Conspiracy Theorist

As mentioned below, Texas Monthly editor Evan Smith has noted in his blog that the “Astronaut Sex” cover might end up being the worst-selling edition in the magazine’s history, because apparently we live in a 18th-century Amish village where children have never seen the word “sex.” (Or, possibly, in a 21st-century state where e-mail blasts can generate instant letter-writing campaigns among the easily offended.)

One snippet of Smith’s blog post caught our eye, however. He wrote that there “are surely any number of reasons” that the magazine sold below the average TM issue. Among the possibilities he listed: “Houston-area boosters boycotted us on the grounds that we dared to take on NASA, their economic development engine.”

Really? Houston-area boosters got together and organized a boycott because of a story on this pretty-damn-well-covered-already story?

Actually, no, says Smith. Asked if there was a real-live boycott, he e-mails “not that I’m aware of – nothing formal or official, in other words. Our Houston-area sales for that issue were down compared to what they normally are, but the notion of a quote-unquote boycott is as theoretical as the idea that newsstand sales of [the] magazine are in precipitous decline (which, other than this issue, we see no evidence of).”

Still worth tossing out there as a possibility, apparently. – Richard Connelly