January 21, 2006

• Your suggestions. Idjit.
• The Wire is very good
• Cooks Illustrated B&W Make
• also evo
• National Geographic is worth it. For the scientific monkey I would recommend Scientific American Hahaha, and just for fun, Cosmopolitan. =)
• Second Make. I really need to subscribe. I always miss it when it actually hits the newsstands. In the same vein, ReadyMade. It's the shizz. Also, haven't subscribed yet, but Lost looks really cool.
• Harper's Monthly. It's my favorite. Three in-depth articles, a short story, book reviews and, what keeps me coming back, the Readings section, a hodge-podge of gleanings from any number of sources in the world, some bizarre, some hilarious, some moving, but all providing food for thought.
• I would second Cooks Illustrated - their mind-blowingly anal approach to cooking is off-putting to some, but when they recommend a product, approach or recipe, you can't go wrong. Plus, the back cover is always pretty. If you were (are?) Canadian, I'd say Geist. Their maps are always fun. My favourite 'magazine' is Granta - more of a monthly book than a magazine, but there are always beautiful photographs and writing ranging from the unknown to Margaret Atwood and Paul Theroux.
• RIght now I have New Yorker, NY Times delivered every day, Geographic, and Vogue, easily the most politically confused magazine I have ever read. All these sound great. More, please?
• Some examples of of the type of items one might find in a typical Readings selection.
• I second Granta, how about The Economist and 2600, to keep it real.
• The Economist for insightful articles on international news. It has great science articles as well and the journalists are top-notch writers. If you want to know where the world is headed, this is the mag to get.
• The Economist. Arf! fixed the link.
• Light Quarterly
• There needs to be a magazine named "Drawn and Quarterly".... sorry... please return to your topic.
• I think there's a comic book called "Drawn and Quarterly."
• How about a combined art and numismatics magazine: Drawn and Quarterly
• Mother Jones
• This is gonna sound weird but the magazine put out by Benneton, "Colors," is really really good. Go to a magazine stand and check it out. Every issue I've ever read has been utterly compelling with gorgeous photos.
• MacAddict
• I love the Atlantic. By the way, you can get magazines for like 5 dollars a year at places like Magazine Price Search. I get a couple that I ordered through them and the only problem I've had so far is a little junk mail. (I purposely misspelled my name to see who they sell my name to.)
• I'd like a magazine that's both washable and wearable.
• There is no question that you need a subscription to New Scientist. If you're an American, the non-American viewpoint is illuminating. The enigma puzzle @ the end of each issue gives you something to think about when you're idle. Each issue delivers more depth and breadth of coverage in one week than SciAm does in one week. -_- If you're a programmer, look into Dr. Dobbs Journal...
• These are chick-centric: Venus (indie music crafty stuff) Bust (I imagine this is what Sassy would be like grown up) Bitch (third wave's Ms)
• I love Bitch :) I used to subscribe to ReadyMade, but I think their business dept is a bit confused. I paid to renew my subscription, twice (I figured the first could be considered a "donation" to keep a cool new mag going) and they never renewed me. I subscribed at the very beginning, though, so hopefully things are a bit better there now. I also recommend Smithsonian, which covers a wide range of art, science, history, and culture. You also get a membership to the museums when you subscribe. A cool indie culture/politics magazine is Clamor. They always get you thinking (disclosure: I know the people who run this magazine, but even if I didn't I'd recommend it.)
• This is a wacky question. Zymurgy is an excellent magazine if you are into brewing your own beer. If you aren't, then not so much. I like New Yorker. Regardless of the magazine titles you want to subscribe to, you should subscribe via eBay. If you can stand waiting the 8-12 weeks for your subscription to begin arriving, you will save a ton of money. New Yorker for instance is normally $46/year ($1 per issue). I got a TWO YEAR subscription on eBay for $17. And, yes, I'm receiving it in the mail each week and the label shows a 2 year expiration date. Just subscribed to Backpacker for about 1/3 the regular price. Check the feedback of the seller, but then do it!
• Yes, ebay is the bees knees when it comes to magazine subscriptions. I got 4 years of PCGamer for $12.99 and a year of Electronic Gaming Monthly for $1.99. I'm a sucker for Discover and Popular Science. If you look around the deals sites you can often find free magazine subscriptions too. Of course you can't pick what you get, but it's free! That's the only reasom I get TV Guide. Especially since they changed format and made it useless.
• I completely agree with Make. Excellent magazine. New Scientist and The Walrus are good too.
• Oh yeah. I also love Discover.
