Earth to Esquire's editors

Esquire writer Lisa Taddeo sits at her desk to write but she doesn't really sit. What she actually does is slalom down in her chair, real low like it's a water slide. Seventy-three inches of all-black everything, laid out like a ramp.

And if those previous sentences made no damn sense to you, perhaps you can return to Earth from Lisa Land. But if you are looking for more of the same in an article about, let's say, Jay-Z, then keep on keepin' on! Slate deconstructs her work like a foamy nü-martini in a quick-to-close hip bar:

The February issue of Esquire features an article entitled "Jay-Z: It Takes a Harmless, Hand-Built Gangster To Run this Town," by Lisa Taddeo. If the author's name sounds familiar, it might be because of another story she wrote for Esquire, a mildly controversial, fictionalized account of Heath Ledger's death in which Taddeo assumed the late actor's voice and narrated his final hours. While she has taken a more straightforward approach to Jay-Z, the end product is no less bizarre[...]

Rather, I'd like to call attention to Taddeo's prose style, which is by turns purple ("Stoute's worldview is both oracular and pretend color-blind") and simply nonsensical. (What could she possibly mean when saying that reporters surround Jay-Z in a "buttery little square"?) There is a tendency toward strange compound constructions ("he is real deal-eyed") and a weakness for neologism (Jay-Zion). Her metaphors—"like an endorsement-gathering snowball"—are decidedly mixed. This isn't bad writing. This is writing so baffling and incomprehensible that I hesitate to guess what the writer or her editors were thinking.

We'll start you off with one uncut gem, and leave you to ponder the rest over at Slate:

Jay-Z is a half-dangerous rapper who grew up in the gat-happy projects of the Bedford-Stuyvesant section of Brooklyn. He sold crack on feral corners and shot his brother for stealing his ring. Badass, for real.

[source: Slate]