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We're usually so excited to get our hands on our copy of Entertainment Weekly—there's something comforting in its large, colorful, My First Magazine headline fonts, and the smiling face of the cover-earning newsmaker makes us think everything's going to be OK. But when we delved deeper into this week's offering, the annual Power Issue, we were shocked by an unexpected development.

The magazine has abandoned the numerical ranking system that helped make quantitative sense of the industry's difference-makers in favor of a more binary, up-or-down/hot-or-not system. We suppose this makes things easier for those readers not intimately familiar with the Arabic numbers system, but we want to see a big, fat "1" in front of the guy whose current level of influence demands the most fervent salad-tossing by those in the business. Why should we have to squander precious brain cells extrapolating that cover boy Mel Gibson is this season's big dog because he successfully made the world pay to watch his savior being beaten up? For the love of God, EW, just tell Les Moonves exactly how many people he has to murder in cold blood to seize the top spot and take out the guesswork, perhaps saving scores of innocent lives! This hot/not business is, at its heart, a cop-out, a sad testament to the regrettable dumbing down of the entertainment-worship industry, and EW should be ashamed.

Unfortunately, EW's website doesn't make the Power Issue available, so you'll have to idle near the supermarket checkout aisle to discover which twins are up (Lindsay Lohan's) and which are down (the Olsens). Just for old times' sake, we're going to call Lohan "#102" and the Olsens "#240.5"