SUPERSTAR 'QUARTERBACK': If I'm lucky, I hope someday to have a journalistic career kind of like Gregg Easterbrook's. The aerospace expert and Senior Editor of The New Republic has been a bit of a cause celebre in the last week, by virtue of an article he wrote for Washington Monthly in 1980 that exposed flaws in the Space Shuttle system (and the Columbia specifically), and essentially predicted last week's disaster; Easterbrook wrote an equally well-received piece for Time last week, making many of the same arguments.
What's funny is that Easterbook lives a sort of journalistic double-life: in addition to his TNR and Atlantic Monthly duties and various book projects, Easterbrook is also author of "Tuesday Morning Quarterback," a weekly column published on ESPN.com during football season. TMQ is long (sometimes as many as 5000 words), and chockful of not only insightful, humorous analysis of the various intricicies of the game, but also of cheesecake photos of "megababe" cheerleaders, and even a "Cheerleader of the Week" feature.
(Easterbrook is also, as I pointed out a few months ago, at least one of the authors of TNR's anonymous &c. blog, as exposed when he copied a paragraph word-for-word from a TMQ column and posted it to &c. And you heard it here first!)
Just as Andrew Sullivan's success has come in spite of (or perhaps because) of his specific honesty about his sexual proclivities, Gregg Easterbrook's rise is proof positive that a male writer can be completely honest about his fondness for bikini-clad babes, and still be taken seriously as a legitimate journalist. And it's also indicative of a decline of feminist influence in the liberal media- if Easterbrook, whose politics can safely be described as left-of-center, had emerged as a journalistic celebrity ten or fifteen years ago, his constant use of cheesecake pics and words like "megababe" would have been cause for outrage, and perhaps even boycotts of the outlets that publish him.
Another indication of declining feminist media power? The continuing dissolution of Maureen Dowd, whose increasingly laughable columns (the stupid nicknames! the imaginery conversations!) would be more at home on the OpEd page of The Justice than in that of the New York Times. For more well-deserved Dowd-bashing, check out FireMaureenDowd.com.