Yes, I'm a man. Also a college English professor, if that matters. I have no opinion of Cosmo, in and of itself. I never read it, it may be drivel.

All of which is beside the point. It doesn't do much good to claim Cosmo doesn't speak to young women when it's the best selling magazine within their demographic. The argument that college women are pouring millions of dollars into the magazine's coffers every month just to laugh at it is pretty weak. If you could demonstrate that the magazine doesn't sell well at this point, your argument about its irrelevency would carry more weight. As things stand, the magazine seems to be very relevant. Really suprisingly so, considering its uncontested position over a forty year period—a period of huge change in women's goals and self-perception.

Whether the magazine's ongoing success is a good or bad thing is, of course, another subject entirely. But that your friends and colleges do not read the magazine hardly proves the magazine is irrelevant. You are making the same mistake Pauline Kael made when she questioned whether Nixon could really have been re-elected when no one she knew voted for him.

First of all, how many gays search under the term "homosexuality"? Isn't that like someone looking for erotica typing in "fornication." "Homosexual" is a conservative buzzword in a lot of cases. Gay writers used to complain that the New York Times demonstrated homophobia by only referring to people as "homosexuals," not "gays" or "lesbians." "Homosexual" denotes a psychological term, most frequently related to outmoded concepts of immaturity or pathology. I'm not surprised conservative titles came up using that search word.

I suspect it was a little bit of both: that a glitch developed when they attemptted to screen out adult material. Since a lot of gay literature is explicit (and should be: the whole point is being honest and unashamed) I think a mistake occured where gay books got screened out entirely. Amazon is hardly a right-wing company. It seems to me that Call Me By Your Name and The Kite Runner used to come up all the time.

I'd also like to point out that as a connoisseur of pre-Stonewall gay fiction, I'm really grateful to Amazon. Books almost impossible to find are now fairly easily available.

And, to be honest, Amazon has the worst search engine ever. If one letter of your search word is incorrect, it most often won't bring up the title. If it's not a book or author you are very familiar with, or a very famous title, this can cause a lot of problems.

Actually what you said was that you used a copy of the magazine in class and they all said they thought it was ridiculous. Not exactly the ideal test conditions.

So what if you and your friends think it's ridiculous? The numbers don't lie. It's not consistently the number one magazine among women on college campuses because they want a laugh. Your applying the standards of a narrow group onto women as a whole. Big mistake, but typical for people in academia.

People do not buy a non-comic magazine month after month just to laugh at it. The sales belie your agenda.

That Brown's image could use an overhaul is unquestionable. As a recent item on Jezebel.com suggests, to the current crop of smart young women, Brown is now little more than a joke, a hopelessly dated and gracelessly aging "bobble head" with an intentionally emaciated body and helmet hair, a peddler of cheesy sex quizzes and rampant cleavage at the magazine she edited for 32 years, Cosmopolitan.

Jezebel has a lot of cache these days as the women's online site. It has clearly forged a position for itself within the journalistic community. Certainly, Salon writers love to write about it, and apparently a number of female journalism majors from our country's top schools want to write for it.

Which tends to obscure the fact that from the time Brown took over the magazine, up to and passed her retirement, Cosmo has remained the Number 1 selling magazine for women on college campuses. You can't stay much more relevant than that, no matter what Miller wants to claim. It's top position has never been shaken. More college women read and respond to Cosmo than Jezabel. Why not an article on the out-of-touch nature of Jezebel and the continuing relevence of Cosmo?

Of course that ain't going to happen. If there's one truism on this site, it's that when reality and Salon wishful thinking collide, Salon eagerly ignores the latter for the sake of the former. I guess it's the inevitable consequence of an ideologically driven publication.

Observe and Report is a rude-comedy riff on Taxi Driver. John Hinckley actually shot President Reagan in an in an attempt to emmulate Travis Bickle in Taxi Driver. I bet no one here would argue there's anything wrong with that movie, that it should be protested or held responsible for the actions of an unstable person who decided to imitate it.

Why should the response to Observe and Report be any different? It's a movie. It takes place in a fictional universe. It looks like a cartoon. It is not written to be emmulated. Why are people only willing to grant freedom of expression to movies or directors they like? That's hypocrisy.

Surely they know what they are in for. Surely Zachareck didn't expect this to be Sleepless in Seattle. Reviews like this will probably do the movie more good than raves. If I were a movie critic, and I hated it, it would seem to me the best thing to do would be to ignore it.

A scene like that exists so people will write about it in moral outrage, and generate word-of-mouth ("let's go see if it's as bad as they say"). And you supplied it. You are now part of the "raging controversy" that will encourage people to check out the movie whether you condemned or praised it.