The William Shatner App, Channeling Celebrity & the Future of Political Discourse

I can’t tell you how relieved I am to learn that on the day after the election William Shatner has introduced a new iPhone app, “Shatoetry” that lets users compose text and play it back in Shatner’s voice.  The options are endless.  It could be a bugger-off message to your ex-boss/lover/dog-sitter.  He told Fox Entertainment News that “I can say anything.  I can even break up with your boyfriend.  I’d be delighted to.”

Time Magazine’s Techland notes that for “dramatic pauses, users select ‘Space Bubbles.’  Different colored portraits of the celebrity can be chosen for the background of each ‘shatism.’  And to listen to the final product, users press ‘shat that!’ and then can trade messages with one another via the Create and Friends option.”

Shatner’s fingerprints and excremental whimsy are all over this offering created by Blindlight Apps, a company that brings Hollywood talent and celebrity to the gaming and app worlds.  Shatner, his launch claims to the contrary, might have been told about the urban belief that his fecal matter is said to possess mystical powers and businesses have been built around that fantasy.  The Urban Dictionary offers a full range of Shat Mugs and Shat shirts.  Nothing yet, as far as I know, for the original Old English “bescatan,” meaning “befowled,” but that word isn’t exactly duck soup.

There was a time when everybody knew that “shat” is the past tense and past participle of the much more current and popular “shit.”  Our political discourse would be so such better if the understanding of grammar and linguistics was more, say, 18^th century.  I will acknowledge that there is no easy transition from this messy grammatical chatter to the long, tedious ordeal called a presidential campaign, except to add that a Shatner- inspired “shat that” button on all political discourse might have added some earthiness and brevity to the conversations.

In the press release, Shatner says that “People all over the world have been listening to my voice for so long, but they only heard what I wanted to say.  I wanted to give people a means to express their thoughts and ideas using my voice.”

Both political parties have become much more adept in using social media.  As the two camps raise their game, perhaps they should consider licensing this product from Shatner Enterprises.  Such a move would not only allow constituents to put a representative’s words in their individual mouths, but it would add a much needed degree of authenticity.

Shatner refers to his disciples as “Shatoetists” and I expect his site will do more to advance modern American poetry than all Ivy League English Departments put together.

The Shatoetry App provides a Word Tray of inspiring words that users select to compose a message. Captain Kirk knows something about speaking in tongues.  The religious implications are profound.

After a twelve month political campaign and $6 billion price tag, the Political Word Tray must be full of words, fitting, brief, and beautiful, worthy in every way to be on the lips of politicians of every stripe. 

Digital Churns: Zynga, Spotify & the Downward Dog

My boss told me some years ago that, if you hang around long enough, every business model will come back either as a bang or a whimper.  His bone of contention was whether a company should be centralized or decentralized.  He gave each type of organization a half-life of about six years until the dreaded consultant came to town and recommended, with great sobriety and cost, the other thing, whatever it happened to be.

I read recently that those launching new businesses should focus much more on the vision and less on the business plan.  I think this advice had its genesis in the Harvard Business Review and was retweeted until it became established wisdom.  It might be time to bring the consultant back to town.

I served as the business development guy at Hachette during the dot com run-up.  Since there were few rules during this prairie fire, I tended to meet with everyone who had invented the next big digital thing.  I soon learned that pets, used clothing, supermarket coupons, and death were the subjects that were getting a lot of attention from the newly formed digital elite.  I had worked at a boutique private equity firm and thought I had enough of a “cunning nose” for new business opportunities, but this was a brand new toy.  I finally decided that for these entrepreneurs to get through the front door, they would have to convince me before a meeting that their Cost of Sales (COS) did not equal or exceed their total revenues by year three.  The foot traffic slowed down to a crawl.  I never got to ask about Average Revenue Per User because it was always somewhere down the road.

The WSJ ran a piece a month ago about Spotify’s plans to launch in Canada (August 22, 2012, “Spotify to Launch in Canada”).   CNET’s Greg Sandoval dug a little deeper into the numbers and asked in his piece, “Is Spotify’s Business Model Broken?”  I have blogged in the past that I thought magazine publishers can learn something from Spotify and still do.  But I was struck by some of the key financial ratios Sandoval focused on with his keen eye and cunning journalistic nose.

