• Domino
    My husband and I hit the real estate jackpot when the up-and-coming Brooklyn neighborhood where we'd bought a co-op gentrified way beyond our expectations. Embarrassed yet delighted, I began furtively checking out home design mags for tips. When Domino debuted last year, I found a level of literate quirkiness in its pages that suited my ambivalence about becoming house-proud.
  • The New Yorker
    There's an exquisitely telling document on the letters page of this week's New Yorker. A quiet little missive about the magazine's legendary editor, William Shawn, written by his two sons, it's an unintentional howler, a rollicking substantiation of Tom Wolfe's famous essay that blew the lid off the inbred and ossified folkways of the otherwise revered publication.
  • Baseball The Magazine
    Baseball season starts on Sunday night at precisely 8:07 p.m. EST. You know what this means, right? Yup, from Monday onward I'll be mailing in this column like nobody's business. Since November, I've actually read every word in every publication I've covered in this space; starting on Monday, I'll be lucky to catch every fifth story. On the plus side, my opinions and wordplay probably can't get any more oafish than they already are.
  • Business Week
    I'm inherently suspicious of any magazine issue that bills itself as "special." I'll leave the question of whether the April 3 BusinessWeek attains specialness (specialitude? specialistasticity?) to the marketing wonks who tagged it as such. Instead, I'll wonder aloud how a single publication can alternate between some of the smartest content to be found in any magazine--business or otherwise--and items that would be deemed too lower-middlebrow for a college newspaper.
  • Mean
    Oscar Wilde once said that "Fashion is a form of ugliness so intolerable that we have to alter it every six months." This quote is emblazoned on the spine of the March/April issue of Mean magazine, the pub's first-ever fashion issue. Already I'm guessing Mean doesn't take itself too seriously.
  • Time
    I grew up reading Newsweek, because Mom and Dad subscribed to it. Over the last year or so, I've been reading Time, because the kind folks at Time Inc. zip me over an issue every Monday. So basically, my choice of newsweekly has heretofore been determined by access to freebie copies.
  • Caring Today
    When Dana Reeve, arguably America's most famous caregiver, died recently, the obits mentioned she'd given up an acting and singing career to devote herself to her husband, paralyzed movie star Christopher Reeve. As profiled in the magazine Caring Today, Bridget Bennett also gave up her acting dreams to become a caregiver for her mother, a breast cancer victim.
  • Arthur Frommer's Budget Travel
    Arthur Frommer's Budget Travel doesn't dawdle with fanciful story leads, nor does it imperil its editorial credibility by plugging, say, lip gloss as a travel accessory. So while the publication may pack all the pizzazz of an actuarial table, it relays pertinent information about destinations and deals in a readily browsable format. That's probably the reason you read a magazine like this, unless you're one of the Gabor sisters.
  • Relevant
    A series of words caught my eye on the cover of the March/April issue of Relevant Magazine: "God. Life. Progressive Culture" (the pub's tagline).... "2006 Spring Music Guide." Mentally naming as many Christian bands as possible in my head (Jars of Clay, Switchfoot, Sixpence None the Richer, Creed, Ok. Scratch Creed.), I left my local bookstore with an overworked brain and Relevant in my hand.
  • Psychology Today
    When did Psychology Today become a chick mag? Why wasn't I notified? And who's to blame for this genre-migrating fiasco?
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