“Fame, fame, fatal fame
It can play hideous tricks on the brain.
But still I’d rather be famous
Than righteous or holy
Any day
Any day
Any day.”
—The Smiths, “Frankly, Mr. Shankly”RECENTLY, WHILE HUNGOVER, I CAUGHT UP WITH THE KARDASHIANS. MY
young children were down for a nap, befuddled by why helping them put
together a Hello Kitty puzzle had nearly made Dad’s eyeballs explode. I was
nestled up beside my wife on the couch; she was watching an Easter episode
of Keeping Up with... in which Kris Jenner, the matriarch of reality TV, hosts a
Sunday-afternoon party for the family’s mostly famous friends.
Somewhere around the egg hunt, it dawned on me: A decade ago, many
halfway-respectable people—including a few in the pages of this magazine—
dismissed the Kardashians as famous for no reason, as the harbingers of the
end of Western civilization. In its 2008 recap of KUWTK’s first season, The
Washington Post called the show a “monstrosity” packed with “brain-numbing”
moments in the lives of a “despicable” family. Now? The Kardashians appear
on the covers of Vogue and Forbes, are feted at very fancy galas, and host Easter
brunch with luminaries. They have the ear of the president. The Washington
Post urges us to “check out” Kim Kardashian’s “walk-in fridge and fro-yo ma-
chine,” as if her kitchen were the setting for peace talks with Iran.
So who changed, the Kardashians or everyone else?
One thing’s for sure: The Kardashians proved to have the savviest business
minds of any clan since the Rockefellers. And while their business pursuits—
and family—have grown in the past dozen years, they’ve remained true to their
hyper-driven selves.
No, it was we, the American public, who changed, because—without even
knowing it—we embraced the flimsier angels of our nature. We dropped all pre-
tense and fell in love with social media, which is just another way of saying
we fell in love with ourselves. Today, we don’t just accept fame as the ulti-
mate pursuit; we celebrate it. Bright flashes of entertainment, schadenfreude
and FOMO, joy and cruelty—these are all hallmarks of the era. It’s like icing—
delicious, yes, but only in small doses. Without the cake, it’s nothing but a tube
of processed sugar. Welcome to what I call the Frosting Era.
And welcome to Esquire’s Fame Issue, which doubles as the debut of our latest
redesign. Of course, no one wants to read about a redesign; they just want to see
it, so please enjoy and turn the page! (But only once you’ve finished reading this
one.) Among the changes you’ll notice is a renaming, and rethinking, of the section
at the beginning of the magazine (what we call the “front of book”). It’s now called
The Short Stories, a nod to Esquire’s literary DNA as well as a place for our short(er)
articles. Here, you’ll find stories on culture, style, and politics. Elsewhere in the
issue, you’ll find stories that explore the beating heart of the Frosting Era: fame
and its many tentacles, good, bad, and ugly. From Ryan D’Agostino’s tender por-
trait of Macaulay Culkin—who, at ten, became the most famous person in America
and then mostly vanished—to Rachel Monroe’s dispatch from the small Texas com-
munity that Elon Musk is buying out to make way for his SpaceX rockets.
The question looming over all of this is: Has the Frosting Era crested or are
we just getting started? President Trump—himself a former reality-TV star, al-
beit a far less successful one than the Kardashians—possesses the nuclear codes
and an itchy trigger finger, and he might yet unwittingly set us on course for a
more sobering future. Here’s to hoping the hangover isn’t awful.—Michael SebastianTHIS WAY INA LETTER FROM THE EDITORAARON RICHTER26