It kind of contradicts itself in a few places, so we've bolded that.

IT'S WHAT YOU MIGHT PICTURE. Sitting on the couch in her parents' home in Encino, California, she's clutching a pillow to her stomach like a kid at a sleepover. A lot of what she says echoes what you've heard. You ask her which star of the silver screen she most identifies with, and she says Dolly Parton. Tee hee. She's got the oh-my-gosh nuh-uh of the small-town Texan.
Sure, Jessica Simpson is a lot like you would expect.
But look close.
Blow her off if you want. Say, She's not even that hot. Yesterday's news. Last year's pinup.
Now look even closer: She may have come from the same Mickey Mouse oven as her pantyless comrades, but unlike them, she is not melting. She is not checking in and out of rehab. She is not squeezing out babies like wet gremlins. She is not selling night-vision sex tapes on the Internet.
Now look north, into her eyes: Jessica Simpson is the future face of the new American job of celebrity, the first of the self-made, small-talent applicants who'll last a Liz Taylor lifetime.

She conjures the sensation of palming the cheerleader's ass behind the bleachers on unwilted September afternoons...You can see it in her girlfriend face. A face that lets men know she will one day be a good mother, with the promise of postpartum sex in her eyes. She says her lips are chapped from kissing. Maybe if you got close enough to kiss them you would see the reflection in her eyes — a football flying past the iris, a cheerleader pom-pomming in the back of the retina.

Simpson kept the cheerleader skirt on. She didn't give in whole naked hog to our imaginations.

"I've come to realize that the more I censor myself, the lest people relate to me," she says. "I went through a period in my life where I kept to myself, this last year and a half. And this is the first time, as I'm making my country album right now, I've had to just lay it all out there and go to that place where I'm comfortable saying, 'Here's my world, come back in.'

And this, the MONEY ANECDOTE:

She's talking about her favorite bra. She's saying that she's wearing it. "What is the damn name?" she asks the ceiling. She rustles around in her sweatshirt. "iI can't ever...watch me, I'm gonna take it off..."
She starts removing the bra under her sweatshirt. "This is so something I would do...Um." The bra is off and in her hands. "It's this. I LOVE this." Love is always in italics, capitalized. Bold-faced, underlined, drop-shadowed...."This store is unbelievable. Kiki de Montparnasse. I'm definitely black lace. Red lace is cheesy but black lace, hmm..."
This is Jessica Simpson.
Just a normal girl, a twenty-seven year-old preacher's daughter with a good-sized heart....at least here we've turned a real-live girl into something more: the lost American metaphor. A blond from Nowhere, Texas, holding a $200 bra in her hands. She knows she doesn't deserve it because of who she is.

You believe her. She's in for the long haul. So he'll continue playing the part, working her way up. She'll be Daisy Duke, she'll wear sort shorts, she'll be a blonde and act like a ditz on camera. She won't bitch about not being in a Woody Allen film or try to write a postmodern novel about canned tuna. Nothing will be handed to Jessica Simpson.

Hahahaha, I found something. It was a crap email I received recently from a particularly exasperating dude. 44.44% FEMALE. Just for fun, I tested the exasperated email I sent him back: 81.16% MALE. Pyhrric victory if there ever motherfucking was one, but still.

Gender Guesser

Conventional wisdom holds that women's magazines aren't as good as men's magazines. That would be correct. Because where the general sin of men's magazines is going overboard — overthinking, overreaching, overwriting, women spend more money on stupid crap so their magazines don't have to win any prestigious awards to justify their existences as anything other than mindless profiligography! Anyway, that's why we like to solicit the advice of manly men's magazine male writer Tom Wolfian (not a real name!) to critique the ladymags for us. He's very busy and very important!

