The Guilty Pleasures of Mansion Porn
Mansion, The Wall Street Journal’s real-estate supplement, arrives each Friday slipped into the middle of my newsprint edition, the way pornography (so I’m told!) used to come in unmarked envelopes back before the internet placed it at everyone’s fingertips. I’m satisfied with my weekly print version, but you may prefer reading Mansion on the web, where the photographs are more numerous, detailed, lurid, and explicit.
Lots of newspapers in the United States—Ha! Look at me, I wrote “lots of newspapers”—I mean, the few newspapers that still exist in the United States, cover the real-estate market in matter-of-fact terms, often in a weekend flyer. You get mid-range listings, mortgage tips, market forecasts, and so on. The effort is invariably respectable and modest in ambition. Mansion is up to something else altogether. Like all great storytelling, Mansion leaves us to uncover the great human truths as if on our own; it shows rather than tells. You have to bring your own mockery and horror.
The comparison to porn is apt. It’s also unoriginal and incomplete. A little more than a decade ago, when the century was young and right before their real-estate holdings drove millions of people into bankruptcy, magazine ran a regular feature about how fabulous it was to own real estate. And
