Sideswipe: May 24: Magazine cover controversies

Sophie's sweet message to the worms.

Magazine cover controversies

1. The 2012 Time cover had a picture of 25-year-old mother Jamie Lynne Grumet standing while breastfeeding her 3-year-old son, who was standing on a chair.
2. Rolling Stone magazine put Boston bomber suspect Dzhokhar Tsarnaev on the cover in 2013, making him look like a rock star.
3. While still on trial, O.J. Simpson appeared on a Time magazine cover in 1995. The controversy was not about him being on the cover, it was because the photo had been digitally altered to darken his skin colour.
4. In 1993, Vanity Fair's cover of Cindy Crawford in her togs, shaving suited country singer K.D. Lang, was a swipe at the country music industry who didn't like her decision to join Peta, not a "coming out" photo shoot as it was interpreted at the time.
5. In 2016, Massey's student magazine Massive had a cover story about students getting jobs as sex workers to get by. Few read the words but many saw the image, which shows a cartoon woman bent over reading a course book with a grimace on her face, while two disembodied hands pull her hair and grab her behind.
6. In 1994, UK-based magazine The Economist put a picture of two camels having sex, accompanied by the headline, "The trouble with mergers".

Chris Lapish of Onehunga writes

Sophie's sweet message to the worms.

"My wife was putting some food scraps into the compost and saw our 6-year-old daughter Sophie had put in a message for the worms."

Knowledge gap confessions

1. "I had no idea that peanuts grow underground ... I think I always assumed they grew on like, I dunno, a peanut tree? I was flabbergasted."
2. "A couple of weeks ago I was told that hay was just dried grass. I thought it was its own thing that grew and I just never saw it."
3. "I never knew you can buy individual bananas. I always thought you had to buy them in bunches. I am 30 years old."
4. "That Wednesday is called hump day because it's the middle of the week, so you're getting 'over the hump'. I thought it was a sex thing."

Hoping fender bender is a tender offender

"Hopefully 'Tail-ender Tim' will come forward with his details," writes an optimistic reader. "The elderly couple who were rear-ended would have come from an era where a person's word was able to be believed. As the couple's car was pushed into the vehicle in front of them (commonly known as a concertina crash) that means the person in the rear car caused the damage to all three cars so therefore that driver carries the responsibility. It really is a good idea to always carry pen and paper in your vehicle to record any offender's licence plate number."

Got a Sideswipe? Send your pictures, links and anecdotes to Ana at ana.samways@nzherald.co.nz