Dear Allison, Jonathan, Johanna, Carole, and Sherry:

No sleep last night for Mister Wolfian. So beware, gynoscribes. I'm pissy. It's the fault of my headstrong tabby cat, Mister Langewiesche. Little fucker spent the entire night digging mites out of his ears, raining little brown clumps of ear gunk onto my nice clean 600-thread count sheets. Seems impossible that that my midtown condo, luxury-constructed at $5 a word, could be so thoroughly soiled by a dirty kitty — but live and learn, gynoscribes, live and learn. So forgive me if I woke up to my assignment from the Jezebelles — a thoughtful, measured, articulate review of the celebrity profiles in the November issues of some major women's magazines, edging toward a general theory of the State of the Ladies' Magazine Celebrity Profile Today — and couldn't get past the description of Ashley Judd as an "actress, southerner, and infectious romantic" without thinking... infectious romantic. Whore with herpes.

Maybe it's me? (And nothing against herpes!!!!)

But I'm in a mood. I want to be nice. But I am not up to it today. So I'm dropping the whole premise of articulate thoughtful whatever in favor of telling you what I really think, because that's how real men talk about other men's stories in editorial meetings as long as the man who wrote the story isn't actually in the room. And the truth is, gynoscribes, it feels kind of good to be mean. It feels like revenge. A cleansing, radiant revenge. Because I have just read every one of your profiles from beginning to end. With the joyless, mercenary dedication of a child soldier. Perhaps one of the very same child soldiers whom so many of your celebrity subjects are now dedicated to helping. And you know what they say about war, ladies.

(It's no worse than learning the profession you love is shared by someone who would actually pose this "question" to Mariah Carey: ""When I read in the New Yorker than you hit one of the highest notes produced by a human voice that's ever been recorded, I got a chill and it almost made me believe in magic... So you're a diva and a genie!")

So to proceed, here is what I gleaned from each of your profiles, in 100 words or less:

"Ashley Judd's Love Trip" by Allison Glock, Redbook, p. 150
Ashley sad. Insecure. Angry all the time. Who knows why? Not Ashley. Then Ashley marry race-car driver. Ashley happy. Yet still sad. Ashley do drugs. Or something. Depression, rehab. Then Ashley find God in the poor. Ashley go on what she call "feel your feelings tour" of India. The poor "is my church." Clotheswise, Ashley like "ruching. I love a little ruffle." Ashley surprisingly grounded for a celebrity!
POSSIBLY RELEVANT TOPICS NOT BROACHED: "Heat." "Frida." "Natural Born Killers." Experiences re: any interesting movie she's ever filmed. Kissing prowess of Ensign Wesley Crusher.

"Dark Victory" by Jonathan Van Meter, Vogue, p. 327
Celebrity Profiled: Jennifer Connelly
Jennifer Connelly is a smart girl who lives a low-key life in Park Slope. "Nothing too scandalous." (What's scandalous is that $3.7 million actually isn't scandalous in this idiotic town, though I should admit I'm cheating here; Vogue doesn't tell us the sale price, so I had to use Google). Despite this, she and her actor husband "blend in with all the other young families in the neighborhood." Jennifer is, like, really, really smart. And surprisingly grounded for a celebrity!
POSSIBLY RELEVANT TOPICS NOT BROACHED: Anorexia. That sex scene in "Requiem for a Dream." David Bowie; Muppets; man-tights; what it's like to act in a movie with David Bowie wearing man-tights with Muppets.

"What's Up, Doc?" by Johanna Schneller, Marie Claire, p. 129
Celebrity Profiled: Kate Walsh, star of "Private Practice"
" 'I do feel I'm here to love, and to keep being curious, to better myself and give back to the world. That's the magical thing that happened with Grey's [Anatomy] — it was a cultural contribution. It sparked conversations, particularly for women. That's a great feeling. Rather than just, How to keep your butt firmer.' Walsh laughs again. BTW, her butt is just fine."
POSSIBLY RELEVANT TOPICS NOT BROACHED: Conversation-sparking potential of Kate's new show, particularly the scene where she dances naked on the deck of her new house and gets spotted by her hunky new doctor-colleague. 150-250-word elaboration on "just fine."

