As of this writing, this woman doing nothing more than introducing herself has about ten times the views of our video commemorating Anna Nicole Smith.

Something is seriously wrong when the internet cannot be counted on to take the low road. [via Defamer]

Based on the past press coverage of Anna Nicole’s legal woes, one might get the impression that J. Howard, her aging wealthy husband, left her a vast amount of his estate in his will and that the litigation that made its way up to the Supreme Court was about the J. Howard estate. But Anna Nicole’s litigation woes were for the most part, not about probate at all. J. Howard actually did not leave her anything in his will: his son, Pierce, was the sole beneficiary of the estate. more »

One year ago, coverage of Anna Nicole’s death tended to go in one of two directions. Either she was memorialized as a breathtaking beauty who was little more than a victim of a cruel culture, or she was mocked for having made one laugably bad life choice after another.

These two views stem from opposing interpretations of her life and death. Was she a victim of a culture in which her only hope of social mobility was leveraging her sex appeal for fame and money and then leveraging that fame once the sex appeal and money ran out? Or was she just an idiot who simply made bad choice after bad choice? If her rise and fall is structural, we are all to blame; if its due to her own agency, then we owe her nothing but scorn. more »

“I really don’t care much about riches, but I do care about achievement. That’s all that matters.”

—J. Howard Marshall II

This isn’t a post about Anna Nicole Smith. This is a post about J. Howard Marshall.

He is, of course, the man who married Smith and willed her his ginormous estate. But what did he do for the first 89 years of his life? As it turns out, a hell of a lot.

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The crew at Overthinking It are committed to reflecting thoughtfully on even the most crass of cultural phenomena. We’re like doctors: you can tell us all your embarrassing secrets. We will nod sagely, and prescribe a cream you can put on your junk.

The life and career of Anna Nicole Smith (née Vickie Lynn Marshal) could be called the most telling artifact of American culture at the opening of the twenty-first century (not by us, but by some bloviating twit or other). The woman became a canvas onto which a culture could project its darkest fantasies and consuming obsessions—celebrity worship, plastic surgery, fad dieting, greed, drugs, boobies—a demented clown enacting in distorted parody the most decadent aspects of late capitalism.

Today, Friday, February 8, 2008, we pause to remember the one year anniversary of the woman’s death. The posts may be irreverent. They will almost certainly be in bad taste. But they will not—you have my word here—be underthinking it.