I am not a cigar aficionado, nor a cigar devotee, zealot or disciple. Happily for me, then, the April issue of Cigar Aficionado continues the title's subtle slide towards men's-general-interest territory. Unhappily for me and you and anybody else who can read, however, that tectonic shift has not served it well. The mag has lost much of its mojo--not to mention nearly all of its credibility and wit--in transition.

Tennis demands of its players etiquette usually associated with finishing school. It imposes attire requirements more stringent than those of Vegas nightclubs. It includes the word "love" in its scoring. Tennis: it's EXTREME. Or so the folks behind Smash would have you believe.

More often than not, magazine redesigns are an exercise in futility. Brighter colors, larger photos, a few extra sidebars... isn't this pretty much the publishing equivalent of throwing the same exact ingredients into a stew, but in a slightly different order? If you really want to get readers to pay more attention, I suggest incentivizing them with a free Mr. Coffee doohickey, like banks used to do.

At a time when magazines and the entire print world are supposedly dying a slow, painful death, Complex magazine, a jam-packed, visually-laden affair, appears to be thriving and having fun doing so.

I can't say that I like Details; the mag and I are as much of an odd-couple pairing as April cover boy Vin Diesel and multisyllabic words (zing!). Nonetheless, I have no problem grasping why the title has surged in popularity since its extreme makeover a few years back.Where other men's magazines throw a bunch of junk against the wall and hope it sticks, Details has something that feels suspiciously like a personality.

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.

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 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.

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.

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.