"Come On In! It's Mariah's House" by Carole Radziwill, Glamour, p. 266
Celebrity Profiled: Mariah Carey
Marriage to Tommy Mottola. Divorce. "Exhaustion." Perfume. "America: A Tribute to Heroes." Mariah is surprisingly grounded for a celebrity!
POSSIBLY RELEVANT TOPICS NOT BROACHED: Marriage to Tommy Mottola. Divorce. "Exhaustion." Psychic salience of creepy overabundance of pink Hello Kitty products in the home Mariah calls "Sing Sing."

"Thanksgiving Is My Favorite Holiday" by Sherry Suib Cohen, Ladies' Home Journal, p. 199
Celebrity Profiled: Food Network hostess Paula Deen
Paula Bubba Dawn Bubba Peggy Otis Cody Bodine walkin' laughin' say grace cook kook kooky damn fine instructions for fryin' a turkey plus poker catfish Uncle Bernie Aunt Glennis Aunt Beth Bubba macaroni ham mayonnaise GET OFFA THAT DAMN PHONE spatula gallonjug fame money fleeting not like family family never fades away Paula surprisingly grounded for a celebrity!
POSSIBLY RELEVANT TOPICS NOT BROACHED: n/a

In a way, gynoscribes, what I'm doing here isn't fair. You're the easiest of easy targets; you're writing the most vapid copy in magazines we all know are pretty vapid to begin with. But there is, in fact, a larger idea behind all this bile, even if it's taken me 600 words to get that idea to bubble up through the hot, acrid smell of Belarussian-refugee perfume and Revolution-brand feline pest drops that is now commingling in my aforementioned sweet-ass condo. And that idea is that even in the world of celebrity profiling — a world that's pretty fairly corrupted on both sides of the gendered magazine divide — there are useful lessons that Vogue and Redbook and Glamour et. al. can learn from Esquire, GQ, Details and the like. Because just trust me... you'll never find anything in GQ as artless as some of the paragraphs I came across in your pieces this morning. Here's one that stuck in my side like a rusty lawn dart:

When I mention to Connelly that I thought her character was probably more like her than not [her character in "Reservation Road" being a grieving mother whose 10-year-old son has been killed by a hit-and-run driver], she tilts her head and says, "Um. I don't know. I didn't really think about her in that way." When I tell her that I meant that her character seems like a stable person in a good marriage with wonderful children, she laughs. "Thank you!" She shifts in her chair and then acknowledges the similarities. "Yes," she says, "I think she is quite rational and clear. She winds up being incredibly resourceful in this situation... She has incredible reserves of strength. And I think she has an almost defining love for her children, which I think I have in common with her. She's completely in awe of her kids."

See, there's no reason for any celeb-profile writer to look this dense in print. Really, there's no reason to try to do the job on its own terms. It's a sucker's game, as we all know. There's no way to write a fleshy, revealing piece about a celeb when all you get is a lunch and some kind of follow-up call or off-the-record "hangout" time moderated by some chick with suspiciously straight hair and a hunted look who doesn't know a sentence that's not: "Did you get what you need? Do you need anything? Here's my card if you need anything!!!!"

This is the cold, hard truth that successful celeb-profile writers at men's magazines have long since realized and run with. And because they've learned how to treat the job with disdain, they've been able to cast off those chains, gynoscribes. They're free. And they're writing more interesting stories because of it. The traditional critique of the genre tends to paint the profile writers as fawning sycophants, but in my (vast, hard-won, gimlet-eyed) experience that's not true. The apparent sycophancy is just a cover for a deeper trait and a deeper goal, which is a happy and useful one: to keep the writer's brain engaged. The modern mensmag celeb profile is actually a surprisingly prayerful, if superficial, blend of braggadocio and dogged practice. Unlike the celeb profiles in women's magazines, the profiles in Esquire/GQ/Details tend to recognize celebrity as a fundamentally alien thing, an institution to be marveled at and toyed with. The work of writing about celebrity is not real work. It's a break from the real work. It is The Writer's Time To Jizz — a way to keep that writerly muscle loose and limber and tuned up for the next Big Plunge... for that 14,000-word hillock of ASME-judge porn that all of us contract heroes have got sitting on our laptops. (Many of which, if we're being truthful, are nowhere near as playful or, in a weird way, honest as our best celeb pieces.) This is why you're way more likely to see something really formally or thematically inventive in a celeb profile than in a respectable magazine feature about politics or business or art or whatever. There's nothing to lose. So each celeb profile becomes a little underdog story, an uplifting tale of a ragtag writer saddled with a task that Nobody Thought He Could Ever Pull Off: Can he spin a few hours' worth of smalltalk and smiles into a revolution?

