Just about a year ago, I noted that I was happily and proudly letting a long-term subscription to Entertainment Weekly lapse. Earlier this summer, they lured me back with a rate so low that I half expect the subscription to eventually be fulfilled with a different publication from the Time-Warner stable. The amount I’m paying can’t even cover the cost of postage to get it to me. It can’t be long for this celebrity-obsessed Earth. I’m not especially proud of this–sometimes I feel a little dirty when I see it in the mailbox–but it’s back into our coffee table rotation.

And whenever I think Entertainment Weekly has sunk as low as they can go, they always find a way to surprise me.

The cover story reports of the results of a March-Madness-styled bracket tournament that used online polls to determine which genre character from an somewhat arbitrarily configured set of categories is the sexiest. Again, this is the cover story, the item the editors feel is worthy of the most attention this week. I know we’re not talking about Harper’s or The New Yorker here, but the embarrassment of this as the centerpiece article of a periodical that is ostensibly contributing something to the cultural conversation is profound. It actually makes any one of their pointless list issues look like the height of magazine journalism in comparison.

All this and an article on the Kardashians too? How lucky can I be?