Ol' Hef

A sort of reflective piece on Hugh Hefner and what Hugh Hefner wrought:
http://www.commentarymagazine.com/viewarticle.cfm/the-playboy-and-his-western-world-15430?page=all. About midway, Martin Amis appears with a few jewels of consideration.

In my misspent youth, Playboy was the gold standard as far as nasty magazines went, only to be replaced by the bolder, Penthouse, sometime in the seventies (I think). There were also, Jugs, Oui, and then later Hustler and High Society and others of that ilk. Our mags were typically stowed in caches in garages or in dugouts in the woods nearby where cussing was perfected, occasional cigarettes were smoked, and lies exchanged regarding the alleged fondling of attractive females. The hard and sometimes frequent rains in the Houston area played hell on magazine collections--we'd return after some turd floater and find a mass of molded and stuck together pages that would often foil even our most intense efforts to separate stuck together pictorials. That was instructive on many levels, most notable of which is that I have valued accurate weather forecasts ever since. They often save lives and prevent page sticking.