In the Penny Press: Esquire and Outside

I thought my week’s Penny Press highlights had already passed, but the hits just keep coming! The New Yorker issue sporting the now-famous Bert & Ernie cover, for instance, features a great piece by Louis Menand called “The Color of Law,” about the systematic suppression of the black vote in the American South – an oppression that’s just been given the green light (by the same court that occasioned the Bert & Ernie cover with a marginally generous gay rights ruling) to resume full-strength, so that in the 2106 presidential election, black and other minority voters can be turned away from their polling stations if they don’t have five forms of picture ID or the ability to answer a battery of questions in Latin. Menand’s piece starkly and eloquently relates the historical iniquities that gave rise to voter protection legislation in the first place – it’s a masterly piece of writing, and it’s unfortunately more relevant than ever.Pointedly relevant too, on a rather less pressing (or maybe more pressing) topic is “Cape No Fear” by the always-enjoyable Abe Streep in the latest Outside magazine; the brief piece deals with the resurgence of shark-sightings in New England, the spiritual birthplace of Peter Benchley’s Jaws. The protected seal population has been booming, and with it comes the also-booming population of sharks that prey on seals – and so human/shark encounters have been on the rise, and Streep briskly summarizes the change in public attitude: “When the Denver tourist was attacked, local consensus was that he had it coming: he swam 100 yards out to a sandbar near two seals.” Although the piece’s money quote comes from a scientist who warns that public acceptance might take a nasty turn “if a 12-year-old kid gets attacked.” Fans of Jaws (especially Steven Spielberg’s great movie adaptation) will know exactly which 12-year-old boy is being alluded to here; that scientist is almost certainly right – little Alex Kintner is all that stands between a healthy shoreline ecosystem and the barbaric shark “cullings” only recently contemplated in Hawaii.But the highlight of the week in the Penny Press – indeed, one of the clear highlights of the year – came in the latest Esquire: a piece about best-selling author and general-purpose fraud Eben Alexander, author of the nauseating mega-bestseller Proof of Heaven. The essay is called “The Prophet,” and it’s the best thing Luke Dittrich has ever written. It takes the reader through the entire story of Alexander’s tawdry, appalling life until now, leading up to the creation of his book, and the genius of the piece is its remorseless, almost inhuman restraint. At no point does Dittrich call Alexander a charlatan, a quack, a serial liar – instead, he just doggedly tracks down every real-world underpinning of everything Alexander has ever done or said or written and lays it before the reader. It’s a stunningly effective performance, the single most thorough demolition of a man’s reputation that I’ve read in years (any writer who’ll double-check Alexander’s weather-references against the national weather bureau is deserving of public applause) – and the fact that it’s done without any ad hominem dashes makes the blade that much sharper. I myself couldn’t possibly have written such a piece; Alexander’s book clearly outraged Dittrich as much as it did me, but he channels that outrage into ribbonizing the man who wrote it. A pure joy to read – and a joy that would be missed by anybody who dismissed Esquire itself as just a glossy lad-mag.