While I was reading Khloé Kardashian’s book Strong Looks Better Naked in a Brooklyn café, the person sitting across from me gingerly asked, “What genre is that?” I had no answer.
My policy on gift certificates may as well be chiseled in stone: SPEND. DON’T EVER NOT SPEND. (It’s actually the opposite of that Ten Commandment against avarice.)
“Hmmm...” said the man behind the counter at McNally Jackson as he looked at the book I was buying while he rang up my purchase. There was the cover, loud and proud: I Suck at Relationships So You Don’t Have To: 10 Rules for Not Screwing Up Your Happily Ever After. “It’s for work,” I responded, with a high laugh I…
"My name is Adam," the post read. "I'm 18 and non-exclusively attracted to boys and girls of all ages (particularly very young ones). I am the leader of a support group for non-offending pedophiles around my age… I would be very happy to talk with you."
Apparently Men Are From Mars, Women Are From Venus is the best selling non-fiction hardcover book of all-time (excepting the Bible and Koran) with over 7 million copies in circulation. So naturally, Hollywood is going to try and make some cash off of the title by turning it into a movie. Much like the vomitrocious …
Your following Kim Kardashian on Twitter is the reason we don't have a female president yet. Or something.
"Unless men change, I will not write a book for men, because I don't want it just sitting on the shelves," he told Latoya Peterson. Also discussed: The media's obsession with black women's love lives as well as interracial dating.
Bestselling author Rhonda Byrne is at it again! Says USA Today, "The Power, like The Secret, is a guide to positive thinking, how 'everyone is meant to have an amazing life.'" And, like The Secret, it's presumably pseudoscientific malarkey!
This collection of the best-selling self-help books of the 1960s demonstrates just how remarkably, er, far the self-help industry has come. We're much better off now that we know the secret.
Teri Hatcher's new website, Get Hatched (a chick's guide to life) is up and running. In a video clip, she claims the site "is not the Teri Hatcher reality show." No — it's more like a self-help book on uppers.
Charla Krupp, having told women how to age, is back to tell us how to dress. Her "secret"? Giving women knowledge of what Krupp calls "fattening clothes." Which you should avoid, because they are like so bad, like cookies!
They're making a movie out of What to Expect When You're Expecting. They've already made movies out of French Women Don't Get Fat and He's Just Not That Into You. Here, we give Hollywood its next batch of self-help blockbusters:
In an LA Times editorial, Barbara Ehrenreich writes that all the hue and cry over modern women's unhappiness may be just a ploy to sell us self-help.
This was the year, we're told, that Hollywood started making movies for women... as long as they were totally inane. And next year, as Self-Help Cinema launches, they'll be even more vapid!
Jessica Simpson is self-help book enthusiast. "I am the first person to go to Barnes & Noble and buy the new self-help book," she says. You're shocked, we're sure, that J. Simp perpetuates the concept of self-help reader as sad sack single girl desperate for a man/learning the meaning of life through shoe purchasing.…
For those who think of Mary Kay cosmetics as nothing more than a pink Cadillac full of mauve lipsticks, think again: when the company's handbook, The Mary Kay Way, came out 20 years ago, Mary Kay Ash's culty brand of get-rich-kinda-quick consumer marketing made it a bestseller. Or, as the blurb would have it, "it was…
Tormented? Driven witless? 99 problems but therapy bills ain't one? Welcome to "Save Your Life, Cheap!" in which we write about the dumb things that get America's uninsured through hard times. AA meetings, James Joyce, Ani di Franco, suicide hotlines…anything nonalcoholic can apply, the more embarrassing the better.…
Remember that deputy Prime Minister who resigned two years ago with Tony Blair only to resurface a year and a half later with a memoir about his decades-long struggle with bulimia? The British press sure does! And while coverage of this confession has generally fallen into the category of "merciless mockfest", an…
In honor of its 75th anniversary the May Esquire has a big pullout feature called "75 Skills Every Man Should Master." The premise — Magazines! Lists! — is not exactly revolutionary, and the "skills," such as practicing "brand loyalty to at least one product" and "making three different bets at a craps table" are not…
I will never forget the first time I noticed the term "Quarterlife crisis." I was about to turn 25 and I had just left a big-time newspaper job in Los Angeles to try magazine writing (and phone sex!) in Philadelphia. I was in the throes of a really really wise platonic-romantic entanglement with someone twenty years…