Spotify’s Total Revenue for 2011 was $244,539,608; its Cost of Sales for the same period, $238,913,983, or 98% of revenue.  Unlike most of the pet sock folks I met over ten years ago, Spotify has real revenue and plenty of new markets to exploit. But at the end of the day, so to speak, the Cost of Sales and specifically the cost of acquiring new members and, conversely, the Average Revenue Per User (for 2011 at about 5.73 Euros) will tell the tale.  As Sandoval observes, the fly-in-the-ointment might be the royalty payment due even when the offer is free.

Money continues to pour into the venture game; $24.4 billion in 2011.  And at the same time we hear the diurnal lament or prediction that the disruptors of a few years ago will now start taking their place on the disruption stage.  This was certainly the talk, even in the mainstream media, about Facebook after its post-IPO stock price fell.  Forget about Facebook’s one billion users.

Equally interesting was Josh Constine’s October 5, 2012, piece in TechCrunch about “Why Zynga Failed,” a title delivered emphatically in the past tense.  As a kid, I spent enough time on a dairy farm and had no desire to relive my cow-milking blunders with the Farmville fantasy, though I have been tempted to invest my virtual wallet in Emus as a specialty crop.

Constine reminds us that in 2008-2009 Zynga was on top of the world with Facebook as a game portal, CPCs low ($0.27), and hockey-stick growth on the office wall.  He ticks off four reasons for this “failure”: games got too complicated; too many developers, not enough software gamers; CPCs have increased more than 3X since 2009; Facebook got sick of game spam; with Facebook taking a 30% cut, margins got smaller.  Whatever we might think about this prediction, Zynga’s stock has dropped to $2.48 as of this writing from $10 ten months ago.

A writer on the TechCrunch comments page even suggested an official Constine’s Law: “Internet advertising margins are proportional to the size of the user’s screen.”  As these things go, this is high praise, especially for a site that has received criticism by those who think it is too uncritical about tech startups.  Zynga executives might want to read some of these informed comments that charge the company is beginning to look a lot like AOL, MySpace and Blackberry, has based the empire too much on Flash, needs to develop more advanced games, and should bring back the original talent pool.  They might want to ignore those who suggest Zynga’s time had come and gone and management has “screwed the pooch.”

Pets, especially dogs, seem to have a deserved place in digital hierarchy.

Re-Visioning Digital Content: Time Inc., Forbes & The Atlantic

I mark the beginning of my digital education more than twenty years ago when an executive at Hachette USA (now owned by Hearst) asked me how to spell dot com.  He was on his way to give a luncheon speech about digital strategy and wanted to start out on the right foot.

In the late 1990s, Hachette was no different than most companies.  It invested in a number of digital startups, including enews.com (a digital subscription platform eventually sold to B&N), endured the internecine warfare between print and digital, and over time made the digital incubator part of the mainstream business.  Echoes of these strategies, disruptions, and hiccups can be found in most publishing companies of size.  It simply took publishers a long time to understand digital, get on the right side of the browser wars, figure out how to sell subscriptions at scale and develop the technical savvy to be able to deliver content to all platforms, such as Time Inc.’s All Access effort, an industry blueprint.

Laura Lang, Time Inc. CEO, recently announced that the company would focus on global growth, growing paid content and creating a broader consumer content experience.  To help with the latter, the company had introduced Amplify, a new digital ad unit, some months ago.  Amplify “marries” editorial content with brand marketing messages.  Given the company’s ability to layer subscriber data with social and behavioral, this promises to become a very interesting platform.

Pat Corpora, a friend who ran Rodale’s book division some years ago, started most strategic meetings with the observation: “What you propose will cost twice as much as you suggest and take at least twice as long as your propose.”   He was usually right, but he might have to expand his time frame for digital.  Soon I’m going to write a book on the psychology of digital, focusing on the generational, societal, cultural and organizational impediments to the movement.  Inertia has enjoyed a long and successful career.

It is no secret that for a long time magazines looked at digital through the print lens and digital products became add-ons to the central business.  Some still do.  What is most heartening these days is that magazines are changing their business models and, God forbid, even rethinking the church/state nexus.  This is hinted at in the above remarks about Time Inc.’s effort to “marry” editorial and marketing messages.  This will help consumer marketers become more adept at marketing to digital consumers.

These Time Inc. initiatives bode well for the industry because the company is an industry leader and is surely its first citizen.  But it’s equally important to note that other companies, often smaller and more nimble, are making interesting structural moves by re-visioning content, sometimes in dramatic ways. GigaOM’s Matt Ingram tells us that there are five reasons we should pay attention to The Atlantic as the company pushes the transformation to digital.  They include: creating web native offerings rather than apps, new forms of content like the Atlantic Wire, and native advertising or more specifically, branded content that looks like what the content readers are used to.  

