Editors Are Making Their Lists, Checking Them Twice

It’s the time of year when, driven by dubious motives, magazine editors concoct dubious lists of dubious length.

Although of dubious import, such lists are among the 25 Easiest Ways to Fill a Column About Magazines. (Other favorites include: discussion of Utne Reader theme issues (No. 9), reference to Spy magazine parodies of other publications (16), critiques of American Spectator hit pieces on liberal icons (22) and in-depth analysis of a New Yorker three-part series or special issue (7)).

What’s most interesting about this year’s bumper crop is that even the perennially upbeat lists are largely depressing. Take, for instance, Discovery’s “Top 50 Science Stories.”

Right off the bat, the magazine hits a sour note, mentioning the Mars Observer’s untimely disappearance, disappearing congressional funding for the Superconducting Supercollider and cutbacks on the space station.

But some science stories were more upbeat and fascinating:

* Reginald Newell, a climatologist at MIT, discovered that vast rivers of water vapor swirl through the atmosphere moving moisture all over the globe.

* There’s not much cheerful on the AIDS front, but epidemiologist Francis Plummer and others have found statistically small groups with astonishing immunological resistance to HIV, the virus that causes AIDS, and to the disease. Within that phenomenon may lie clues to treatment.

* It took him seven years and 200 pages of figuring, but mathematician Andrew Wiles seems to have proved the theorem scrawled by Pierre Fermat more than 350 years ago. (It has to do with the impossibility of arriving at whole-number solutions in Pythagorean theorem-like equations when one cubes the sides of a right triangle--or uses larger exponents.)

Wiles, in fact, is one of People Weekly’s “25 Most Intriguing People” of 1993. Don’t confuse People with Scientific American, though. Also on People’s list are such non-newsworthies as Susan Powter and Lorena Bobbitt.

Others may also make readers despair for the state of intrigue: Rush Limbaugh, Sheik Omar Abdel Rahman, Howard Stern, Janet Reno, Shannen Doherty. . . .

In a narrower field of interest, the January Popular Mechanics lists its Design and Engineering Awards, including: GM’s automatic van door opener, the SSC Radisson Diamond twin-hull cruise ship, Matsushita’s flat vision television and Apple’s Newton MessagePad.

U.S. News & World Report, meanwhile, makes 20 Predictions for 1994, such as:

* 20. Soccer will catch fire in the United States.

* 11. North Korea will become President Clinton’s Cuban Missile Crisis.

* 9. Russian President Boris Yeltsin will turn authoritarian.

Given the predominantly grim nature of news and predictions, it’s no wonder that the most entertaining list by far this year is the most cynical: Esquire’s Dubious Achievement Awards.

Don’t yawn. This annual list has been getting a bit predictable, but this year’s is more blistering than usual.

You know how it works. The magazine comes up with a bunch of people and events, sticks them in little boxes, and adds witty captions that make the people or events look really stupid.

Here are the cheap shots that readers are advised to skip without even reading the predictable captions (or inventing their own): John Wayne Bobbitt (he’s Man of the Year), Michael Jackson, Barney, Chevy Chase, Fabio, Robert James Waller and Roger Clinton.

(Actually, one mention of Jackson is kind of funny. It features a picture of Michael Milken, who “announced plans to form an interactive educational television network with Michael Jackson.” To which Esquire adds the caption: “If we’re gonna get interactive, let’s leave Jackson out of it.”)

Speaking of peculiar pop icons--the spread’s best photo is of Sinead O’Connor. The box quotes a poem she sent to a newspaper. It reads, in part:

Stop hurting me please.

Saying mean things about me.

I’ve been in public since I was only 20.

Still a sad baby.

Esquire’s caption:

Grow your hair.

Get a life.

We’re really glad you’re not our wife.

Really.

Please.

Thank you.

Even better, though, are the fake advertisements interspersed through the awards section. They’re so real (despite their absurdity) that readers will do triple takes.

The “Feed the Waifs” ad, for instance, is a dead-on satire of skinny models (and cloying charitable advertisements).

The best one, however, shows Bill and Hillary Clinton doing a “What’s on Your PowerBook?” ad for Apple.

Among Hillary’s files: Microsoft 1-2-3, Microsoft Office, Oxford English Dictionary and a P.I.’s report on Bill’s nocturnal activities.

Bill’s files include: Mortal Kombat, database of Elvis movies and albums, Barbi Twins calendar, people whose pain I feel, database of my siblings, movie stars’ home phone numbers and Sharon Stone’s NAFTA position.

If Esquire’s awards top the Most Tasteless List, the magazine’s cover gets the nod for Most Tasteless Aspect of the Most Tasteless List.

There, in full flesh tone, is the real Heidi Fleiss, doing a Rolling Stone-esque pose with two hands grasping her breasts. One hand, naturally, wears a white glove.

Even more scandalous: In an inside photo, the pose is reversed, with Heidi groping Deputy Editor David Hirshey, the man behind the award. “In nine years of heading up Dubious Achievements,” he says, “I’ve never been quite so touched.”

*

Required Reading: The January-February Mother Jones charges into the gun-control battle armed to the teeth, with a hard-hitting package of features and essays.

The most innovative part is a page of full-color, anti-gun stamps, each designed by one of 12 artists.

But the most potent feature combines Joseph Rodriguez’s photographs and Richard Rodriguez’s text to examine gangbanging in East L.A.

The lead photo, of a young gangbanger putting a revolver in the hand of a baby daughter-- while her mother watches adoringly--makes a frank bookend to a funeral portrait of a drive-by shooter’s 2-year-old victim.

Richard Rodriguez’s accompanying essay simmers with disgust for gangsterism, but he reserves his purest contempt for middle-class outsiders who get some vicarious kick from the rhetoric and trappings of gangsta chic while remaining utterly unempathetic to the daily tragedy reflected in the photos.

* The January Details profiles former Black Flag-man Henry Rollins as “a fearsome man confronting his fears. And ours. . . . A big brother for the walking wounded, a hard-core humanist.”

Rollins tells slackers the secret of surviving to age 32 in spite of some lousy circumstances: “I didn’t get a Ph.D. I just said, ‘I don’t want to work at Pizza Hut. I don’t want to join the Navy. I guess I’ll just have to go out and be awesome.’ ”

* On TV, David Letterman sometimes seems cold, snide and solipsistic. In the January Playboy interview, he comes across as what his TV persona might refer to as “a fine human being.”

Of the woman who repeatedly breaks into his house--who even camped out on his tennis court recently, he says: “This woman has, in my assessment, been failed by the judicial system, been failed by the state psychiatric system--if in fact there is one--failed by her family and failed by her friends. . . . I’m just befuddled and perplexed. Not because she’s doing anything to me, but this woman needs so much help and so much attention and has not received anything.”