Business

Here’s the J.Lo-down

Debt ceiling? Oslo? Why worry about stuff like that when we can learn who’s breaking up with whom?

OK! promises to tell its readers “what really went wrong” with J.Lo and Marc Anthony, but its “exclusive” is sorely lacking in gory details. Aside from the obvious — that J.Lo is obsessed with her career and Marc caught the seven-year itch — we learn that Marc has been “spending time” with ex-wife and former Miss Universe Dayanara Torres. Better is the cover story on Brad Pitt’s flirtation with a young production assistant on the set of his new zombie thriller, “World War Z,” which has sent Angelina Jolie into a jealous rage. Noting that the unnamed brunette “started out being an assistant type but now she’s much more involved,” a source says “Angelina is right to be worried.”

Star managed a deft salvage of its big cover spread, “Plastic Surgery Confessions,” using nips and tucks to fit in the big news of J.Lo and what’s his name. The narrow J.Lo banner across the top cover spills all about their divorce: “Sexless Night, Other Women, Other Men, Final Screaming Match.” To squeeze it onto the cover, editors had to reduce ever so slightly, and thankfully, the head shots of seven female stars showing off fat, injected lips and pulled-back feline faces. J.Lo’s divorce price tag? $250 million. That fit in, too. Best are before-and-after photos of celebrity plastic surgeries.

People gets right down to it and blames J.Lo’s split with Marc on him. He was a control freak who behaved badly when he didn’t get his way — most recently making a fuss over William Levy, the sultry Cuban telenovela star who played Lopez’s love interest in her new video “I’m into You.” People also tries to give us Anthony’s point of view, occasionally interjecting a statement from his “insider.” But the statements just lead us even more to suspect that the gossip rags have it right and the one-time Salsa King was an obsessive baby who was happy to make his lovely wife miserable because he knew he didn’t deserve her. In trying to refute rumors of his jealousy over her newly explosive career, for example, the People insider says: “He has always been very supportive of Jennifer’s career. But they got to a point where they started to see life differently. For Marc, life is about enjoying life. There are people that think life is all about work.” Bitter much?

Like People, US Weekly paints Anthony as a control freak who tried to wrest control from his beautiful wife, trying to boss her around in her career and at home. Also, he was allegedly jealous about everything, from other men to Lopez’s career. US delivers additional juicy tidbits on the breakup of the year, such as their explosive feuds over his smoking habit and Anthony’s dalliance with a flight attendant in 2009. The hookup almost led to their split, but Anthony pleaded with J.Lo to not leave him and she agreed to couples therapy, the mag tells us. The gossip rag also tells us about Anthony’s anger over Lopez’s manager, Benny Medina, and his lackadaisical attitude toward raising their twins — Max and Emme — whom he’s already agreed to give to Lopez as part of the divorce.

It’s hard to say which of New York‘s two big puff pieces is puffier. There’s one on Goldman Sachs CEO Lloyd Blankfein who, charming the pants off his interviewer, finishes a story about meeting with rapper 50 Cent saying, “And by the way, it’s ‘Fitty’ Cent. Fitty.” That, we must admit, was somewhat amusing. Less easy to stomach was the softball story on the New York Times, which at one point rhapsodizes about what it felt to be “the most satisfying moment in Page One,” referring to this spring’s boring, brown-nosing documentary that even the Times itself panned. More compelling — and depressing — was a feature about big developers who are destroying the mom-and-pop-shop vibe of Upper Broadway with a host of new skyscrapers that fill entire blocks with big, sterile, glass-front facades.

The New Yorker, for some reason, assigns its movie critic to write about the British tabloid culture. The result is a tut-tutting jawboner that declares “you cannot hear yourself think” in London because it has so many print newspapers: five tabloids and five broadsheets during the week alone, not counting the weekends. We’d submit that we’re a little jealous of Londoners in this regard, forced to make do instead with prim weeklies from the liberal establishment. We didn’t enjoy, for example, slogging through a dull non-story on the stalemate in Egypt that has developed between citizens and the army since the uprising of six months ago.

Just when you thought you’d had enough of Time, deciding that reading it was a chore, the magazine delivers a cover story on — we hate to say it — household chores. With many of us addled by the 11th-hour budget talks, the Greek debt crisis and the infernal heat wave, some will no doubt prefer an article on chores to this magazine’s more traditional summer fare on Martians or the Shroud of Turin. And many men will no doubt cheer the slant of the article, which finds that men are doing half the work but still not getting credit for it. Still, this week’s issue was one we found ourselves putting off reading until the last minute, and sulking about it the whole time.