What do men really want? Well, if they’re fathers, they want a drink and a hammock on their special day. Anything else is for these magazines to examine.
Only Esquire seems to care about Father’s Day in our review of this month’s men’s magazines. But care it does. “FATHERHOOD” jumps off the cover , just below a photo of Mark Wahlberg with one of four kids on his shoulder. This sets up a script-perfect cover story about being a Hollywood dad. Marky Mark, all grown up, tossing a ball with his sons, taking his first-born back to Boston to meet his since-deceased dad … It’s all there. But so is Wahlberg’s not-so-pretty formula for work-life balance: to bed after dinner at 6:45 p.m., up to exercise at 1:30 a.m., then, after we mere mortals awake, out of the house to take the kids to school. The mag gets more serious about the subject in “Manifesto of the New Fatherhood,” a well-researched piece by Stephen Marche that asserts “fatherlessness is a national disaster.” The issue even serves up insights from Robert DeNiro, including this bit we want our kids to read: “I wish I had done so many things with my father. DeNiro admits, however, he did not wish that as a kid. And now, he says, his own brood brushes him off the same way.
Okay, so Men’s Journal doesn’t officially address Father’s Day. But it features three father-like figures — most notably Peter Matthiessen. In an interview subtitled “A Final Visit with one of America’s Greatest Writers,” author Mark Adams sorts out Matthiessen’s many lives: literary icon, nature writer, CIA operative, Zen Buddhist, East End fixture and WASP aristocrat-turned-juvenile delinquent. John Lucas, the “go-to guru” for pro athletes with pot problems or worse, also makes an appearance. Once an All-American in tennis and basketball, Lucas knows about what he now treats. The former NBA star, Men’s Journal reports, “lost the prime of his career to six years of cocaine and alcohol abuse.” The magazine literally gives “The Last Word” to Stan Lee in a transparent play to Daddy-deprived fanboys. “How should a man handle growing older?” it asks the august animator, who earlier in the piece says that, with The Fantastic Four, he re-invented comics.
If the audience for Details gives a hoot about Father’s Day, you’d never know it looking at the current issue. The theme, if any, is life after 15 minutes of fame. America houseguest Kato Kaelin re-appears in a Q&A in which, as a proud homeowner, he parades his previously closeted humorous side. “Two bedrooms, three baths,” he says. “And did I tell you I live behind it?” Another Q&A is devoted to Natasha (Don’t Call it a Comeback) Lyonne, who characterizes comments about her previous life in the tabs and her character on “Orange is the New Black” as “a little bit redundant.” A look at the Heene family provides a story of interest in which we thought we had no interest. This is the family whose youngest sibling, Falcon, captured our attention as “Balloon Boy” — the 6-year-old mistakenly (but purposely) presumed to be aboard a helium-filled flying saucer that “unexpectedly” took flight in Colorado. Now 11, Falcon fronts “the world’s youngest metal band” — another family enterprise masterminded by his dad, Richard.
Maxim devotes half of this month’s issue to its “Hot 100,” leaving precious little space for other trivial pursuits. It also leaves us wondering what its staff does, given it doesn’t even own up to who makes the “Hot 100.” It says, “You voted, we counted,” thereby distancing itself from the objectifying, quantifying exercise. The issue does devote a page to the new mile-high club, which introduces an airborne cottage industry (plane rentals) committed to increasing what only 4 percent have achieved yet 33 percent “fantasize about.” Yet another way, we suppose, of producing fathers.
A New York profile of health-care startup Oscar is full of cute color about the company’s ads, the Soho loft where it’s headquartered and its “artisanal” tech-driven strategy. What is glaringly absent is any discussion about the fact that Oscar and its backers, who include Facebook seeder Peter Thiel, are specifically targeting young people — exactly the demographic that Obamacare needs to attract if it’s going to afford covering Baby Boomers. Elsewhere, features on sleeplessness and a new opioid drug are equally mediocre. But we did enjoy the piece by Dan Kois, who chronicles the month he went without sitting down. “My calves weren’t happy,” Kois reports, in one of his few summations that aren’t laced with expletives.
Making a case that Hillary Clinton could lose a 2016 presidential bid, Time’s Joe Klein argues that her biggest vulnerability is that she’s too “political” — that, for example, being the word she used to describe her support for the Iraq invasion. “She’s going to have to drop the veil,” Klein contends. We wish there were a ring of truth to this, just like we wish former Montana governor Brian Schweitzer might have a chance running against her in the Democratic primary. The gun-toting populist isn’t afraid to say that Obamacare sold out to the drug and insurance lobbies, and notes that Clinton has been courting Goldman Sachs. “You can’t be a candidate that shakes down more money on Wall Street than anybody … and be a populist,” Schweitzer says.