I have previously blogged about Forbes’ effort to re-think content.  Forbes has done this more substantially and more elegantly than any magazine or content producer I know.  And Lewis D’Vorkin is the Forbes evangelist.  In describing Forbes’ new home page, D’Vorkin explains that each magazine constituency “is represented in one of four equal modules, or as we call them, stacks.”  These include: the Journalistic Agenda:  Forbes is a brand that has meaning; the Social Agenda, which is based on Forbes’ Velocity, “an algorithm that weighs page views, sharing and comments;” the Individual User’s Agenda: personalization with serendipity; and the Marketer’s Agenda: brands are publishers, they create content, and are experts in their fields.  For marketers, Forbes provides a perfectly transparent AdVoice platform.  According to published remarks by Forbes CEO Mike Perlis, this platform will also have very high content standards.  They won’t be publishing just anything.   D’Vorkin has written that this advertising trend will shake up 100 years of journalism.  I think he’s right.  

Other magazines will find their way to this place.  There is a lot of experimenting going on.  Good magazine, launched in 2006 and shut down a few months ago to predictable headlines, is coming back to life as a community platform named Good.is.  According to a variety of published reports, Good.is will leverage Jumo, a social activist platform acquired from Facebook co-founder Chris Hughes.

I have no idea whether this will work.  What I find interesting is the effort to develop a community, aggregate this muscle, and in turn create branded sponsorships around calls to civic and social action.  This seems an ingenious, viral and legitimate “social” way to bring brands into the conversation in a manner that will extend the brand and help underwrite the business.  The effort might take the form of branded challenges.  Apparently IBM, Toyota, and UPS are interested.

I’ve sat through too many meetings where the very thought of using what is called “deep advertising content” was dismissed out-of-hand.

 

Three cheers for the companies that are re-visioning content and re-thinking their business models from the ground up in elegant and profound ways.  

Mighty Text, Mobile Diaries, and Spotify for All

Google has teamed with Sterling brands and Ipsos to investigate consumer attitudes and behaviors associated with certain digital activities, specifically when using multiple screens.  The study involved 1,611 participants who recorded 7,955 hours of media activities logged in a mobile diary over a 24-hour period.

That consumers use multiple screens is not news; nor is the observation that multi-screen behavior has moved mainstream.  I think that this study is particularly valuable because it adds behavioral and psychological weight to our multi-screen habits.

The study finds that the “majority of our daily media interactions are screen-based.”  In fact, 90% of all media interactions are screen-based: smartphone, PC/laptop, tablet, television.  Conversely, 10% of all media interactions are non-screen-based (radio, newspaper, magazines).   And context drives device choice, including time available, goal, location, and attitude and state-of-mind.  Not surprisingly, the research adds weight to findings that might be obvious.  Computers keep us productive and informed; smartphones keep us connected; tablets keep us entertained.

According to the study, there are two modes of multi-screening; sequential usage and simultaneous usage.  The former describes moving from one device to another at different times to accomplish a task.  The latter describes using more than one device at the same time, for either a related or unrelated activity.  Sequential screening is common and largely completed within a day.  Top activities while in this mode are Internet browsing, social networking, and online shopping.  The prevalence of such usage suggests that businesses save their shopping progress between devices, such including “shopping carts” and “signed-in” experiences.

Smartphones are the most frequent companion devices during simultaneous usage.  The research indicates that “content viewed on one device can trigger specific behavior on the other,” suggesting businesses might not want to limit their conversion goals and calls to action.  Smartphones are the centerpiece of daily media use and serve as the most common starting point for activities across multiple screens.  Therefore, mobile is a business imperative.

I’ll leave the specifics of this important research on that note and reflect on the growing importance of the smartphone in other contexts.  I’ve been going to mobile conferences for at least a decade and every year the bar for mobile advertising revenue ticks up a notch--$20 billion in 2012?—and that reality seems never to come to pass.  I’ve long thought mobile advocates were beating the wrong drum.  Someone might yet solve the mobile advertising dilemma, but nonetheless the reason the smartphone is in ascendency is its growing importance in the enterprise and transaction zone, as the above research makes clear.

Qualcomm recently announced the North American regional winner of its 2012 QPrize venture investment competition.  Mighty Text is “an android-based application that enables people to send SMS messages from their computer or any device via the cloud.  It syncs directly with the user’s Android phone and number, making life easier for people who send and receive text messages and get phone calls while in front of a computer.”  Mighty Text gets $100,000 in venture funding and a chance to compete for another $150,000 attached to the QPrize Global Grand Prize competition in early 2013.

