The Tabloid Habit

It takes about a quarter of an hour to read a copy of The National Enquirer if you skip, as I do, the medical-breakthrough stories and the regular feature called "Next Week on Your Favorite Soaps" and zero in on the celebrity gossip—and I have never found this time to be wasted. Although I make silent, unkept pledges to cancel my subscriptions to People (the better part of an hour) and Vanity Fair (two evenings), The National Enquirer delivers the shameful goods so directly and with so few niceties—no Graydon Carter essay on Cartier-Bresson—that I can buzz through the whole thing and have it smashed down in the recycling bin before my husband has a chance to catch me in the act.

I began reading the tabloids during the O. J. Simpson case, which I followed closely, and which The National Enquirer so thoroughly dominated that even The New York ...