No one has ever accused New York Times columnist Ross Douthat of excessive astuteness. "Donald Trump isn't going to be the Republican nominee," he wrote in January 2016. Even so, Douthat probably pulls down six figures at The New York Times, which doesn't grant me the courtesy of a rejection letter. So people pay attention to him.
Hugh Hefner's death didn't move me. Penthouse was my print media stimulus of choice. I only read Playboy after the magazine's late delightful cartoons director Michelle Urry commissioned some samples from me during her campaign to update the magazine's hoary cartoon section with edgier, more political work. The worst cartoon editors are former aspiring cartoonists. Hef was one of those; he killed my stuff for being too edgy and political.
But Hefner sure managed to rile up Douthat. "Hef was the grinning pimp of the sexual revolution, with quaaludes for the ladies and Viagra for himself — a father of smut addictions and eating disorders, abortions and divorce and syphilis, a pretentious huckster who published Updike stories no one read while doing flesh procurement for celebrities, a revolutionary whose revolution chiefly benefited men much like himself," Douthat wrote upon the Playboy founder's passing.