Sometimes, gynoscribes, he can:

This is a 9/11 story. Granted, it's also a celebrity profile — well, a profile of Angelina Jolie — and so calling it a 9/11 story may sound like a stretch. But that's the point. It's a 9/11 story because it's a celebrity profile — because celebrities and their perceived power are a big part of the strange story of how America responded to the attacks upon it. And no celebrity plays a bigger role in that strange story than Angelina Jolie.

This Esquire piece — and there's no more fruitful place to look for this stuff than Esquire — is essentially a mental exercise, the reification of a writer's private dare to himself; the important action here is all happening in the writer's (Tom Junod's) head, which is what makes it such a perfect document of this particular strain of writer-hero ambition, such a perfect jarring crashing clanging smashing collision of high and low, of material and purpose, task and talent. It's like watching Garry Kasparov play tic-tac-toe. Which is of course the whole point... to show your readers how valiantly you're chafing against the strictures of your impossible assignment while simultaneously transcending those strictures WITH MERE WORDS:

CUT TO:
EXT. HOTEL COURTYARD
CHARLIZE [THERON] pinches her eye shut against a waft of smoke.
CHARLIZE
What choice do I have? I can't go anywhere. Not if we want to talk. This is L.A. I mean, if you can find me some taco place, a place where we can go, sit around, drink beers, argue politics, and be left alone, then take me there. I'll go with you. I'm yours. Those places don't exist for me. There aren't any little joints for me. The screen FREEZES. The background fades, the moment at the Chateau [Marmont] untiles itself in some fashion and is replaced, retiled, and patched in all around CHARLIZE and the WRITER, who are suddenly sitting across from each other at an empty taco joint, another place of the writer's contrivance, this one grittier in detail than the lake, glowingly lit by the late afternoon sun. CHARLIZE and the WRITER are in the middle of something, something like an argument, something like a hashing out between friends. The place is the WRITER's daydream, but the conversation is real.
CHARLIZE
So what do you think will happen with Roe v. Wade?
WRITER
I'm the writer. I ask the questions.
CHARLIZE
Just tell me. Just say it.

The WRITER here is Tom Chiarella, a facile writer whose profile of Charlize Theron complains that nobody will ever read it because they'll be too busy looking at the pictures. The piece is very weird and very smooth. It's a pastiche of fiction and meta-criticism (several of the scenes are phone calls between the WRITER and his EDITOR about the terribleness of the Chateau Marmont as an interview location) and calculated banality. And gynoscribes, it manages to do something that none of your pieces accomplish, which is to make both the subject and the author seem like decent and halfway intelligent human beings who basically know what the deal is, this absurd magazine-profile deal, and are trying to find an honorable way to come out of it with at least as much self-respect — and certainly more money/exposure — as they had when they came in.

The downside of all this fierce invention is that, as with other forms of self-pleasure, it tends to have diminishing returns. In fact, the only place left to go may be... straight-up fiction.

That's all I've got for ya, gynoscribes. The ear gunk is still flying, and I have to get Weeshie back to the vet.

-Wolfian

Conventional wisdom holds that men's magazines are better than women's magazines. That would be correct. Below, our manly men's magazine writer Tim Wolfian offers 'Glamour' dating blogger Alyssa Shelasky some gentle advice on love, literacy, Sexy Euro and Edgy English Teacher...

