Well, Kim Kardashian’s baby is a celebrity already, despite never having done anything. Come to think of it, isn’t that true of mom? Anyway, these mags have the latest on little North West.
Kardashian-haters will love Star’s take on the June 15 birth of Li’l Kim. The gossip rag paints a picture of a delivery from hell with Kim and her overbearing mother Kris almost gleefully creating havoc in the LA hospital where Kim and Kanye’s baby was born. According to Star, their diva antics had nurses breaking down in tears and baby daddy Kanye in a rage. He was pushed out of the delivery room to make way for Kim’s film crew, Star tells us. And he had a blowout fight with Kris right in the delivery room over who will have say over this baby’s life. Kim, meanwhile, had her makeup crew with her the whole time and delivered the baby in “designer heels.” No doubt Kim is a diva, but large swaths of Star’s account came off as exaggerated and cartoonish. We’re surprised Star didn’t report that the baby was born with horns on her poor, wee head.
Star’s depiction of the birth may have seemed exaggerated, but at least it was entertaining — which is far more than we can say for US Weekly, which read like it had been written by one of Kim’s teenage sisters for the Kardashian Christmas newsletter. According to US, everything went perfectly, and mommy and daddy couldn’t be happier and in love and successful and beautiful and …. well, you get the drift. The mag goes to great lengths to dismiss all those nasty rumors about Kim and Kanye leading up to the birth, even though it was evident Kanye’s mind has been on his new album, which dropped June 18. US also takes a different stance on whether this baby will be in the spotlight, saying the birth was not filmed and that Kim has told friends that she “100 percent wouldn’t sell photos of the baby.” Yeah, right.
People also serves up a sunny version of Kim and Kanye, but in a much more entertaining and believable way than US. It’s interesting to note that People uses the same shots of Kim pregnant in a bikini that US used, as well as similar details of the pregnancy. At least People doesn’t pussyfoot around what has been a clearly troublesome time for the reality TV star, even if it does report that Kim and Kanye plan to get married. “He definitely wants to marry her,” a Kanye source tells the gossip mag. It attributes Kanye’s “grim” appearance of late to his “increasingly antagonistic view of the media” rather than any distress between the lovebirds. It also cites preeclampsia, a high blood pressure disorder caused by pregnancy, as the likely the cause of the early birth.
In Touch gives readers a super sad but gripping view of the reality star’s current life. Kanye only made it to the birth because he happened to be in the same time zone at the right time. The couple are clashing over everything, and yet he’s barely been there during her difficult pregnancy. Like Star, In Touch says Kim is desperate to get her old body back and therefore has decided not to breast-feed. “You can’t get Botox while you’re breast-feeding,” one source said. Unlike Star, In Touch describes Kanye as the control freak in the delivery room and the guy calling the shots, with Kim being viewed as alone and terrified and facing the prospect of raising little North West alone. Even gramma Kris left the new mom the day after the pregnancy to attend the Daytime Emmys.
The New Yorker seems preoccupied this week with a number of epidemics now plaguing sundry parts of the world. Outside the city, Lyme disease is escalating, and so is the argument over how to treat it. Al Qaeda was recently blown back after taking over the war-torn African nation of Mali, but fears linger that it could attempt a coup again. There’s even a piece by John McPhee and his battle against an epidemic of lost golf balls that litter the bottom of the Delaware River. Scariest of all, though, is dissident poet Liao Yiwu’s new prison memoir, which details four years of grisly torture by Chinese authorities. After the failed rebellion of 1989, the Communists essentially paid off dissident artists to keep quiet. “The same people who used to march fearlessly in the street for democracy now have become ‘apolitical’ in the current era of rampant materialism — Communist style,” Liao writes. “Our whole country was suddenly busy making money, which was a corrosive acid that dissolved political dissent.”
Time, meanwhile, frets that a 46-year-old Burmese Buddhist monk named Wirathu is inciting bigotry and violence against the nation’s minority Muslim population. While Muslims make up about 5 percent of Burma’s estimated 60 million people, they “are breeding so fast, and they are stealing our women, raping them,” Wirathu charges. Frightening, hysterical and ominous talk for sure, and Wirathu is said to have incited the massacre of 70 Muslim villagers last year. Nevertheless, Time’s reporting also is a bit hysterical, leaving open some important questions as it indulges in a somewhat high-toned condemnation of the Buddhist atrocities. “I listen to monk after monk heighten tensions by telling me that Muslims are using mosques to store weapons or that every imam carries a gun,” reporter Hannah Beech laments. Well, is there any truth to that? The question isn’t even posed to the Muslims themselves. In fact, not a single imam or Muslim leader is quoted. May we ask why?