Stacey Higginbotham at GigaOM sees more than another tech prize winner here.  She notes that this “IP testing app and the nine other finalists are also a microcosm of Qualcomm’s views about what mobility can bring to computing and how to design for mobile.”  In her opinion, mobile isn’t a separate platform.  Rather, everything should be built to tie back into the mobile device.  She concludes that for Qualcomm this is a “fundamental shift in worldview and some companies like Spotify and Mighty Text get it and some companies are struggling, such as Facebook.”

By way of full disclosure, I have consulted for Qualcomm.  That said, it’s hard to disagree with Mr. Higginbotham’s conclusions.  Certainly the various app stores have only added value to the smartphone in the enterprise zone.

Perhaps equally important is her remark about Spotify.  Hamish McKenzie has waxed eloquent at Pandodaily about a Spotify for magazines, suggesting publishers break up the magazine bundles and present stories on an individual basis with a large dose of social.  If you add sponsored subscription bundles and a content/data arrangement with carriers and advertisers, you might have scale and a business model, one article at a time.

Did I mention the smartphone? 

Peter Pan, the Old Man, and Brands that Last Forever

Over the Labor Day weekend, I watched a DVD by the late psychologist James Hillman on the Puer and the Senex, with the former referring generally to the archetype of the eternally young, as in Peter Pan, and the latter to the hide-bound, rule-waving elder, man or woman, who wants the rest of society to stay within the lines.  From a Jungian perspective, these archetypes describe psychological modes of being as well as types of behavior.  We saw these archetypes on display at the recent Republican Convention;   Clint Eastwood, an aging, angry, scolding Senex talking to a chair; and Representative Paul Ryan, sketching a trajectory of the high-flying Puer, who shaved an hour off his marathon time.  Whatever sins might have been committed at the convention, any runner will argue that this “sin” was as mortal as they get.  Runners never forget their marathon times.  Running a marathon in under three hours is as difficult as Congress passing a balanced budget.

In his presentation, Dr. Hillman mentioned Clint Eastwood’s role in the movie Gran Torino, in which the actor portrays a disgruntled Korean War veteran who openly resents the changes in the ethnic make-up of his Detroit neighborhood, especially the influx of the Hmong Americans.  For Hillman, Eastwood’s character, Walt Kowalski, is Senex to the core, even when he softened his view towards the Hmong. Kowalski is “executed” in a manner consistent with his warrior culture and cunning.  His character cannot really think or get out of the box.

Hillman, whose psychology is apolitical, suggests that with all the idealization of the Puer, with his or her legions of Twitter followers and Facebook friends, the Senex, known for stubbornness, avarice, and resistance to change, will likely win the day.  We see this played out daily in our political theater.  President Obama’s promise of Change ran headlong into the Senex, who knows how to deal with the golden age of fantasy.

If the Senex and the Puer represent psychological modes or perspectives, they can also be seen to represent brands which, when successful, are also archetypes.  This is what makes them abiding and generally long-lasting.  I was thinking about this aspect of brands when reading about the late Helen Gurley Brown and her remarkable transformation of Cosmopolitan magazine and eventual international expansion.  This is certainly one of the most important magazines success stories, from both an editorial and business perspective, of the last fifty years.

While the Senex and the Puer might be battling it out on the national stage, it’s an open question whether brands can retain their historical permanence.  Douglas McIntyre has blogged about ten brands that will disappear in 2013 (www.24/wallst.com), including RIM, Avon, Suzuki, American Airlines and others. The sweet smell of private equity money is present here and very little nostalgia.

I’ve heard over the years that somehow magazines brands are more resilient than so-called commodity brands because they carry our personal and cultural archetypes; in other words, our essential meanings.  Christine Haughney and Noam Cohen writing in the NYT Media Decoder conducted an unscientific reader poll of what magazines they missed (www.nyt.com/magazines-you-miss-from-skateboarder-to-metropolitan-home-but-mainly-gourmet/?).   Gourmet, shut down three years ago, “was the dearest of the dearly departed.”  Spy, Talk, George, and House and Garden also made the list.

I was at Hachette when George magazine was launched with John Kennedy as publisher.  I had a business development role at the company but little to do with George.  But I made my views clear on the magazine; I thought it lacked a business model.  The magazine lasted two years after Kennedy’s tragic death in 1999.

