To theme or not to theme? This has been the question ringing through Last Exit headquarters in recent weeks. After the success of our second issue on land and agriculture, we were tempted to continue down this merry path. Yet something within us resisted, not wanting our contributors to be handcuffed to a single idea. And so what you have before you started out as an attempted compromise: an unthemed Issue 3, to be followed up next month by yet another issue with some very specific things to get off its chest. We planned to continue the alterations until we got bored of them.

And yet a funny thing happens when you don’t invite someone to your party: they often have a way of showing up anyway. And so it was with this month’s theme. Try as we might to enforce the law of anything goes, connections between contributions crept in unannounced, and before we knew it, we seemed to be staring at a full-blown motif. We had only to name it. Behold the Showbiz Issue.

At the heart of this issue is the camera: as lover, oppressor, prison warden, sugar daddy, retirement plan, democracy mediator, likeability meter, misstep catcher, citizen stand-in, nostalgia factory, surgical instrument, mirror, ticket out, and — of course, everyone’s favorite — fantasy portal.

In “The Huckster,” sports essayist Bryan Joiner examines A-Rod’s masochistic relationship with the media and explains why, in 20 years, baseball’s most talented player will be standing on a podium wearing a fake smile.

In “Drag City,” mainstream media misanthrope Ethan Smith takes an exasperated look at another pack of media masochists in his dispatch from the Iowa caucuses, where he found the traveling press corps was cynical – but usually about the wrong things.

Kramer O’Neill’s photo essay, “The America Space,” peers into Midtown Manhattan with some cynicism of his own about the meaning of this quintessentially American spectacle-scape. “Our subconscious anxiety over our empire’s decline bubbles to the surface in the form of ever-grander spectacle,” he writes, “yet what could be more tedious than to be excited all the time?”

We tend to feel this is a distinctly American phenomenon, but as Lauren D. Klein shows us in her trip through the Bollywood film industry, “Bollywood or Bust,” the craving for constant spectacle – especially the kind with bared abs and backup dancers — is universal.

- Paul Menchaca and Keach Hagey, Editors