• For general art without excessive pretentiousness try Art in America or Art News. They cover a wide variety of art and are pretty down to earth in their writing. Recently they've covered stuff like detecting fakes and the science behind it and stuff like that. So it's much more than just pompous artspeak buffonery. Modern Painters used to be a great painting magazine, but last I looked they switched to some interior designy format which might float your boat but as a painter I stopped being interested in it. Juxtapoz is really amazing for modern surrealism and tattoo type stuff.
• Used to get at least a dozen mags monthly, form tech stuff, mac mags, to news and design ones. Economics and time constraints kepp making it difficult to really read or at least scan them, so right now I'm at an all time low: Harper's, maybe a local political review and HOW, a design mag. Tech stuff I get from the web and most Mac ones are so full of fluff and ads, it's disheartening. Used to get Utne Reader but they have gone way too enlightened for my cynical self.
• Utne Reader: Bleah. Was it just me or was EVERYTHING in that magazine a "top ten" list?
• I completely agree with Cook's Illustrated. A periodical that comes into my library that I always find interesting is CQ Researcher and it's sister publication CQ Weekly. The Researcher covers one current events topic per issue such as Predatory Loaning or Sex Education. It may be pricey. I don't know, I am not the acquisitions person.
• Natural History
• Utne Reader: Bleah. Was it just me or was EVERYTHING in that magazine a "top ten" list? Utne Reader: it used to be good but now definitely second rate. The decline started a few years ago E.g. when it went wacko on the Y2K scare. Even worse, when 2000 arrived without a glitch, they said *nothing*. No attempt to figure out why they got it all so terribly wrong.
• Re: Mac mags, the one I still find useful is MacFormat, the UK version. Pricey, but their coverdisks actually have valuable stuff and the mag's full of tutorials. Quality of such varies wildly from month to month, though.
• Ditto, on The Atlantic and New Scientist. I currently get ReadyMade, which I really like, but the past couple of issues have not been so great. I wish Omni was still around, that was a good one.
• Omni and Whole Earth Review, yeah. Good times.
• I read way too many magazines, but I like that they're a good, short,"fun" read at the end of the day. My magazine subscriptions are a mix of the useful and silly. I've already mentioned Bitch, Smithsonian, and Clamor(which I pick up at the newsstand, for some reason). I also get Premiere, Entertainment Weekly, Spin, Discover, and Newsweek. I used to get Sports Illustrated, but I get too disgusted by the swimsuit issue every year. (It's partially a feminist thing, yeah, but it's also that if they're gonna put out porn, just go all the way and put out some damn porn. At least that might be fun.) Good lord. Seeing it all written out, I *do* get too many magazines... I'll shut up now
• Dwell magazine and Wallpaper are pretty good design and architecture magazines, always a good time to be found between the pages when looking for a change.
• I can't stand Newsweek. U.S. News and World Report is the way to go, instead. /just sayin'
• On The Economist as a choice for a magazine, I was reading it about ten years ago (still reading it today) and some of the predictions they were making for the economy, politics, etc. were somewhat bleak. They were talking about where american politics would be ten years from now, the russian economy, how China would develop. So here we are ten years later and. . . They totally nailed it. It's like looking into a freakin' crystal ball. Highly recommended.
• echo that, mk1gti. When it comes to finance, they're good at calling a bubble a bubble -- although they usually do it a shade too early. They called the Japanese Nikkei market crash a year early, and ditto the NASDAQ. They called the real-estate market in the US a bubble last year so...any day now... Countless billions of dollars would have been saved if more folks would just STFU and read the magazine! *falls off soapbox*
• Try going Outside.
• Discover Magazine which will make you interested in things that you would think would totally fly over your head. I doubt it'd really be many people's cup of tea around here but I've always loved the graffiti magazine Life Sucks Die if only for the articles and interviews with crazy graffiti artists and underground hip-hop personalities.
• I like Fine Cooking because it feels less pretentious than some of the other food magazines, and the recipes sound good to me. It's a bit pricey for what you get, but it seems like all Taunton magazines are that way. They have some other titles for specific interests, most notably Threads and Fine Woodworking, if you've ever fancied sewing a blazer or building a cabinet or something. For so many of the other magazines I used to get, I end up just subscribing to their websites instead. If I want to know what chef's knife Cooks Illustrated recommends, I don't want to go leafing through two years of issues to find that. Same for Consumer Reports.
• To be honest, Darshon, I'm letting my subscription to Newsweek lapse because I find that I'm getting all of my news on the internets.... I used to like it for in-depth and extended coverage, but now they seem to be getting too much into celebrity "news."