George was very much in the Puer tradition, a marriage of Kennedy mystique and celebrity politics; an arc of brilliance and an Icarus-like fall.  The magazine struggled before Kennedy’s death and was impossible after the fact.

Most magazines, whether they have a short lifespan or not, have archetypal roots and done well are grounded in in our culture, memory, and mythology.

In this regard magazines are indeed brands with a difference. 

Digital Dawn, Advertising Born, and Forbes to the Head of the Class

The word on the street is that About.com, purchased from Primedia by the NYT in 2005 for $410 million, will be sold to Answers.com for $270 million.  Ten years ago, About.com sounded like a great idea.  Put 500 content specialists in a room to write about every special interest under the sun from cross-stitching to how to throw a knuckle ball and you surely have a winner.  About’s entre into content farming might have seemed like a good idea until Google’s algorithm change hurt site traffic.  The company’s business model was also hurt by declining revenues from cost-per-click and display advertising, a trend not unique to this business.

Jeff Bercovici at Forbes astutely describes About.com as a company “caught between its past and its future.”  I recall at a luncheon, right before the NYT acquisition, a Primedia executive talking about the endless business prospects in the content verticals.  As someone who has cut his teeth in the verticals, I thought he was absolutely right.  The verticals would survive any digital onslaught.

Recently the NYT’s David Carr, addressing the recent dismal news from the Audit Bureau of Circulation about the almost 10% drop in newsstand magazine sales, refers to this downturn as “existential.” “Magazines, all kinds of them, don’t work very well in the marketplace anymore.”  Even Cat Fancy is down 23%!

Magazine publishers have experienced all sorts of “digital dawns” during the last fifteen years, from the dot com fantasy, to the browser wars, to the tablet age and have muddled through reasonably well, thanks in part to the power of the magazine brands.  During my stay at MPA, we struggled with the definition of a magazine that always seemed to begin with the phrase: “a magazine is branded, edited content,” as if that would be a defensible last line of defense.  But what if other reputable brands entered the content business with reputable offerings that found particular favor in social media?

It’s a natural, and perhaps inevitable, psychological bias that we view business opportunities through an existing lens.  Magazine publishers have almost necessarily been caught between its digital past/present and the future, forever enshrined in the phrase, “exchanging analog dollars for digital dimes.”  This doesn’t mean that publishers have not made huge advances in the digital arena.  It’s that the disruptions we have faced to date might pale in comparison to what is around the corner.  That is the gist of a recent article by Lewis D’Vorkin at Forbes.com: “The advertising trend that will shake up 100 years of journalism.”

According to D’Vorkin, this trend is a product of the marriage of social media and content marketing.  He defines the latter as “brands using the tools of digital media and social sharing to behave like original content publishers.  They want to break out of the silos (full and partial-page display ads, 30-second spots and Web banners) that both traditional and new media forced them into.  The idea that a company—as a brand and a marketer–can be an expert content creator and reach an audience by disintermediating reporters is confusing, threatening and scary to an entire profession that had its way for a century.”

Forbes has entered this brave new world with a product called AdVoice, “a fully transparent way for marketers to publish and curate content on Forbes.com and in our magazine.”  SAP, Microsoft, Dell, Merrill Lynch and others have published on this digital platform; Toyota, Northwestern Mutual and United Airlines have done so in print.  D’Vorkin notes that Buzzfeed, The Huffington Post, The Atlantic, and Gawker have offered content marketing opportunities.  Of course, social marketing campaigns are at the heart of the Facebook business proposition.

This seems to represent a fundamental shift in the Forbes business eco-system; and not just another platform chasing available advertising.  At the heart of this enterprise is the belief “that there are five vital constituencies in the media business, each with a different agenda.”  According to D’Vorkin, these include the voices of the Forbes brand, the journalist, the consumer, the social community and the marketer.  “In the digital era, each can produce content at will in an effort to be heard.  That leads to a corollary principle: content is content, and transparency makes it possible for many different credible sources to provide useful information.”  Go to the Forbes home page to see how this delineation plays out.

Congratulations to Forbes for an enlightened content strategy that gets us out of the church/state cul-de-sac and into our new world order.  This is a conversation well-worth having.

  

 

Greek Cautions, In Vogue, and Out of Fashion

I’ve been reading around in Greek literature for a psychology class.  I keep bumping into works that seems to still resonate in our language and culture, and not only during the Olympic season:  Hubris, Nemesis, and Hamartia.  All have currency in our language except hamartia, which means falling short.  In his Poetics, Aristotle defined hamartia as a “fatal flaw” brought about by ignorance or a mistake.  I don’t think the eight badminton players booted out of the Olympics for cheating can hide behind the idea of hamartia, perhaps because hundreds of millions of people worldwide were watching their comic and slow-motion antics in real time.  At this time, their motivations seem closer to mendacity.

