page 279”; “25 NAKED TRUTHS ABOUT GUYS’ BODIES page 264 [don’t miss the body map on page 267!]”).

Tom Scocca: Not on the first page of the actual contents pages: “268 Finally! Money advice just for young women.” Not on the second page of contents: “258 DIANE KRUGER SHOWS OFF FALL’S CHICEST CONFIDENCE CLOTHES.”

Choire Sicha: Oooh, “Confidence Clothes”! They invented something

Tom Scocca: I always get Diane and Barbara Kruger mixed up.

Choire Sicha: Diane Kruger is the poor man’s Heidi Klum.

Tom Scocca: Who is the rich man’s Heidi Klum?

Choire Sicha: Well it used to be Milla Jovovich but not for some time.

Tom Scocca: Anyway, finally, on the second page of the Editor’s Note (which is actually an Editor’s Listicle and is printed eye-ache-inducingly out of register), down at the very bottom inside corner, inside sideways red brackets, there is a little set of contributors’ pictures, including the one I was looking for!

Tom Scocca: “BEN AFFLECK The star interviewed Nicholas Kristof and wife Sheryl WuDunn about their new book on women’s rights worldwide (page 211). Says Affleck, ‘I really wanted to be a part of this — it’s important.’”

Choire Sicha: WHAT.

Tom Scocca: We could have an all-day seminar on the use here of the phrase “wife Sheryl WuDunn.”

Choire Sicha: You mean as opposed to “Pulitzer Prize-winning Goldman Sachs advisor”?

Tom Scocca: Well, she did share the Pulitzer with husband Nicholas Kristof.

Choire Sicha: It all starts to sound better if you replace “wife” with “breadwinner.” Though you know, she was only a VP.

Tom Scocca: Still, that Christmas bonus would buy a lot of Cambodian child prostitutes out of bondage.

Choire Sicha: Well Cambodian child prostitutes are cheap.

Tom Scocca: [Leaves punchline lying on table, untouched, because thinking about serious women’s issues while contemplating Glamour’s handling of same makes that particular strain of parody and irony seem inadequate and distasteful.]

Choire Sicha: [Sits quietly for a while.]

Tom Scocca: But anyway, you know, as the Q&A — which; is not terrible — says, sometimes women are the ones who oppress women the most. “There’s a perception that men are the culprits of the terrible things done to women. Often they are, but there is no worse oppressor to women and girls in much of the world than the mother-in-law.” That’s Kristof speaking.

Choire Sicha: UM? REALLY?

Tom Scocca: I suppose it’s in how you measure it. “Mother-in-law” being a position one occupies for a particular span of time within one’s greater arc of social status and personal experience.

Choire Sicha: !!

Tom Scocca: So the mothers-in-law may be the more active day-to-day oppressors — though the men still get to do the high-impact oppressions such as rape or acid-burn mutilation — but before they were mothers-in-law, they were oppressed little girls and young brides themselves. So the business of women oppressing women is a wee bit more complicated, maybe, than the Glamour Q&A; makes it out to be.

Choire Sicha: Who could imagine!

Tom Scocca: Anyway, they gave it a full page, even if they forgot to promote it in the table of contents or on the cover. What was the point of getting a celebrity to do it if you’re not going to promote the celebrity? I guess it speaks to the genuine seriousness of Ben Affleck’s interest in world issues!

Choire Sicha: Glamour didn’t do it as a magazine-selling stunt. True!

Tom Scocca: I wonder if he got paid by the word. Maybe he pitched them, even.

Choire Sicha: I imagine the fee was waived! But then I am imagining. Here’s what I want to know. Was it any good?

Tom Scocca: It was non-incompetent. It may be an ideal arrangement for journalists with a book to promote, to have a non-journalist do the interview. “BEN AFFLECK: I’m the amateur here, so I’ll try not to embarrass myself doing this interview. Let me start by asking: What was the impetus for writing your new book, Half the Sky?”

Choire Sicha: Oh wow.

Tom Scocca: So you know, Ginger leads and Fred follows, really. It’s better than giving a journalist a cameo in a movie.

Choire Sicha: YEAH YOU KNOW WHAT? Amanda Hesser SUCKED in Julie and Julia.

Tom Scocca: Who is Amanda Hesser? It’s vaguely familiar. Was she a restaurant publicist?

Choire Sicha: Oh you kidder. Says someone at Gawker, some time ago: “Former New York Times editor Amanda Hesser is starting a new company called Seawinkle, which may or may not be named after an obscure character from the My Little Pony universe.”

Tom Scocca: Former New York Times editor? That seems imprecise.

Choire Sicha: I just hit a Hesser Dead End.

Tom Scocca: What you need is a recipe! “The frenulum, the bit of tissue on the underside that connects the head and the shaft, is THE most sensitive spot on many guys’ bodies.” Oh, wait, wrong article. So confusing, the way this magazine is set up.

Choire Sicha: Do women not really know that factoid, which in many ways isn’t really true?

Tom Scocca: That’s the definition of a factoid! “The spots behind the knees and elbows tend to be very sensitive.” Is this a guide to sexing or to tickling? Anyway, flipping forward a few pages! “Hey, Glamour Readers! Julia Child Is Making You Dinner.” Or, really, it’s “recipes from the legendary chef and the stars of this month’s gutsy girl tribute movie JULIE & JULIA.”

Choire Sicha: Is that false advertising??? I mean, really, there is no dinner?

