By Jae-Ha Kim
Chicago Sun-Times
January 5, 1999
A. Magazine: Inside Asian America features “Martial Law” star Kelly Hu as its December/January cover girl. The former Miss Hawaii appears in a fashion layout that showcases Asian-American models posing in a “holiday masquerade” theme.
The splashy mag has a little bit of everything in this issue, including an article titled “Jewel Tones” that has nothing to do with the yodeling Alaskan singer with the crooked teeth. It’s a food story featuring recipes for jewel-toned dishes such as stuffed eggplant tofu, sake cooler and grilled chicken kebab.
There’s also a list of the 25 most influential Asians in America, which includes figure skater Michelle Kwan, fashion designer Sandy Dalal, federal judge Susan Oki Mollway, golf sensation Se Ri Pak, author Eric Liu and actors Michelle Yeoh, Jackie Chan, Sammo Hung and Jet Li.
Journalist Katie Roiphe goes on the offensive in the January issue of Harper’s Bazaar. Writing about 23-year-old Wendy Shalit’s impassioned plea for virginity in her book A Return to Modesty: Discovering the Lost Virtue, Roiphe states: “Shalit takes the discontents of female writers who have actually had sex and uses them as proof that having sex is not what it’s cracked up to be. She writes, `Take Katie Roiphe’s accounts of her sexual experience. You would expect someone who is against ” ’50s propriety” to have a lot of dirty stories to tell, but usually her stories are just plain sad.’ Fair enough. But Shalit’s ignorance-is-bliss theory is based on the slightly suspect argument that if people like me had just kept our virginity, our lives would have been perfect. Though Shalit thinks that we bad girls romanticize promiscuity, she may be guilty of precisely the same type of romanticization: If you don’t touch someone before marriage, you are going to live happily ever after.”
Meow.
Indie queen Christina Ricci looks very age-appropriate clad in denim and minimalist makeup on the cover of Mademoiselle‘s January issue. The 18-year-old star of “Buffalo 66,” “The Opposite of Sex” and “The Addams Family” comes across as much less brash than she has in other interviews – a fact that doesn’t escape her. “I’m really not that dark,” she is quoted as saying. “I’m disappointingly normal. I love prime-time TV. When I felt that I sounded uninteresting, I’d make up a shocking story. Now I think I sounded so dirty and obnoxious. I’m trying to grow up and not have to be that shocking. . . . Because of my persona, I’m controversial. But studio people don’t want to put me in their movies. They think I might offend.”
This week’s Time offers a comprehensive look at “The Future of Medicine.” The opening essay begins, “Seeds for the 21st century were spawned in 1952, when James Watson blurted out . . . how four nucleic acids could pair to form the self-copying code of a DNA molecule.”
What do Book, Teen People, Women Outside, Brill’s Content and ESPN: The Magazine have in common? They are among the 30 most notable new publications of 1998, says Samir Husni, author of the perennial Guide to New Consumer Magazines. He considered a number of factors when making the selections, including timeliness, buzz and innovation. So there you go.