It would be tempting to transition now to the story of the New Yorker writer Jonah Lehrer, who admitted to fabricating quotes for Imagine, a book about Bob Dylan, but Aristotle would probably not approve of a predictable commentary, already abundant on the web.  Most writers and editors have fallen short at one time or the other.  I did when I was a new and young editor of Bicycling magazine.  By virtue of an advertising and promotion deal with Olympic sponsor, the Southland Corporation/7-Eleven stores, Bicycling had a closer relationship with the 1984 Los Angeles Games than would usually be the case.  It was a very good event for cycling as Americans won nine medals.  This narrative was later tarnished when we learned that some cycling team members had “blood doped” to increase red cell counts.  It was Sports Illustrated, the Rolling Stone, and others that made this story public.  Bicycling was too cozy with the sponsor, the cycling federation, and the good news Olympics.  My editor, who was at the Games, was slow to bring this to my attention and I was slow to act on editorial and management issues.  I fell short of the mark.

Like most Americans, I have followed the Penn State scandal with horror and sadness.  I learned the other day that the football stadium in Happy Valley seats more than 106,000 fans or around three times the population of State College, where the university is located.  It is now easy to see this as a massively grotesque and symbolic overhang, representing the collective Football Hubris that was in plain sight.  But that was not my opinion on numerous trips to State College to visit family and friends and work on projects with PSU professors.  I bought into the official narrative.

Jack McCallum is one of my favorite Sports Illustrated writers.  McCallum wrote a piece about Coach Jerry Sandusky after his curtain call as coach before a game against Michigan State, November 13, 1999.  He would then move on to the Second Mile charity.  McCallum wrote: “If Sandusky did not have such a human side, there would be temptations around Happy Valley to canonize him. Saint Sandusky, leader of linebackers, molder of men.”

In fairness to McCallum, he was quick to write on November 8, 2011, after the scandal broke: “Jerry Sandusky fooled a lot of people over the years-including me.”  He recalled that Sandusky didn’t seem at all joyful about what he was doing.   Penn State might have been on the moon.  It was a “perfect place for a predator like Sandusky.”  The author was not the only one to feel like a “jerk” after the truth came to light.

Everyone associated with this scandal seems to have fallen short in one way or another.  McCallum’s narrative is actually far less extravagant than some of the pieces coming out of the Philadelphia newspapers at the time, though it’s clear that the mention of sainthood sticks in the writer’s craw.

As writers we live in a hyperbolic world and are tempted, in the words of Flannery O’Connor, to draw large and startling figures, an observation she offered with her usual pinch of irony.  I’ve read with interest and sadness the saga about the Vogue article by Joan Juliet Buck published in March, 2011, about Asma al-Assad, wife of the President of Syria.  The Daily Beast and Newsweek have done a masterful job on this story.

This would not have been such a big story if the Arab Spring and government retributions had not begun in early 2011.  The public response was withering.  Vogue pulled the story, entitled “A Rose in the Desert,” from its web site, fired Buck and offered an apology.

Mrs. Assad probably would not have been the subject of the Vogue “Power Issue” if she wasn’t very attractive, born and educated in England, and according to French Elle in 2009, one of the best-dressed women in the world.   Paris Match suggested she was an “element of light in a country full of shadowy zones.”  The PR firm behind the Vogue story said that the President “speaks English and his wife is hot.”  She was ripe for celebrity treatment.

Author Buck claims that Mrs. Assad duped her, presumably expecting the focus of the interview to be more about Syrian culture, antiquities and museums than politics.  Joan Buck does note in her article some of the darkness of the regime, such as a prison on wheels, but the article overall suggests, in Tina Brown’s words, that the author drank “the Vogue Kool-Aid.”  In my time at Hachette, then publisher of Elle, I had an occasional whiff of that wine. 

James Hillman, one the most interesting psychologists and philosophers of the last fifty years, published an essay, “Aphrodite’s Justice,” shortly before his death in 2011, about the relationship between ethics and aesthetics.  In his view, we cannot separate beauty from morality, “since beauty works as a calling to better things, pulling at the heart to love, to the mind to imagine more vividly.”

Aphrodite is not only just another pretty face.  Nemesis is part of her constellation and stands ready with a kind of righteous anger, to return order to the cosmos.