Some of you may have become sufficiently infected with this way of seeing to have yourselves noted this odd convergence from last week’s newsstands …
Curious about the uncanny rhyme, I mentioned it to a friend of mine who works at Time, and she wasn’t as surprised. She said that in-house there at the magazine of record, they had all been quite aware of the Brokeback-y resonance of their cover image; indeed, they’d even contemplated deploying the cover line “Damn it all, Dick, I wish I could quit you,” but had pulled back, for fear of alienating a sizable chunk of their putative readership. The New Yorker, for its part, showed no such compunctions. (Perhaps they figure they’ve already scared those readers away a long time ago.) At any rate, The New Yorker won that round.