The undeniable appeal of trash

Midterms are a notoriously hellish time of year. Yes, they end with Halloween and fall break, but there's not one reading day before them to let us breathe a little. In times like these, we have to create our own mindless activities and study breaks, and I have to say that one of my favorite ways to stop thinking about French essays and action potentials involves spending some quality time with Us Weekly and Star.

While tabloids make good stress-busters, enjoyment of them isn't limited to times of tension. Trashy magazines are hands-down the best reading material for the gym ever invented. It's like they did focus groups to try to figure out what could be the most entertaining distracter from the Stairmaster, and tabloids are what they came up with. The pictures are big and flashy, and let's face it — it doesn't hurt your motivation to see stars in their bathing suits.

Though sometimes just having a new magazine is enough to make me trek to Dillon, tabloids are also useful when you're doing the opposite of something active—waiting. If I know I'm going to McCosh, I try to bring my own magazine. Some people do class reading, or "meaningful," "intellectual" reading, but I say, hey, you're already waiting and sick, which is bad enough. Read something mindless with articles you can have the satisfaction of finishing completely in a short time period.

Despite these obvious benefits of tabloids, one of my friends asked me this summer what it was about tabloids that I could possibly enjoy so much. I told her about the mindlessness and the big pictures, and she understood how it was like junk food for the brain, but she couldn't get how people would enjoy watching stars as if they were animals in a zoo. That's when I realized the true reason tabloids are so appealing: They're about strangers everyone knows. The articles keep you up to date on the latest personal sagas of celebrities, but they have no idea who you are, and you don't really know them. They're not going to overhear you talking about them or run into you at the local Starbucks—they're these (sometimes literally) plastic people, who are somehow O.K. to make fun of. So O.K., in fact, that there's even a new tabloid called "O.K!"

The fact that the people in trashy magazines are simultaneously real and, in a way, not, gives them this unique quality that no fiction novel's characters could ever have. Not only is it more acceptable to revel in their misfortune, because, after all, isn't that what they signed up for, but reading about their lives can also provide relief from the sometimes suffocating atmosphere of Ivy League self-involvement. When you're sick and waiting in McCosh, you think you have it bad, but Brad dropped Jen like she was going out of style, and Nick and Jessica are on the rocks. You might be tired of doing a problem set, but Kenny and Renee stayed together for about as long as it took you to get through half of it. As scary as that midterm or bicker might be, it can't make you feel worse than Kate Moss did when proof of her coke addiction pretty much ruined her career. It's comforting to know that even the rich, beautiful and famous have far less than perfect lives.

Beyond the philosophical and psychological reasons why I and others love trashy magazines, there's also just some indescribable mystique about them. I distinctly remember a time when I left a Star near my dad's computer. This is a man who has to be pretty interested to read things that aren't related to his kids, news, the economy, or golf. At dinner he said, "You know, I looked at that magazine, and it was really garbage, but I couldn't stop reading it." He told me it was like a train wreck he couldn't pull his eyes away from.

Even though my own dad now, on some level, comprehends the appeal, some people still don't understand how anyone could love reading tabloids. I have to admit that I can understand some of the arguments of anti-tabloiders. Do I feel guilty supporting the paparazzi? Kind of. Am I somehow not completely comfortable subscribing to a trashy magazine even though it would save me a lot of money? Perhaps. Maybe tabloids are like picture books for grownups. They are undeniably full of cultural garbage, but someone once said that you can tell a lot about people by what's in their wastebaskets. Laura Berner is a psychology major from Rye, N.Y. She can be reached at lberner@princeton.edu.