One of my few gripes about The New Yorker is that the magazine doesn’t make enough of its content available online. More than once in the past couple of months, I’ve wanted to link to an article only to find it published as an abstract only. Thankfully, this recent profile of George Clooney is on the Web in full. The opening few pages will soon be pinned to my corkboard as an example of writing to strive for. Here’s a taster from the first page, Clooney at an Oscar-related panel discussion about acting and filmmaking:

The event, organized by Newsweek, was leisurely, designed to encourage a degree of self-analysis, but Clooney (looking about as skinny as a young Sinatra, his sunglasses hooked over the opening of his collar) seemed to have set himself the task of resisting group drift toward actorly grandeur or celebrity griping. He was unremittingly affable. “We have time for one more question,” he said, after taking his seat. He traded running jokes with McAvoy, and made mock-scornful comments about Day-Lewis’s exalted reputation. (“You just kill it for the rest of us; we’ll take care of you, pal.”) He capped a conversation about paparazzi intrusions with a politic acknowledgment of the privileges of fame. His manner—nonchalance underpinned, it seemed, by vigilance and self-scrutiny—carried the suggestion that almost any divergence from banter was unforgivable artsy narcissism.

This is probably the performance for which Clooney, now forty-six, is still best known, even as he has become a Hollywood emperor, not to mention a left-leaning activist and a friend of Senator Barack Obama’s. Clooney is America’s national flirt, a pitchman on talk shows and red carpets who, against the background hum of the world’s lust and envy, is lightly ironic, clever, and self-deprecating, with furrowed brow and bobbing head, and a gyration in the lower jaw suggesting something being moved around under his tongue.

Related:
Somebody Has to Be in Control (TNY)