Lemondrop

I read a New York Times article about The Nation magazine this week. It suggested that The Nation, founded in 1865, fell on hard times after the election of Barack Obama, our gay Nazi Muslim president, but that it may benefit from the rise of the Tea Party.

At the top of the page was a picture of Katrina vanden Heuvel (left), The Nation's editor and publisher. She started at the left-leaning weekly as an intern and left-winged her way to the top.

Based on her photo in the Times, she struck me as intelligent, principled and kind of hot. I realize there's probably a dedicated circle in hell for guys who comment on the hotness of female magazine editors, especially editors of progressive magazines that pre-date the oceans and the mountains and the sky. But please bear with me.

Curious about Ms. vanden Heuvel, I shuffled over to a popular website called the Facebook, and saw that she had a profile and 175 friends. I was sort of surprised, given her job title, but then I was irritated with myself for being surprised. Who cares, right? It's just Facebook.

I puzzled over the issue and decided I needed a dose of context, so I looked into how vanden Heuvel stacks up against other female magazine editors. I started close to home with my friend Aurelie Jezequel, the co-editor of a photography magazine called Resource. Jezequel, as shy as the cheetah is swift, has 432 friends on Facebook.

I moved further afield! Cristina Greeven of Manhattan File? No publicly viewable Facebook page. Same with Anna Wintour of Vogue and Brandon Holley, now editor of Lucky. Information for this glitzy cohort was scarce. I then took a brief detour from print into digital. Not many surprises there. Jezebel editor Jessica Coen comes in with 852 friends, versus 1,863 for Gawker founding editor Elizabeth Spiers, versus 4,257 for Media Bistro founder Laurel Touby. I found no data for Tina Brown of The Daily Beast. That surprised me, actually; I thought she'd be on it.

Then there is Arianna, gazing down with an Aegean beneficence on the 157,566 fans who have liked her on Facebook. Reflecting on the size of her following, it occurred to me that with some training and a few AK's they could have stabilized Iraq. They could adequately populate Iowa. Arianna more than doubles Oprah's 61,757 likes, with enough left over for a manicure and blow-out.

But in all fairness, these are not the races we should have vanden Heuvel running. The ideal comparator for her would not be fashionistas or New Media femme fatales. More fitting would be editors of print news magazines. So much the better if these magazines, like The Nation, pre-date the inchoate burblings of our Neanderthal forbearers as they wallowed in the muck of Creation.

There is, based on my cursory research, one woman who fits this narrow profile: Ellen Rosenbush. Ellen Rosenbush is the editor of Harper's, she has a profile on Facebook, and as of Nov. 11 she has 34 friends. Compared to Rosenbush, vanden Heuvel's Facebook activity can be characterized as volcanic in its scope and fury.

Of course, making friends on Facebook is not part of these women's job descriptions. They're editors, not prom queens. Ellen Rosenbush is not a protoplasmic appendage of Harper's magazine. She's a human being with her own thoughts. Her own needs. Her own emotions.

I concede these points, but tucked into the concession is a however, and the however looks something like this: If you are the editor of a prominent national magazine, and one day you wrap your arm around the Internet and tell it that you only have 12 friends on Facebook, it doesn't look so good. Especially for the editor of a publication that is ... ancient.

To my (admittedly vapid) mind, this is akin to showing up for work in sweats. You run the risk of creating a perception among and readers and job candidates that your publication is a cul de sac that time and the digital age forgot. While we're on the topic, if you really want to cultivate a new generation of readers, why not toss a few LMFAOs into that upcoming 5,000-word article about Burmese garment workers?

Does all of this mean vanden Heuvel and Rosenbush need to put in their demanding work weeks and then go home and get all stupid on the Internet for 20 hours? No. If you'll follow me into my recreation area over here (mind the Chewbacca action figures on the floor, please), you'll see I've ferreted out two reasonable solutions:

1) Fix your profile so people can't see how many friends you have. Better yet, hire a young intern who actually knows how to do this, and have him do it for you. Stuff like that is his calling and his destiny.

2) Grab and hold your Luddite proclivities to your bosom and flee Facebook's orbit entirely. Leave it gasping and disoriented in the exhaust of your Towncar. For your sake, and for the sake of our soldiers fighting bravely in Iraq, and for the sake of Chewbacca, and for the sake of the children, just let it go.

Thank you for your kind attention.


Stephen Kosloff has more Facebook friends than there are stars in the sky. When not networking socially, he is a freelance writer and photographer who has written for The New York Times, Gawker, Time Out New York, the New York Post, and The Cambodia Daily. His photographs have been published by The New York Times, Interview Magazine, Paper Magazine, Gawker, CNN, Huffington Post, Time Out New York, Media Bistro, Brooklyn Vegan, Organizing for America and Resource Magazine.