"He buckled his seatbelt and rested his left hand on his knee, exposing between his knuckles and wrist a tattoo of the words 'want nothing' over the outline of a desert island."

I quoted that because it's my favorite sentence in "Will Welch Leads GQ to ‘the New Masculinity’/When he got the job as top editor, a friend told him, 'Yikes.' Now, with an assist from Brad Pitt, he has remade the men’s magazine for the post-#MeToo age" (NYT). 

What more do you want? Well, he has to want you to want his magazine. And he seems to want you to buy into masculinity, but doubts you'll buy that (or doubts you need him to inform you on the subject), so he came up with "new masculinity," so he must want you to believe that GQ is in the know about what is new.

Mr. Welch’s office on the 25th floor of One World Trade is windowless, befitting a top-of-the-masthead editor in these not-so-high-flying times for the magazine industry. He has a framed photograph of Malcolm X on his desk. Near the red sofa, tucked into a spot that Mr. Welch can see from his workstation, is a portrait of Ram Dass, the spiritual leader and author of “Be Here Now.”

Be here — in this windowless 25th-floor office — now... because now is new, and newness is the product.

“In my first days as editor, I just had this language — ‘the new masculinity’ — because the culture was demanding that men change, straight up,” Mr. Welch said. “We are a longstanding, decades-long men’s magazine. So what are we just going to do? Shoot fancy clothes and hope everybody applauds and keeps subscribing and clicking on our website? That is absurd.”

That really does sound like nothing, and if he can get you to "want nothing" and to believe you need GQ to get what you want, then he will have figured out what are we just going to do.

“We’re not saying, ‘Men of America, dress in a gender-neutral way,’ or ‘Wear women’s clothes,’” he said, adding that the “mission” of the magazine has moved away from giving readers style tips and sex advice. “Instead, we’re going to show different forms of self-expression, almost like a mood board, and let you find yourself in it.”

He will let you find yourself in GQ. You can find yourself somewhere else too. I'll let you find yourself in my blog. Where did Malcolm X and Ram Dass go to find themselves? It's funny to picture them reading GQ!

ADDED: Here's a GQ article by Will Welch, "The Unified Theory Of Ram Dass/In 1967 the noted Harvard psychedelic explorer Dr. Richard Alpert was transformed into Ram Dass by a Hindu guru in the foothills of the Himalayas. He then came back to the States with a vision of spirituality that transformed hippie America. Now the message of this 87-year-old teacher who keeps images of both Barack Obama and Donald Trump on his altar has taken on a profound new resonance."

Excerpt:

“I didn't like Hinduism,” Ram Dass will tell me of the days before he found his guru. “All the gods and goddesses and bells and whistles—agh. I was a clean Buddhist.” Clearly, after devoting himself to Maharajji in the late 1960s, his tastes changed. The living room altar also holds figures of the Hindu monkey god Hanuman (servant to Ram and the deity closely associated with Maharajji and his devotees) and the Buddha, plus images of Christ, Gandhi, Mary, and other saints—as well as those of both Barack Obama and Donald Trump. The message is simple: Love everyone. “I have to work hard to be able to keep my heart open to people whose policies I disagree with,” Ram Dass once said, in a lecture from the '90s. “I have a holy table with pictures on it of Buddha and Christ and Maharajji, my guru.… And I used to have Caspar Weinberger”—the secretary of defense under Ronald Reagan—“on the table, but I now have replaced him with Bob Dole. So in the morning, I say, ‘Good morning, Christ! Hello, Buddha! Good morning, Maharajji! Hello, Bob.’ And I see how far I have to go yet. Because after all, [Bob Dole] is merely God in drag, saying, I bet you won't recognize me this way, will you? They're all faces of the beloved.”

Has this blog post devolved into the issue of interior decoration using portraits of famous people?