Tom Scocca: There is not really a dinner, no, not in the sense of food actually existing. Nor is Julia Child really involved, since she is dead (and perhaps also made different sorts of choices, when alive, about to what kinds of projects she would lend her name).

Choire Sicha: Magazines!

Tom Scocca: Would it be too cynical for me to wonder whether the “stars” who are putting forward their food advice are in fact merely putting their own name-stamps on the work of publicists and consultants? Meryl Streep (“Meryl Streep”?) says she cooks chicken according to Julia Child’s recipe, then stretches the leftovers out for a week, turning them into chicken salad, risotto, curry, and soup.

Tom Scocca: I suppose that’s possible, although since the original recipe starts with one three-pound chicken, I’m not sure how the carcass is still yielding anything to eat by Friday. But Julia / Meryl as “Julia” / “Meryl” fills a two-page spread, plus you have to go online to see her recipes for the leftovers. While “Julie” / Amy Adams / “Amy Adams” gets only one page, for her “no fail” guacamole.

Choire Sicha: How does guacamole ever “fail”???

Tom Scocca: And she doesn’t supply any first-person text to go with it. This all amounts to a pretty deftly coded critique of the entire Julie & Julia phenomenon, doesn’t it? And then Nora Ephron gets a page to explain “How to Whip Up Dinner in Only 10 Minutes.” (Pasta with parsley, garlic, and bread crumbs.)

Choire Sicha: If she ever serves me that, I’m walking out.

Tom Scocca: It might be good. It probably is. But it’s not 10 minutes! The spaghetti I use takes 9 to 10 minutes to cook. In boiling water. Which has to be brought to a boil.

Choire Sicha: Well you don’t have Nora Ephron’s stove. With the RIGHT stove you can bring water to a boil in 2 minutes.

Tom Scocca: Perhaps she has a boiling-water tap.

Choire Sicha: Yes. From inside her. She is like Yellowstone.

Tom Scocca: Now I feel bad about YOUR neck.

Choire Sicha: Me too. It’s hungry. But you know I love some Nora Ephron. And her $25 mil gross.

Tom Scocca: But there is no recipe from Amanda Hesser! I thought you said she was in this movie.

Choire Sicha: She plays herself, just like she always has.

Tom Scocca: Sometimes she plays editors.

Choire Sicha: So. Well. What we’re talking about is…. magazines as… access? Julia Child comes in your kitchen and helps you please a frenum.

Tom Scocca: For an entire workweek. With Jessica Simpson. Speaking of leftovers. Does her face move magazine covers?

Choire Sicha: In 2009???? Couldn’t possibly.

Tom Scocca: The Washington Post Style section this week time-traveled forward to 2009 from the old days when it used to try to do readings of the popular culture, and it ran a newspaper essay about people being “famesque,” aka being fixed in the public mind without having done anything of interest to the public mind, with Sienna Miller as the lead, Jessica Simpson as the definitive example, and Ashton Kutcher as the conclusive example. Rule of three and all.

Choire Sicha: Well. Hmm. Jessica Simpson is at the top of a multimillion dollar business empire. (Yes, still.) So actually is Ashton Kutcher! Him and his 3.1 million Twitter followers. But Sienna Miller is just slutty noise in the TMZ signal.

Tom Scocca: These business empires are poorly understood, aren’t they?

Choire Sicha: Yes! Totally!

Tom Scocca: It all goes back to the Olsen twins. They created this incredible business almost entirely outside the realm of entertainment gossip, discussion, or news. Then they became celebrities — like dazed, body-image-problematic, explicitly objectified debutantes.

Choire Sicha: Yes. While getting rich at Wal-Mart.

Tom Scocca: No, AFTER getting rich at Wal-Mart. First they were sitcom-famous, then they were semi-invisible and incredibly lucrative on the straight-to-DVD market, and only after that did they go Famous. Via I believe a gross and molest-y Rolling Stone cover.

Choire Sicha: Also the infamous Age of Majority Countdown Clock.

Tom Scocca: Who was running that? The whole thing was a strange and confusing act of publicity-as-reality. The Olsens had never done anything that the adult human audience for popular culture had any reason at all to care about.

Choire Sicha: It was really impressive, in retrospect!

Tom Scocca: And creepy. Because they certainly weren’t better-looking or sexier or more charming than the average young actress. They were cyphers as far as persona went. They were just sold as the idea of Barely Legal. And as Twins, another pornographic trope. Did you know that in their hidden-in-plain-sight years, they had made a version of The Parent Trap, or a version of the source story? I learned this after we saw the Lindsay Lohan version on TV the other day.

Tom Scocca: That movie is amazing, the Lohan one. It has horrifying retroactive subtext. Nothing quite like seeing a (well-acted) scene of parental love and mother-daughter reconciliation between a young Lindsay Lohan, making her film debut, and Natasha Richardson.

Tom Scocca: Oh, jeez, thanks, Wikipedia: “Lindsay Lohan had to have her ears pierced especially for her role in this film.” That is one of the saddest sentences I have read in a long time.

Choire Sicha: Oh that is terribly sad!

Tom Scocca: “AFFLECK: One of the things in your book that I find difficult to understand is the extent to which women perpetrate violence against other women. Why aren’t women more protective of one another?”
 “….WUDUNN: It’s frustrating to be looking in and to say, ‘How come they don’t get it?’ But it’s the rules of their culture.”

Choire Sicha: Oh! Oh dear.

Tom Scocca: