A.J. Jacobs, THE GUINEA PIG DIARIES author: Mr. Media Interview

 

A.J. Jacobs

By BOB ANDELMAN

I’m a little worried about A.J. Jacobs.

His latest book, The Guinea Pig Diaries: My Life as an Experiment, takes the social tests he put himself through in previous books such as The Know-It-All—in which he read the entire encyclopedia—and The Year of Living Biblically—in which he followed every single rule of the Bible—and reveals a funny, introspective man who may be in danger of becoming a caricature of himself.

The Guinea Pig Diaries compiles some of his most brilliant experiments for Esquire magazine, where he is an editor at large, and adds in several new trials. It’s all good, meaty reading, but I’m starting to wince more than laugh at A.J.’s escapades.

Where is the line for a man who once outsourced his life to India but more recently spent a month being whipped—figuratively, I think—by his wife? And how much is too much information for readers about a writer’s personal life?

AUDIO EXCERPT: "I found this device on the Internet that I never knew existed: a chastity belt for men. If she's going to be in control of my life, it would be interesting if she could also control my private parts. So I did order one of those for her and I did strap it on for a couple days..."

Don’t get me wrong. I’m a big fan of A.J.’s work—and have been for a long time. If I could have another writer’s career, I’d admit to wanting his. But I do wonder, honestly, if it might not be time for him to point that giant, sensitive brain of his in a different creative direction for a while.

I’m curious to see if he agrees.


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Gloria Steinem Would Be So Proud (Esquire)

"Equal opportunities for everyone on the planet. If women are going to prostitute themselves, men should as well. There should be more male hookers. And eighteen-year-old women should demand satisfaction from their men."

-- Actress Radha Mitchell, explaining to Esquire's Matthew Belloni, what she means by saying she's a feminist. She is one of the magazine's "Women We Love" in the June 2008 issue.Her new movie is The Children of Huang Shi.

A.J. Jacobs, "The Year of Living Biblically" author: Mr. Media Interview, Pt. 1

A.J. Jacobs must have the best magazine job in America. As editor-at-large for Esquire, here are a few examples of recent stories appearing under his byline:

• “My Outsourced Life,” detailing his effort to send his writing assignments to India,

• “Googling A.J. Jacobs’s Brain,” about his proposed effort to catalogue his thoughts, dreams, and desires

“The Sexiest Woman Alive 2005” and “2006,” in which he spent five months teasing readers as to the identities of Jessica Biel and Scarlett Johansson. And, yes, he was required by law to spend time with each of them, passing off flirtation as research.

And then there was his equally painful interview with Eva Longoria of “Desperate Housewives” in which he described each of her body parts in languorous detail.

Oh, I could go on and on about the women in his professional life. They also include Mary Louise Parker and Rosario Dawson. But then we’d never get to the reason for this interview, which is to celebrate his hysterical, yet thought-provoking new book, The Year of Living Biblically.

You can LISTEN to this interview with A.J. JACOBS, author of THE YEAR OF LIVING BIBLICALLY and THE KNOW-IT-ALL, by clicking the BlogTalkRadio.com audio player above!


BOB ANDELMAN/Mr. MEDIA: I have to start by saying I think you’re a friggin’ genius. Not only do you have an inventive new book and a magazine publisher prompting it and promoting it online and in print, but you’ve also found ways within its own text to subtly plug your last book, The Know-It-All. At least -- I counted -- 13 times directly.

A.J. JACOBS: Really? Oh, wow, I didn’t realize I was that good.

ANDELMAN: Well, it’s easy. Anyone can figure it out. You actually have an index. There’s an index, and you can go through, and you can count. So directly or indirectly, thirteen plugs, and that, to me, as a guy who’s written a few books, I have to say, I think it’s as brilliant as Nick Tosches thanking himself in the acknowledgements to one of his books because, without him, his books wouldn’t have been possible.

JACOBS: That’s true. That’s absolutely true. Yeah, well, that’s nice. Maybe I should have a coupon for the first book in The Year of Living Biblically.

ANDELMAN: I think that’s the only thing that’s missing. I think it’s great. I think it’s brilliant. How did The Year of Living Biblically come about?

JACOBS: It came about because I grew up in an incredibly secular home. As I say in the book, I am Jewish but in the same way the Olive Garden is Italian. So not very Jewish at all. And I actually thought that religion was gonna wither away, and we’d all live in this sort of scientific world. But, of course, that didn’t happen, and so I became fascinated with was I missing something by not having a spiritual life? But was I missing something essential to being human like someone who’s never heard Beethoven? Or was half the world deluded? So I decided to dive in head first cause that’s what I like to do. So I dive in head first to try to understand the Bible, this most influential book in the world. And I thought the best way to do it would be try to actually get inside the minds of the ancient people and get in the sandals of my forefathers.




ANDELMAN: And you did this how?

JACOBS: Well, I read the Bible, and I compiled a list of every suggestion, every rule, every commandment in the Bible. And by the end, my list was 72 pages, over 700 rules. Everything from the Ten Commandments we all know, all the famous ones, no lying, no coveting, but it also had dozens, hundreds of obscure rules like don’t wear clothes with mixed fibers and don’t, well, stone adulterers, for instance. So I wanted to try to follow every single one of those. So just commit myself completely to this project. So that’s what I did.

ANDELMAN: Now, I’m definitely, I’m about as close to agnostic as you are, as you were at least. Moses had 613 rules that he brought down, didn’t he?

JACOBS: Right.

ANDELMAN: But you actually got over 700.

JACOBS: Well, I included sections of the Bible including the Proverbs, which have a lot to say about, for instance, laziness. So I couldn’t be lazy anymore. The Proverbs don’t like naps very much so it was unfortunate I couldn’t take naps all year. So I included other sections of the Bible in addition to the five books of Moses.

ANDELMAN: The thing that struck me reading was that this research must have affected a lot more people than just you. Particularly, your wife comes to mind.

JACOBS: My wife is a saint. That is true. I won’t deny it. Yeah, it was the most extreme makeover of my life. It affected every single part so the way I ate, the way I talked, the way I dressed, and the way I touched my wife. So she was very patient. I’m glad that we’re still married.

ANDELMAN: And you literally did change the way that you touched your wife. There were times where she was considered impure by the Bible.

JACOBS: That’s right.

ANDELMAN: Which meant not just not touching her, you couldn’t sit where she sat.

JACOBS: Right. There’s a section of the Bible, if you take it literally, that says you cannot sit where an impure woman has sat, which ruled out pretty much every chair, and in New York, you’ve got the subways, the buses. And my wife, as revenge, she didn’t like that rule so she sat on every chair in our apartment so I was reduced to doing a lot of standing.

ANDELMAN: And then you actually found a portable chair, right?

JACOBS: I did. I carried around a chair, a little pure chair for the subways.




ANDELMAN: Now, who else was affected by this project? People you work with, perhaps? Your son?

JACOBS: Yeah, people I work with. You mentioned Rosario Dawson. There was a little conflict between my work life where I work for Esquire, a men’s magazine. I like to think it’s a high-brow men’s magazine, but it’s still a men’s magazine. So interviewing Rosario Dawson while trying to obey the Bible’s rules about lusting, that was not an easy one. I had to do the interview without looking at her.

ANDELMAN: You were in the same room, though.

JACOBS: Oh, yeah. I just avoided eye contact.

ANDELMAN: Uh-huh. And how did Rosario feel about this?

JACOBS: Rosario was actually very understanding. I had a huge beard like this hedgehog on my face, and she actually said that, she was one of the few people who said she actually liked the beard.

ANDELMAN: Well, of course, at that point, wasn’t she just coming off working with Kevin Smith?

JACOBS: That’s right. Yeah. So she was used to it.

ANDELMAN: Were there other assignments that were affected by the beard and the whole practice?

JACOBS: Well, I did an assignment on the Bible for Esquire so that was one. But, yeah, it was the clash between the way we live now in the 21st century and the way they lived then. It’s all I see now. I was walking around Manhattan in a white robe and sandals carrying a staff. I didn’t have sheep with me most of the time.

ANDELMAN: Most of the time.

JACOBS: Most of the time. Well, I did go on a number of adventures because I wanted to immerse myself with people who live biblically or took the Bible literally in some way. So I did go to Israel, and I did spend the day shepherding sheep, which was one of the most, the greatest experiences of my book.

ANDELMAN: Now, there was also Uncle Gil.

JACOBS: Right. My family has an interesting religious background because most of us are very secular, but my ex-uncle, a man formerly married to my aunt, is probably the most religious person in the world. He’s been through every major religion. He was a born-again Christian. He was a Buddhist. He was a Hindu cult leader. And now he’s an Orthodox Jew in Jerusalem.

ANDELMAN: In any of that time, I kept wondering, did he do Amway?

JACOBS: I didn’t see that in his autobiography, but he’d be good.




ANDELMAN: It’s a really interesting book to read, partly because it’s funny, but it’s also very thought provoking, as I said earlier. Myself, I’ve always been much less of a religious person and more of a Ten Commandments guy. I always thought, if you needed guiding principles in life, the Ten Commandments seemed to boil down pretty well to the basics of being a good person.

JACOBS: Right.

ANDELMAN: But, I wondered, now that you’ve finished the book, what elements of your year continue with you?

JACOBS: Well, it’s interesting because the book did change me in a hundred different ways, big and small. There is humor in the book, I hope, but that’s only part of it. I really was fascinated with religion, and I wanted to see what, if anything, I was missing. So there are things that I found about religion that I’ve kept even after my year. I don’t stone adulterers anymore, but I…

ANDELMAN: Thank God.

JACOBS: Yeah, thank God. I definitely, the Bible gave me a sense of gratefulness because there’s a lot of talk about thanking in the Bible, which I think it’s really important to remember the hundred things that go right in a day instead of focusing on the three or four things that go wrong. So it really helped me in that. And one of the other lessons I learned is that by acting with almost a “fake it till you make it” approach because I was acting like a moral person. I was not coveting. I was not lying. I was trying not to gossip. And, if you do that, you slowly become a slightly better person. I’m not Angelina Jolie or Gandhi, but I feel that by committing yourself to acting, pretending that you’re a good person, you actually become a better person.

ANDELMAN: Now, have you had that confirmed by other people?

JACOBS: That I’m a better person?

ANDELMAN: Yeah.

JACOBS: Well, my wife thinks I’m a better person now that I shaved my beard.


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©2007 by Bob Andelman. All rights reserved.

A.J. Jacobs, "The Year of Living Biblically" author: Mr. Media Interview, Pt. 2

(Return to Part 1)

BOB ANDELMAN/Mr. MEDIA: What are you especially glad to be done with from that year?

A.J. JACOBS: Well, it was a very intense year so it was hard to, for instance, completely cut out lying, to be totally honest, all the time. It’s a radical life change. And I think it’s good not to. I think I learned that I should lie less. But there were times where it was just exhausting because I have a three-year-old kid, and you can’t tell him, “Uh, sorry, the TV’s broken”. You have to say, “No, you can’t watch TV because I don’t want you to,” and so there’s screaming, there’s crying, and he gets upset too.

ANDELMAN: I think at one point he wanted a bagel, and you tried to convince him it was an English muffin. No, your wife convinced him it was an English muffin, and you just couldn’t do that.

JACOBS: Right. He wanted a bagel. We didn’t have bagels. We only had an English muffin. So she wanted me to say, “Hey, here’s a bagel,” and give him the muffin, but I felt I had to tell him the truth. And it backfired in a massive way.



ANDELMAN: Has your year of living biblically changed the way that you will raise him?

JACOBS: It has. It has. One of the interesting things is the Bible talks a lot about how the God of the Bible has mercy, but also He has sternness. So I was a pushover dad. I was no backbone, say yes to everything. But I’m trying to be a little more like the God of the Bible where I have a balance between the mercy and the toughness.

ANDELMAN: I have to tell you that, of all the things in the book, the one that stopped me dead and made me scratch my head a little bit, I hope you laugh about this, but it was that your son could only watch TV while he was eating. That just really stuck with me.

JACOBS: You like that?

ANDELMAN: I thought that was interesting. It was the thing that we used to do. We used to let my daughter watch TV while she was eating, but then we noticed that eating was taking an hour to 90 minutes.

JACOBS: That is exactly the problem I have. I know. He turns it into like a five-course French meal.

ANDELMAN: I know that’s kind of off-topic, but that was the thing that really… I’ll remember that for a while.

JACOBS: I wish the Bible had more specific commands about television and when kids should watch it.

ANDELMAN: Since you mention that, you did keep working on your Powerbook, which I don’t recall seeing mentioned in any versions of the Bible or even the Torah.

JACOBS: Some of the time I actually tried to live like they lived 3,000, 2,000 years ago with the robe, or I wrote a lot by olive oil lamp. But, much of the time, I found if I could just follow the rules strictly then I could do some modern things. There’s no commandment, “Thou shalt not use a Macbook Pro.” So that’s sort of the loophole I found for that.

ANDELMAN: Now, one of the unnerving aspects of reading your book, as a writer, again, was the thought of massaging and merging so many versions of the Bible and related texts with so many purported authorities on its content. You have this whole council of people. And then, somehow, you come out of that with expertise yourself, all in less than a year, whereas some of these people have obviously committed their whole lifetimes to this. How did you do that?

JACOBS: Well, I’m certainly not the world’s greatest expert on the Bible, but I think I’ve got a unique point of view on it. And, as you say, I had a spiritual advisory board. I had rabbis, ministers, priests, some very liberal, some extremely conservative, and they helped me navigate. But, in the end, one of the goals was to see if I could strip away all the interpretations and get back to what the Bible actually said, what it meant back then, get back to the Biblical bedrock. And I realized that this was Mission: Impossible. I could not do that. The Biblical bedrock is too slippery. You can’t find out what it meant, the original intent was. But it was a fascinating journey, and I learned thousands of things along the way. So I’m glad I did it even if I’ll never know what Moses actually meant with a certain passage.



ANDELMAN: Would I be wrong in guessing that the proofreading and copy-editing process might have been a bit of a nightmare?

JACOBS: That is true. There were a lot of names that…Methuselah and things. I thank God for the copy editors.

ANDELMAN: I was going to ask you if you encountered any editors along the process who did not appreciate the point of view in the book or the interpretation of certain things in the book.

JACOBS: Well, I actually thought I would get a lot more flak than I did, and I’m not really sure why I didn’t. Definitely, there are people who don’t approve of my project, but far more people have been accepting of it. And I think that that is because I went in there with an open mind, really trying to understand this incredibly influential book as opposed to going in with an agenda.

ANDELMAN: Now, as we’re talking, the book hasn’t officially gone on sale yet.

JACOBS: True.

ANDELMAN: There’re a few things ahead of us that you don’t know what’s going to happen. But what would surprise you in the months to come as far as the acceptance of the book goes? Would it be, if this hasn’t already happened, would it be if someone wanted to option the book as a movie, would that surprise you? Before you answer that, I’m thinking also you write about going into a Bible bookstore in Manhattan where there was a guy there who was real mellow and real calm. Would it surprise you to walk by there one day in the coming months and see the book in the window, for example?

JACOBS: As for the first question, it actually was already optioned as a screenplay by Paramount.

ANDELMAN: Good for you.

JACOBS: It was actually quite a bizarre process because we optioned the idea, and they wrote the screenplay simultaneously as I was writing the book. And the guy who wrote the screenplay actually finished his screenplay before I finished my book. So I want us to get a hold of the screenplay and see how my year ended. But it’s in development, and things are looking good, but you never know with Hollywood. And as for the bookstore, it is interesting. I’ve gotten a lot of good feedback so far from evangelical Christians who, I don’t agree with a lot of what they say, but I did try to explore their point of view, and they seem to be interested. So I’m hoping the book will appeal to everyone from the Christopher Hitchens-type atheists to the Orthodox Jews, but we’ll see.

ANDELMAN: Are you now or do you see yourself becoming a regular at either temple or church at some point?

JACOBS: Well, I started the year as an agnostic and, by the end of the year, I don’t want to give away the ending. By the end of the year, I’m still agnostic, but I call myself a reverent agnostic. It’s actually a term a minister friend of mine came up with because, whether or not there’s a God, I do believe there’s something to the idea of sacredness and that rituals can be sacred and the Sabbath can be sacred, and there’s an importance to that, whether or not God exists.

ANDELMAN: So you didn’t come back and decide that you wanted to be Jewish, something you had not been really beforehand.

JACOBS: Well, I actually am a little more committed than I was. My kid is going to a Jewish school for the first couple of years. I don’t think he’ll continue in a Jewish school the whole way, but it happens to be a block away from our house so that helps. And I like some of the rituals, the Seder, and other things which I just didn’t have when I was growing up.

ANDELMAN: A.J., how did this book, the research and preparation for this book, compare to The Know-It-All in which you read the entire encyclopedia?

JACOBS: The Know-It-All was definitely an intellectual Everest because I had to read 33,000 pages and 44 million words. And not every single word was fascinating. So, nothing against the Portuguese, but the 25 pages on Portuguese literature, I could’ve done without. So it was a very challenging year, but I think that the Bible was more of a challenge because it affected every single part of my life. So it affected the way I ate, the way I talked, the way I thought, the way I touched my wife. It was a full immersion experiment.



ANDELMAN: How do you follow this? To the magazine, of course, you’ve set yourself up as the go-to guy for interviewing the hottest actresses and, with the books, you’re the go-to guy for time intensive big projects. What do you do next?

JACOBS: I know. I’m trying to think. My wife thinks I should try eating at every restaurant in New York City. My brother-in-law thinks I should become a eunuch for a year, but I don’t know if that can be a year long project. It’s sort of a lifetime commitment.

ANDELMAN: That’s the brother-in-law?

JACOBS: Yeah.

ANDELMAN: Yeah, that figures, doesn’t it?

JACOBS: Yeah. He thinks that would be a good idea. He thinks I have enough kids. I have some ideas, but I haven’t settled on one yet. But I do love the genre, the immersion genre or whatever you want to call it. I just love living these things, and I love reading other people’s books about it cause I think it’s like a memoir with added value. You get to look at someone’s life, but you also get a peek at this fascinating topic.

ANDELMAN: Well, it seems like you have a pretty good gig in balancing the occasional book with the magazine visibility and obviously the hot babes. So I have to say I’m sure I’m not the only guy in the business who’s very envious of what you do. But I really enjoyed the book. I’m really glad we had time to talk today.

JACOBS: Oh, I had a great time. Thanks, Bob. And envying is a sin, of course.

ANDELMAN: Yes, but I’m not keeping to the Good Book.

© 2007 by Bob Andelman. All rights reserved.

Clare McHugh, "Maxim" editor: Mr. Media Interview Classic

Originally published March 31, 1997

Does America really need another men's magazine?

Do men need another 172 pages every month or so telling us how to behave, how to get lucky more often, how to pick wine, who's hot and what's not?

If subsequent issues of a new magazine called Maxim are as ticklishly unsubtle as the first, the answer is a testosterone-cup-runneth-over yes.

Mr. Media reads piles of magazines each month, but the men's category is his favorite. Not for the pictures, either, although . . . The quality of writing in Playboy, Esquire, and GQ, for example, is generally excellent. But no matter how much older, wiser and wealthier Mr. Media gets, he never quite sees himself as the model reader for those publications. In his 20s, he thought he'd grow into that debonair, literate, sophisticated fella.

But now, in his mid-30s, all those guys seem much younger!

Maxim, on the other hand, is a perfect fit.




What makes it so different? Is it that Maxim is the American edition of a popular European magazine? Or could it be that this is the only major men's magazine in this country edited by a woman? A woman with a tree house sense of humor, that is, who could hang out and be accepted by your average bunch of guys talking sports, knocking back a few, checking out babes and scratching themselves. Okay, maybe not that last thing.

"I spent a lot of time studying men because I always wanted them to be interested in me and think I was good fun," says Maxim editor Clare McHugh.

McHugh, 35, certainly pushed the right buttons in her first issue. On the cover is Christa Miller, Drew Carey's TV gal pal; inside is a photo of Star Trek's Spock and Kirk; a directory of women who guest starred on "Seinfeld" and went on to greater glory -- providing an excuse to run Teri Hatcher's picture; a comparison between Macintosh and Windows users; and useful advice on buying lingerie for the woman in a man's life -- accompanied by 11 photos, natch.

But it's that very lingerie story -- "The Gift That Keeps On Giving" -- that spins the editor's gender. "It's a match made in heaven," reads the subhead. "Women love wearing lingerie; we love seeing it in action."

Not to be too picky, but if the editor is a woman, that sounds a little, um, funny.

"Some guy did write that," McHugh protests. "You have to assume the 'we' is a masculine voice. Besides, I don't think people will realize right off the bat that there is a woman editor."

C'mon! Mr. Media protests. There's a picture of you on page 16 over the headline, "So who's the chick?"

"I hadn't thought of that, really," McHugh says demurely, chuckling.

And it is a small point, but one that's important in a business where men's -- and women's -- magazine are closely identified with their editors -- Hugh Hefner is Playboy; Ed Kosner is Esquire; Art Cooper is GQ, Helen Gurley Brown was Cosmopolitan.

"Helen Gurley Brown is a brilliant editor because she really speaks to the readers where they are," McHugh says. "If I could wish for anything for Maxim it's that I could address men where they are, not in some idealized place or role of what masculinity is or means."





Staking out a piece of the newsstand to call her own, the fast-talking editor litters her magazine with politically incorrect lines her male counterparts couldn't pull off, such as "Hot Babe Management Tips."

"You've uncovered my secret!" she says, laughing. "I think I can get away with things that male editors can't."

Doesn't she care about potentially offending members of her own team?

"I don't care, in fact," she says rather bluntly. "In my mind, I think that if women are not upset by it, I'm doing something wrong. It was very important to strike a very male tone and attitude toward women. Not in an antagonistic way. But for lots of men, women are confusing and mysterious -- and also annoying! So we really had to write about women the way men thought. I'm not trying to explain women to men as much as I'm trying to address men's concerns about women."

McHugh's last job was launching another European import, Marie Claire, in an American edition. And her boss there was Bonnie Fuller, who recently stepped into Brown's fashionable shoes at Cosmo. Before that, McHugh worked her way up the Big Apple media food chain: New York Post, The New York Observer and New York magazine.




Joining a previously all-male fraternity, McHugh doesn't seem the least bit worried about comparisons with her "brother" magazines in the category, based on these blunt assessments:

Details -- "Cool. Maybe too cool."

Playboy -- "Nobody reads it just for the articles."

GQ -- "It's a fashion magazine."

Men's Health -- "A great magazine. Practical. It turns off people who aren't that interested in health. And it does tend to be the same issue over and over again."

Esquire -- "It's a literary magazine. For older gentlemen."

"Women's magazines in this country have done a better job of addressing women than men's magazines have done addressing men," McHugh says. "Men's magazines lag behind the development of men. I don't think men really changed through the ages. Feminism affected them in a way that it's given men more opportunities to do what they want. They don't have to fall into the stereotype of what it means to be masculine. You know, the good provider, the mountain warrior, the Hemingway wannabe. Other men's magazines address this heroic, iconic man, whereas most guys I know are very warm and interested in having a good time. They're in touch with themselves in that they know they like sports, they like women. They drink beer. They like to know stuff. They like to have a little something up their sleeves so they seem like experts. They don't spend a lot of time worrying if they're 'adequate' or not."

McHugh is surrounded by men, both at the office and at home. Beside her husband, renowned freelance writer Mark Lasswell, and their two-year-old son, Charlie, she also has two younger brothers and an "overpowering" father, who is a distinguished professor of psychiatry at Johns Hopkins.

Still, won't guys doubt you know what's going on?

"I hope to prove worthy of the job," McHugh says. "It is strange to edit a magazine for a group that you are not a member of. On the other hand, it does give me freedom and it's a new slant on doing men's content to have a woman's touch. I hope it works out for readers; I hope it works out for me."

© 2007 by Bob Andelman. All rights reserved.

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Chris Napolitano, "Playboy Magazine" editor: Mr. Media Interview, Pt. 2

(RETURN TO PART 1!!!)

ANDELMAN: One of the main things that’s different about Playboy today than it was in 1988 when you joined is the competition. For a long time, it was basically Playboy and Penthouse. It was Hefner and Guccione. Today, Penthouse is basically on the scrap heap of adult magazine history, and your biggest competitor, I think, in print at least, would seem to be Maxim. There was an effort the last couple years to sort of “Maxim-ize” I hate to use the term, but Maxim-ize Playboy a bit. My sense is that you guys did that, but gradually you’ve kind of even pulled away from that and gone back to more of the older Playboy style.

NAPOLITANO: Yeah, that was a very conscious decision based on what feedback we were getting from our audience and from young men. It’s very true that when it comes to female personalities and stuff like that, Maxim, in their cover choices, is a very close competitor to ours. They are a starter magazine for a lot of young men.

ANDELMAN: Oh boy. They’re gonna love that term. I like that.

NAPOLITANO: Oh sure. Well, they have been reinventing themselves three times a year in an effort to get away from that, but the reality is that you can attract a guy’s attention, but to hold it over the long term, which is what most magazines on the newsstand are about these days, they are in a place where they can’t claim newness anymore. You have to provide something substantial, and those are the kind of reactions that we were getting, that there might be short attention span stuff going on everywhere on the net or on TV or on video games or whatever, but the best service a magazine can provide is high-quality entertainment in print form.

So we look at the core of our magazine, the well, the interview, and everything in that as not easily mimicked or something that works best on paper right now. That’s the big draw, and that’s what we’ve dedicated ourselves to providing to readers, and I don’t think that anybody really matches up against us in that way. We’re a general interest magazine for men. We have a lot of content overlap with Esquire. We have a dedication to fiction which puts us in a similar place with The New Yorker. We go in depth with personalities who have given our interview which kind of aligns us and puts us in competition with Vanity Fair. But the package is unique to us, and we don’t want to mess with that because in that mix, which also includes jokes and cartoons, is the secret to why people stay with us so long. And I think that’s a lesson that will be learned by other people who truly want to compete with us.




ANDELMAN: I could see that there was a point a few years ago where Maxim was certainly the hottie on the block, and people were talking about it, and there’s rarely anything that goes over a page it seems like. But, Playboy , you open it up, and you expect to be engrossed in the stories, you expect to be reading it and turning the pages and following it and jumping to the back of the book to finish the story and to learn something. Maxim it seems like, by the time you get interested in it, the story is over, and then you’re on to the next thing. They used to talk about the MTV Generation years ago, with all the jump-cutting, the short attention spans, but maybe if you buy into what you said about it being a starter magazine, yeah, it gets you into it, if you’re a young man and you haven’t been reading magazines, certainly there’s eye candy and you start reading it, but it leaves you kind of empty.

NAPOLITANO: Yeah, I would agree. I think definitely we’re editors talking to each other, and we’re in a field where we’re curious, and we like to read and consume that kind of material. I’m not opposed to a guy going to a newsstand and picking up a magazine that is different from mine, because I think that it basically will spark something in them that they’ll draw a connection; if they ever get a look at Playboy, they’ll be favorably impressed. But they’ll be in the habit of looking at the stuff. And judging from what Maxim is doing, they seem to have gone heavily in the direction of service journalism, so they’re still kind of pitching woo to their marketers and their advertisers and providing them with a lot of face-offs that are similar in terms of content. But the flip side is that they really are kind of packing every page with a lot of consumable things. They’re keeping their guys up to date with a lot of products and gadgets. And we’ll have to see whether that’s gonna be successful for them. But they don’t seem to be showing any interest in personalities or articles or fiction, so it’s a different model.

ANDELMAN: Now, I mention that it used to be Hefner and Guccione were the guys that everyone equated with men’s magazines. Guccione, of course, is not involved with Penthouse anymore. Hefner, from what we read, what we see, he’s still there but not maybe as active in the magazine. My question really is, do you think there’ll be another generation of editors, perhaps like yourself, that will rise in the coming years and become associated with these magazines? At Esquire, David Granger is clearly connected to that. People kind of in the industry know that’s a David Granger product. It’s got his fingerprint all over it. Will people be talking about Chris Napolitano the same way or whoever takes charge at Maxim, or will these things still be, Hefner and Guccione, and then there’s not so much a visible personality beyond that?

NAPOLITANO: Yeah, well, it’s funny to say. Less so than Guccione and more so Jann Wenner. I think Jann and Hefner and their magazines and their products are kind of very similar, and they both invented these things. And I don’t know whether magazines and the corporate climate necessarily whether you’re gonna see magazine products that are identified with a personality like that. I would say that this is a Hugh Hefner product. I’m in there, and I’m making a lot of decisions about where we’re going and generating material, but for our company, there’s nothing wrong with the identification of Hef and the magazine and the Playboy brand. That just is. I don’t think that we could possibly get somebody else to do the things that Hef does for this company.

ANDELMAN: I’m glad you mention that because I want to ask you, what does, relative to the magazine, what does Hef have to do with the magazine these days?

NAPOLITANO: Oh, he does a lot. He is a very easy guy to reach. For as famous a guy and as much as he has going on day to day, I don’t know where he finds the time, but he dedicates two or three hours a day to the magazine. And that goes from everything of talking to our photo editors on the West Coast who are very close to him and nearby generating Playmate photography or working with our photo director, Gary Cole, on the major and minor photography or engaging in dialogues with our cartoonists and approving the work that they do, get a lot of different ideas coming across his desk, and he’s picking stuff for them to finalize.

ANDELMAN: Who’s the last hand on the magazine when it goes out the door, is it you or is it him at this point?

NAPOLITANO: I would give it to him, but I don’t quite know what that really means. There are three or four points when the material that we’re pursuing is passed before Hef for review. We pace out the magazine at the very beginning of the process before any work is even turned in. We basically know where things are going in each magazine. He might think that something is inappropriate or wish for us to improve it, but we’re probably on the same page with that. And then the work starts coming in, and it’s a lot of work, a lot of moving parts to this thing. And when stories enter the system, he’s going to get a read on it. When layouts are being built, they come out of Chicago and New York and go for his approval. Eventually, he has seen everything that goes into the magazine and given it the thumbs up, and then we have to make it all work. That’s really the last hand in terms of the detail work. If there are changes that come along or things that get adjusted, it’s just time to pick up the phone and fill him in.



ANDELMAN: And Chris, you’ve been sitting in the big seat now for I think about three years, I think we’re just about at three years, have you had a moment where he’s wanted to do something or something has come up, and you’ve had to say no to Hugh Hefner or you’ve had to take a stand and kind of say look?

NAPOLITANO: Yeah. In the three years that I’ve been doing this, I’ve been here for a very long time, he’s very clear about what he wants. He knows that he’s creating an atmosphere and a feeling. He doesn’t pretend to be inside the mind of a 30-year-old guy, but he pretty much wants to know what that 30-year-old guy should think of us. So using that, we generate a whole lot of ideas. In that time frame that I’ve been here, he’s spiked, I’d say, about three stories for admittedly good reasons, and this is where he and I both are approving it all on the process where, okay, you see it on the schedule or maybe it’s an iffy idea, but you really go through the whole thing, and then you’ve got two weeks before you go to the printer, and he says, “No,” usually in the humor or the more Maximy vein of things. I’ve had no problem pulling those pieces because he’s usually very persuasive in making his case. I’ve never told him or had to say no to any ideas that he has because editors, we have batting averages, and he’s got a very high batting average for what is successful for the magazine, and so we see it three months later down the line in showing up on the newsstand.

ANDELMAN: I would think that there are real pros and cons to being the guy who’s been there for 20 years and that you’ve come up from an editorial assistant to rise, like I said, to the big seat, that the pro is that you have this incredible institutional knowledge, you probably know where every paper clip is kept in the office. On the other hand, having been there all that time and started under this incredible publishing legend, and I’m not just saying it to suck up to him, he is an incredible publishing legend, and he’s a man who’s influenced an awful lot of things. But then suddenly, you’re in the position 20 years later of the other people in the organization turn to you when there’s a dispute, or if there’s an issue, they turn to you and say, “Chris, this is what we believe, and Hef may think this, what are we going to do?” It’s got to be a little challenging at times.

NAPOLITANO: It is, but the best thing is to keep the dialogue going. Hef is, first and foremost an editor, which is a very interesting kind of thing. He’s many things, and he’s had many roles here, and he’s been famous for 54 years. But, his love is the magazine, and his greatest knowledge is as an editor. I feel very comfortable with him, and I’m not going to stroke myself here, but I believe that we’ve been putting out a fantastic product in the last three years, and I’ve heard as much from him. He doesn’t like getting in a place where he is dictating material. He wants you to understand what he’s looking for, and he wants to get it, but when he starts shortening that leash, or when he starts feeling that you can’t give him what he’s looking for, that’s when people panic or start making the wrong moves. So you have to be as aggressive as you would be under anybody.

Every editor has a boss, and sometimes that boss is waving newsstand results or advertising results in front of your face. Hef is waving quality and instinctively knowing what he thinks Playboy should look and feel like.

So let’s go back to one of the stories that -- I’m long-winded I know -- but the one thing that he’s been very gracious about is one time I was saying yes to something that he was saying no to, and that was a very nice piece from a book called The Weathermakers. It was all about global warming, and we were ahead of the curve on that one, and he had some problems with the layout, and he really didn’t want to go forward with the piece, but I persuaded him to think twice about it. It was going to be a big topic, and he was very happy when our issue hit the stands and two weeks later, “60 Minutes” used the same kind of iconic image that we did, which was a polar bear on a tropical island, and then two weeks after that, Vanity Fair came out with their first green issue. So you do have to stand your ground and persuade him, this is why we’re doing this. And he’s very quick on the uptake, and so things move forward. So those are the kind of conversations you have with him.



ANDELMAN: Well, Chris, before we finish, I want to try something with it. Do you remember the movie Sophie’s Choice?

NAPOLITANO: Uh, I never saw it.

ANDELMAN: Well, the basic idea was that I think it is the Nazis, they are going to take, she has two kids, they’re going to take one of the two kids, and she has to choose which one’s gonna die. So this is your Sophie’s Choice. I’m gonna kill one of Playboy ’s most treasured features, and you have to choose which one to save. Is it the Playboy interview or the Playboy jokes?

NAPOLITANO: Oh, boy. Oh, I would…..Wow, wow. I’d kill the jokes.

ANDELMAN: You’d kill the jokes, okay. I’m not done. Now, the Playboy interview or the Forum?

NAPOLITANO: Uh, I’d kill the Forum.

ANDELMAN: Okay, the Playboy interview or the Playboy advisor?

NAPOLITANO: Wow, that’s another tough one. I could get what I get from the advisor in other places. I’d kill the advisor.

ANDELMAN: Oh, tell Chip Rowe I’m very sorry.

NAPOLITANO: Yeah, we’ll give him something else to do.

ANDELMAN: Alright, last one. Well, he is multi-talented. Playboy interview or the centerfold?

NAPOLITANO: The interview.

ANDELMAN: Ah, there we go folks. We’ve narrowed down what’s important in the magazine. Alright, last question. Chris, you’re married, and I understand you’ve got two children.

NAPOLITANO: Yes.

ANDELMAN: How does the editor of Playboy position his workday when he gets home at night?

NAPOLITANO: Oh, I got to let it go. I have to let it go. I don’t take notes as to what happens during the day. This is a very interesting job to have, but you can care about something too deeply, and I’m so happy and pleased with the editorial product that we put out. I don’t want to brag, but there’s nothing that I don’t like about what we put on paper for the magazine. There are a host of other things that I’m responsible for or in the middle of. If there are 10 things, I have to be happy. Success is defined by six out of those ten things being right, and I want ten out of ten, and that can be nerve-wracking. But that’s my problem, and I got to let that go.

ANDELMAN: Maybe I should have asked the question slightly differently. I think you’re 43?

NAPOLITANO: Yeah.

ANDELMAN: Okay. You’ve got two kids, probably not too old, a wife, how do they explain what daddy does?

NAPOLITANO: Well, it’s kind of interesting. I have a daughter, and she’s older. I don’t think she’s at the age yet where her classmates might have picked up the magazine or found it. But they’ve been in the office, and they’ve seen, gotten glimpses of what we’re all about here. And it’s just a simple thing of like this is for adults. This is for adult men. Just like you’ll see me have a glass of wine during dinner, and you’re drinking juice. That’s just the way it is.

© 2007 by Bob Andelman. All rights reserved.

Entourage: Jeremy Piven Reveals A Little to Esquire

"Don't consume a bacon double cheeseburger, a bucket of sweet-potato fries, and a pony keg of any adult beverage just before bed. It will murder sleep and summon the demons of hell into your slumber."

-- Jeremy Piven, star of HBO's hit series "Entourage," on how to avoid nightmares. He was profiled in an Esquire magazine cover story by A.J. Jacobs.

Elder Statesmen Agree: Fiction Sucks

From month to month, Esquire is consistently inconsistent. One month Mr. Media will read it from cover to cover, the next, pffffffft.

Fortunately, the February 2007 issue is chockful of challenging reading, including the annual Dubious Achievement Awards.

And then there are the back-to-back stories about two very different American seniors, actor Dick Van Dyke, 81, and lawyer-activist Ramsey Clark, 78. What could the co-star of "Night at the Museum" and Saddam Hussein's attorney have in common?

A bad attitude toward fiction. To wit:

Van Dyke: "For some reason, as time gets short in life, wasting time escaping through entertainment bothers me. I've been off fiction for years."

Clark: "Voltaire says history is fiction agreed upon. I find that unacceptable."

Hope this doesn't turn folks off Oprah's Book Club. Ever since James Frey, fiction just ain't what it used to be.