Daddy’s little whirl
With Father’s Day coming, it’s time for gift givers to think outside the necktie box. To find out what might be on pop’s mind, check out these leading titles.
Action hero and comedy star Chris Pratt, whose latest movie, “Jurassic World,” just hit theaters, is the subject of the thoughtful and pretty amusing cover story for GQ. This is the guy who, more than any other, is responsible for the term “dad bod,” which has come to describe some of the fleshier gentlemen. It’s a good piece, with some literal toilet humor and his reflections on being a father. Don’t skip the surprisingly insightful profile of Giorgio Armani to mark the 40th anniversary of his company. The fashion legend, 80, reflects on his long life, his career and the people he’s lost.
If that sounds like too much for you, Details skews a little more brainless with tips for “How to Build the Perfect Beach Body.” They’re all the same ones you’ve heard. Pecs are apparently more important than abs right now — who knew? There’s a meandering profile of Haley Joel Osment, the kid from “The Sixth Sense,” which is occasioned because he has a more recent role in flop “Entourage” that was ( smartly) passed over by Jonah Hill. It’s kind of sad. The 27yearold sounded like hewas pretty happy at the Experimental Theater Workshop at NYU but all the videogame voiceovers and guest spots in white rappers’ music videos probably won’t save his career.
Esquire’s “Fun” issue is a total bore. It leads with Jason Statham, recently of “Furious 7” and “Spy,” who is not only not fun but sounds so full of himself it’s hard to take anything he does or says seriously. Writer Tom Chiarella says that “Statham talks like a man who knows things, who understands the physics at play”— a baffling description caked in so many layers of meaninglessness it’s hard to know where to begin. If this is all you have to read and you’re on a plane with no Internet connection, maybe read the gruesome profile of Judy Clarke, who has defended the likes of Dzhokhar Tsarnaev and Ted Kaczynski.
Men’s Health has some practical advice tucked away in a sidebar: only 3 percent of dads want clothing for Father’s Day, so you might want to return that tie and pick up some Yankees tickets. The profile on Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson ( he’s in “San Andreas”) has a light touch to it, starting off with the star bringing a Tupperware of chicken and rice to the interview because he must watch what he eats. The magazine’s bread and butter, as always, is advice on exercise routines, nutrition and sex.
The New Yorker has a nice piece on Sen. Dianne Feinstein’s 6,700page torture report she filed on the CIA last December. The California Democrat is shocked, simply shocked, that nobody in the White House or the media paid much attention to it. That includes the New Yorker until now and, we predict, the New Yorker will resume not paying much attention now that it has done its duty. Elsewhere, a piece on the killing of three Muslims in North Carolina gets worked up over a lunkhead statement from Chapel Hill police that blamed a “parking dispute.” The article argues elaborately this should be rebranded a “hate crime,” a point that some might call fairly obvious. But it’s less clear on how such nomenclature helps as survivors of the victims seemingly gird for a domestic culture war.
Worker bees of the world, unite! New York’s cover story on the bee crisis claims that a couple of littlenoticed scientific papers this spring have solved the mystery— and the findings might be enough to spawn a honeybee labor movement. The only bee populations that are plummeting, it claims, are those inside industrial farming operations, whereas wild bee populations are “doing fairly well.” The reason, the article says, is that industrial bees lead “stressful” lives, subjected to mites and pesticides as they’re “bused around America’s farmland like an industrial farming era chain gang.” Hauled around on trucks, they gorge on almond nectar one week, apples the next. So why are they dying now, after all these years of oppression? The article doesn’t make it totally clear, but don’t be surprised if you start seeing reports about jailbreaker bees.
Time has redesigned its pages “to make the magazine easier to read,” says Managing Editor Nancy Gibbs. Funny, because the cover asks “How High Is Your XQ?” without any indication of what the heck an XQ is. Overall, the new look appears designed to reduce the focus on big enterprise stories about the leading news of the week. Good? Bad? We’ll see.