• Tape-Op: Full of insight and FREE! It's the best magazine next to Adbusters, mesez.
• For food: http://www.chowmag.com For anime dorks: http://www.newtype-usa.com
• This is so great. Just what I wanted. I know it's a funny question but I am going to cut back my dish tv subscription to just about nothing-feel I should read more and watch tv a lot less. I get all my news on the internets, too and find it hard to watch that celebrity stuff. Thanks for all the ideas.
• 1) Frieze magazine, and 2) Cabinet magazine. Both great art mags.
• Teevee is teh suck.
• Thirding the Atlantic.
• Prior to the internet, I would have made some solid porn recommendations. Alas, there is almost no use for porno magazines now.
• It's a UK music/ents mag, but Word Magazine is excellent, some very high quality writing, often quite contentious, but always with a solidly constructed argument. You can pay to read articles online
• Exactly, meredithea!! The quality of writing has dropped significantly, as have most magazines' writing, these days. I absolutely cannot tolerate Rolling Stones anymore for that very reason. Wow, does that magazine suck!
• You've heard of porn, right?
• The Believer.
• Well. About ReadyMade - someone mentioned really liking it when they first found it, but being less impressed with the most recent issues. That seems to be the pattern with that magazine for most people I know... it seems like a great idea when you read the first issue, but as time goes on, it becomes less and less impressive. Most of the time you can get the same ideas by browsing Craftster, minus ReadyMade's curiously sexist tone. (Something that may not bother you if you aren't into any degree of feminist media criticism. And even though I am, I don't care for Bitch, either - the critiques there are too often either ill-founded to begin with, or taken way past the point where the author can actually support them.) As to most other magazines, it depends on the contents of the particular issue. I usually buy Interweave Knits, which is probably the best of the knitting magazines. But it sometimes includes horrible missteps, and is most interesting to current or aspiring knitters. (Most of the patterns are intermediate to expert, so there isn't too much that aspiring knitters will actually want to MAKE, here.) Somerset Studios is a fancy and relatively expensive magazine for people into paper arts (altered books, artists' journals, etc), and Paper Scissors Cloth is similar, but with art quilting added to the mix. Make wasn't a bad recommendation either, but you have to be into tech stuff to like it. I like Kitchen Sink (which has some similarities to Bitch's better side), but the most recent issue was disappointing. I like Juxtapoz, but it depends who they're featuring. I think Giant Robot is often interesting, but others might disagree. I second the recommendation of The Believer, if you like to read. Mental Floss is fun. Real Simple is spotty - if you subscribe for more than a year or two you'll see a lot of repetition in article topics in a way common to mainstream magazines. It has become more of a "women's magazine" than it was when it was launched, it assumes its audience is of at least comfortably middle-class means, and sometimes it goes too much in the direction of being a catalogue. But it can still be valuable - I never regret trying anything they've recommended. Some of the recipes are particularly easy and wonderful. As far as news magazines - I spend enough time online that I don't read them. My mom likes The Week, which can be difficult to find. There are tons and piles of other magazines you might look at, depending on what grabs your attention. I think a good way to make this decision would be to head to a big chain bookstore, and, going by section, pull out anything that looks interesting to you. This might take several visits, but it'll be a more visceral and decisive experience than just having titles recommended, and you'll probably discover something that the rest of us have missed recommending.
• Repeat poster! If you like to read, don't forget about the various literary journals - Granta and Paris Review are good, but there are bunches of others. There's also a special discount that many small literary journals are running, with the help of the Emerging Writers Network - you can find the information here. The two I mentioned are not part of the deal, but Kenyon Review, Small Spiral Notebook, and other Pushcart Prize Usual Suspects are.
• Second on Walrus. Great articles, well written, not at all dumbed down. Neat little obscure news items to boot. And damn cheap. Got me a year and a t-shirt for twenty bucks. Canadian. Also good is Maisonneuve, which is just as interesting as The Walrus, if a little self-involved and Montreal-centric.
• I can see what you're saying about _Bitch_, verbminx, but I think that might be one reason why I like it. What I mean is, the authors aren't afraid to take a stand and run with it, and I appreciate that as someone who reads overly-cautious academic writing too often. The articles that take an out-there stand and work it are fun to read, and the ones that fall apart help me learn what *not* to do in my own writing. I know that's not for everyone, though.
• ok, this is what I'm going to get: Economist Bitch Atlantic Macaddict Granta Harpers Adbusters Cooks Illustrated Wired Focus Art in America B&W Flaunt Hobo Doubletake and Archive. Now I can cancle the teeeeveeeee.