And yet here you are, Alyssa, blogging for Glamour magazine about the comings and goings of your Brazilian-waxed bod; and here I am, Tim Wolfian, writing J-school memos for the blogworld equivalent of Ally Sheedy in The Breakfast Club. In my defense, I only accepted this assignment after the Jezebel gals — a terrible ferocity in their eyes, bits of Cap 'N' Crunch-and-sugar sandwiches between their teeth — fawned extravagantly over my wallet pics of Mr. Langewiesche, my dashing, headstrong black tabby. ("Weeshie" for short.)

But enough. Let's get to the heart of the Shelasky blog/life/blog/life crisis. I have now read three months' worth of your blog posts. Here is what have I learned. You are 29. You live in New York. The HBO character with whom you most identify is Brenda from Six Feet Under. You used to work for US Weekly. Your social capital allows you to have dinner at the Waverly Inn and spend summers in the Hamptons even though you don't have any steady sources of income save your blog (and maybe your parents). You do an hour of "hard cardio" every day. You once allowed yourself to be faux-tattooed by fifteen Swedish rappers called "Speech Defect" (Mr. Wolfian sends big ups to Mr Linus, Boogie B, Thage and Prao-D). You love New York, except when you're in L.A, because L.A. "feels so authentically me"; you are casual-sex-positive, and have dated a million guys on both coasts, but lately you are "obsessed with eloping, and although you think your bicoastal "gypsy" life is "cool" — your therapist called it "unsettled" — you do wonder sometimes, just like you wonder about your skanky ex-boyfriend "Edgy English Teacher," whom you abbreviate as EET, and your difficult breakup with "Greek Dentist," the great love of your life, whom you abbreviate, confusingly, as GD, which I misread the first time as the Jewish abbreviation for G*D, and which misreading really fucked me up ("GD bought me those /tearful/ Manolos!"). Most poignantly, Alyssa, you seem to realize that many of the things your friends think are important are actually — well, you put it best:

Just got back from B's "Change for Kids" event at Room Service, this new "hot spot" (and I use that term loosely) in the Flatiron district. It was like this "/make a donation, make your mother proud, have a million free martinis and save the children"/ thing. Great cause, girls in pearls, endless smalltalk, you know the drill.

The problem here is not Alyssa Shelasky, the person; unlike my Jezebel editors, whose opinion of you is, I'm afraid, not kind, I think you are well-intentioned and probably very decent. The problem is that your well-intentioned decency is obscured by layers of terrible prose. How often can you "fall in lust" and "go with the flow"? How often can those "sun-kissed afternoons" make you feel like you "had wings"? How often can you look for major life solutions in the email-forward wisdom of your dipshit friends ("If you love him, let him go")?

I don't think it's incidental that some of your romantic frustrations concern guys who believe you're not "interesting enough, exotic enough, jet-setter enough" to steadily date/fuck. Witness your romantic Paris dinner with the man you call "Sexy Euro." The two of you meet at a "charming" cafe, where you say you "lit up at the first sight of him" because he "turns me on." Over steak frites and red wine, you grill Sexy Euro about his educational background. He gets pissy with the waiter, which you don't like. He starts "blabbing about god-knows-what." At the end of the dinner, the two of you part ways with vague plans to meet up again stateside, but as much as you'd like to show him off to your friends — "he is called SEXY EURO for a reason!" — you're not sure if his charms outweigh his faults. You ask your readers for advice.

