Reading Playboy

Sat, 18 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0600

↳ “But is it, is it like the old Playboy magazine? You have essays there by the modern-day equivalent of Gore Vidal and William F. Buckley, Junior?”

I’ve been reading a lot of Playboy recently. For the articles.

This is not a joke, although it used to be one.

The joke depended on a man caught with Playboy insisting that he bought it for the fiction. Nobody believed him because the magazine also contained naked women. The lie was obvious. What made it funny, though, was that the articles were real. They were not eight pages of hastily commissioned filler surrounding the breasts. Ray Bradbury published in Playboy. So did Margaret Atwood, Vladimir Nabokov, Ursula K. Le Guin, Gabriel García Márquez, John Updike, Joyce Carol Oates, Saul Bellow, Norman Mailer, Roald Dahl, Kurt Vonnegut, and enough other major writers that listing them begins to sound like someone left the door to the twentieth century unlocked.

Masculinity on Lagomorph

Reading Playboy