“Last year, I had the honor of giving what’s known as a Delacorte Lecture at Columbia University. I was, they told me, the lone editor from a fashion magazine to address the crowd of journalism students that semester. The first thing I asked was how many people there actually read fashion magazines, which got a fair show of hands. Then I asked who in the crowd thought fashion magazines were the devil, and one or two gamely waved. It was a lively hour of back-and-forth with the cream of America’s student journalism crop, but my favorite question came after I described the nearly 10,000-word piece we’d done on Barack Obama in December 2006, for which contributing editor Laurie Abraham traveled to Africa with him and wrote one of the first, and to my mind still one of the best, approximations of Obama the man, the candidate, and the American (check it out on ELLE.com). The J-school student, a young man, asked me how I felt about the fact that we’d done this great piece but “no one” read it. No one? You mean, except for the 4.5 million women who read ELLE every month? You mean men, right? I’m writing this just as primary season is heating up, and I don’t think I can stand one more news report referring to the “real Americans” “out there” who need so much coddling and attention from the candidates that they’ve spent what equals the GDP of a developing nation. As our intrepid E. Jean Caroll might say, you, dolls, — ELLE readers — are as much the face of “real America” as any pudgy pink guy in overalls, and there are more of you than the total populations of Iowa and New Hampshire combined. (Though I know that we have loads of readers in both those states.)”