This dinner seems to have frustrated you, but I'm not sure I know why; personally, and I'm sure my four ex-wives will back me up on this, I've always believed that yelling at waiters is a sign of alpha-male virility. Clearly, Alyssa, you need something from Sexy Euro at this dinner that you don't get. But I'm guessing that the feeling is mutual. Sexy Euro needs something too. What he needs, in the absence of actual sex, is a good story. He needs a story to tell his buddies just like you need a story to share with your blog readers. He needs to fixate on some sexual/personal detail that distinguishes you, Alyssa Shelasky, from every other 29-year-old woman who grew up reading gyno-mags and whose neural net, forked through with all that bad writing and banal romantic advice, is the author of a vapid non-persona — who knows, maybe you're the kind of girl who masturbates in the shower and opens her mouth sooooooooo wide at the moment of orgasm to let the hot shower water fill her mouth like a cup, like the woman in Vox — except the problem for Sexy Euro is that he doesn't get anything close to this at your Paris dinner, anything creepy or intriguing or mysterious or soul-laid-bare honest. I bet I know what he gets instead. I bet he gets the same sun-kissed ALYSSACENTRIC sentiments that we, your blog readers, already know are as intriguing as EZ-Pass, as mysterious as Lunchables. Alyssa, I think Sexy Euro would be surprised to hear that you identify so strongly with Brenda from Six Feet Under — passionate, dark, impulsive, complex, fucks-a-guy-in-a-broom-closet Brenda. Brenda is a mess but she is also a STORY MACHINE. Sexy Euro needs a hook, but his girl Shelasky is dud velcro. No hooks. So maybe — just a guess here — he fixates on anatomy. Maybe he looks up from his frites and thinks... wow, big forehead. Cute girl, gigantic forehead. I could shave in its reflection.

Now I'm not saying, Alyssa, that Sexy Euro is some great catch. He would never share his insecurities on a blog, and that makes you a braver person than he. Still, the prose, babe, the prose, the prose.

Two suggestions. First, look to EET, your "Edgy English Teacher" ex-boyfriend to whom you turn over your blog in times — Sundance? self-purification? — of overcommitment . EET is a promising prose stylist. His guest posts are funny, breezy, and utterly transparent. He conveys exactly the kind of person he is. I know this guy without ever having met him; I know what he thinks and feels and dreams; I know, with complete certainty, that he is a sashimi-grade douchebag. Alyssa, offer EET something "edgy" in exchange for writing lessons. I have a feeling he'll respond with enthusiasm.

My second bit of advice is to raise the stakes. If there is a shared quality of mensmag writers, it's that we are tortured, and willing to share that torturedness for three dollars a word. We are constantly returning to the sites of our childhood traumas: The dead parents, the murdered classmates, the bullies that beat us up and the girls who never wanted to blow us. In the world of gyno-mags, Mariane Pearl is doing something similar, turning herself into a global avatar of suffering, a hotter, thinner Sally Struthers. You need to push yourself toward catharsis, Alyssa. Fly to Greece. Confront Greek Dentist, to whom you are always circling back in brief cryptic references, much like Yossarian circles back to the memory of Snowden. Or at least throw your readers a frickin' bone and sooooooo tart it up stateside with a few decent necking sessions already!!!!!!!!

All that said, Alyssa, I wish you luck finding a good man. And if you are interested in discussing your career in journalism further, perhaps over a glass of single-malt scotch — the very same scotch that the late Art Cooper presented to me as a hiring gift years ago, and which he and I used to sip while leaning against the sturdy rail of Art's Manhattan balcony, looking out wistfully at the East River, talking about our wives and our lost loves — and, also, Alyssa, if you are not allergic to cats — MySpace-message me, screenname SINATRAHADACOLD, and we'll talk.

— Mr. Wolfian

Alyssacentric [Glamour]
Earlier: When Writing About A Pretty Lady In Iraq, At Least Do A Decent Job Describing Her Prettiness

Conventional wisdom holds that women's magazines aren't as good as men's magazines. That would be correct. So we hired a manly-man type men's magazine contributor to "coach" our favorite ladymag writers. You are so welcome in advance!

Rebecca, babe, holy crap, wow wow wow. I just read your profile of CBS war correspondent Lara Logan, and, well, ordinarily I would never say "wow" or "holy crap" in the public prints, but your story's terribleness has jolted me out of the manly and muscular prose style for which I am perpetually showered with Ellies. Let's hope it's only temporary. Honestly, Rebecca, I sympathize with your plight. We all phone it in occasionally. I mean, many's the time that Graydon or Nelson has given me all of two days to churn out one of my signature 9,000-word epics on some topic about which I know fuck-all, and with a godlike POV to boot, regardless of whether there's time to earn that godlike POV through proper reporting. Magazine writing is hard. Believe me, Rebecca, I'm not here to judge. I'm here to help.

