Earlier this month, Decca Aitkenhead published a profile of British Vogue’s outgoing editor Alexandra Schulman in The Guardian. Her piece is an object lesson in letting one’s subject dig her own grave. Aitkenhead presses Schulman amiably over her feeble record of featuring black women on her cover. Then she quotes Schulman’s own garbled responses, without editing and without commentary. “I’m just getting more coffee because it’s so stressful, that whole thing about models—black—the whole thing,” Schulman says. What Aitkenhead doesn’t write is as loud as what she does. Aitkenhead knows exactly how Schulman’s answers will sound in the reader’s head, and gives enough space for her self-incrimination to ring out. She builds a cave; she introduces the voice.



Profiles come in a few different classical forms. Aitkenhead’s “let them hang themselves” style is only one. There’s the anecdotal style, in which the journalist describes nutshells of gesture and speech and behavior that capture the subject. In the famous “Frank Sinatra Has a Cold,” Gay Talese describes how “the common cold robs Sinatra of that uninsurable jewel, his voice, cutting into the core of his confidence, and it affects not only his own psyche but also seems to cause a kind of psychosomatic nasal drip within dozens of people who work for him, drink with him, love him, depend on him for their own welfare and stability.” The psychosomatic nasal drip turns Sinatra into a kind of virus himself, even though the cold virus is an incidental guest in his body.

Then there’s the analytical style, in which the journalist conducts an interview and weaves the subject’s words into a broader context. This is usually just called reporting.

When The New York Times sent journalist Richard Fausset to profile a “normal” white supremacist in a now widely derided piece, he chose the wrong form. Fausset chose the “hang themselves” style, letting Tony Hovator express his fascist views in his own words so that they could echo. The details that Fausset added were of the domestic type, describing Hovator’s wedding registry and his cat. As thousands of readers agreed, the effect of Fausset’s stylistic choices was the rhetorical equivalent of pointing the gun the wrong way around. Fausset normalized Hovator’s life, and quoted his bigoted words without analyzing them, thus suggesting that the words were normal also. He brought the voice out, but built the wrong cave.

Fausset’s intention, it seems, was to let Hovator’s extraordinary views form a contrast to his ordinary lifestyle, thus demonstrating the old lesson about the banality of evil in a new context: contemporary America. But the outcome was to bleed the two together. It was not clear what was meant to be ordinary, the pet cat or the fascist views.