So let's talk Lara Logan. You lead with a scene of Logan in the TV studio, getting her makeup done. When a tech tries to fit her with an earpiece, she freaks:

"I see earwax," she said, smiling at him, holding the earpiece aloft.
"It's new," the man protested.
"Look." She held it up to the light.

After spending a few days with her, I've come to see the moment as classic Logan. She's cheerful but dogged. Friendly but persistent. And basically impossible to resist. The man returned with a bag of new earpieces.

The story ends with four grafs so depressing, so saturated with death and the Void, that you almost forget that they have nothing to do with the death and the Void of, you know, being in the middle of a war.

At 36, Logan herself is finally beginning to understand how, like it or not, life eventually pushes you one way or the other. "When you're eighteen," she says, "you reject the notion that you can't have a career and a family... [work] takes a heavier toll than you realize. And when you do, it's too late."

Rebecca, I think I realize the problem. See, if you're not interested in writing about the big things... the texture of Logan's actual job... what it's it's like to be there in Iraq, to make high-stakes decisions in a war zone, to argue with network bosses about coverage, to get hate mail from the American Right—as opposed to, say, Logan's tips for doing laundry in Afghanistan (take that AMERICAN APPAREL!!! tee and bang it against a rock!)—well then, you've got to lavish attention on the little things. When you phone it in, you've got to take to the tiny details and extrude them into big insights. Find a pebble and use it to tell the history of the universe to date, or at least a good yarn about the human condition. COMMIT.

And commitment starts with the lede. I'd suggest beginning the story with what I like to call a "Junod Graf," in honor of the Esquire master himself, Tom Junod. To write a gripping Junod Graf, follow these two simple rules. One: The Junod Graf must be written in a wizened, storytelly voice not unlike that of the sea captain in Jaws (feel free to visualize Robert Shaw if this helps). Two: The Junod Graf must conflate your own emotional hangups with whatever you imagine to be the emotional hangups of your subject. Because, Rebecca, is this story really, at its core, about Lara Logan? Isn't it really about you, Rebecca Johnson? To get a feel for what I'm talking about, check out this classic example from the Junod canon. In your own story, Rebecca, with your own set of facts and hangups—prettiness as a cross to be borne, etc.—a Junod Graf might look like this:

You didn't ask for the ginsu cheekbones. You didn't ask for that startled circumflex of a mouth, those limpid pools of azure in your eyes. You didn't ask for the taut flanks and the breasts like artisan challah. You didn't ask for the ass. Aye, the ass. You didn't ask for any of it, and that's exactly the thing that nobody around you ever understood. That you were a reluctant martyr. That you were the pretty, pretty baby in the barn. Your beauty was your hindrance, and your hindrance was your beauty; your freelance writing income was your gaping need, and your gaping need was your freelance writing income. Would you be a bad person if you used these things, these soft warm parts of you, to get ahead in the world? Would you be a bad person if you didn't? In the end, of course, you made made The Decision. You took The Job. We all do. We all wish we could.

Also, you might consider reading the clips. A quick Google search reveals this juicy exchange between Ms. Logan and CNN's Howie Kurtz, in which Howie asks our intrepid gal one of those unspeakably irresponsible, unkillable, spawn-of-Limbaugh questions that CNN anchors are always pretending they don't know better than to ask—namely, Why aren't Iraq correspondents reporting all the GOOD NEWS IN IRAQ?—and Logan responds with some justifiably righteous anger. Becks, here is your subject engaging one of the most important press questions of our time, and from a place of real knowledge. I don't know if it's a "quintessential Logan moment," but it's certainly promising material. On the other hand, I can see why you didn't include it, because it suggests that Logan may be a person of substance and courage after all, which is incompatible with your chosen Take.

Finally, Becks? One last thing? You know how you say that Logan interviewing Bonnie Fuller is like "a racehorse pulling a plow"? Not that I'm some fan of Bonnie Fuller, but... babe, that is just mean.
—Mr. Wolfian