• Redbook
    It's noon on a Friday in New York as I write this, and by now someone nearby is cracking the first beer of the weekend, declaring, "It's 5:00 somewhere!" Redbook is the magazine that reminds you that it's 1955 somewhere. In the pages of Redbook, to be exact. Here women use Valentine's Day cookie cutters to slice "a message of love" into their husbands' morning toast. Here women buy their husbands a gift for every day they're away on a business trip....
  • Promenade
    According to its publisher, Promenade will serve the "wealthiest 1% of the world's population when they're visiting New York." Fair enough. But if the old adage is true -- you can tell who reads magazines by the ads -- the top drawer wants dental implants, antique paperweights and oversized fossils.
  • Atomic Ranch
    As a middle-period baby boomer, I feel a vague sense of guilt because of the recent lionization of what Tom Brokaw dubbed "The Greatest Generation." But wait! Our parents also did something not just noble, but cool! They moved into ranch houses with screen-block walls and turquoise Formica and Eames chairs and Saarinen tables and, out back behind the carport, Tiki bars! Atomic Ranch celebrates that style with panache.
  • Make It Mine
    The call has gone out -- and not to the writers and TV execs to settle the strike. Thanks to their intransigence, studio wrestling will probably win the first-ever Emmy for Live Action in a Ring. Like all entertainment-starved Americans, I'm prowling for alternatives. So if you're focused on creative can-do, look to Make It Mine.
  • Imbibe
    Like High Times before it, Imbibe helps you celebrate a pastime not endorsed by the PTA. It's a swinging shindig for the liquor-happy booze hound -- or at least when it's focusing on booze.
  • Jewish Living
    When Lenny Bruce did his sketch -- Jewish or Not Jewish -- the Jews got it. Trailer parks? Not Jewish. New York? Jewish. Fruit salad is Jewish. Lime Jell-O isn't. Here's another: the name Rex. This is a moniker one finds at the Museum of Natural History, usually preceded by the letter T. It is not commonly found on a bar mitzvah invitation. It is, however, the name of the Jewish Living editor's son. I'm sure he's a good kid, and we don't name ourselves. But as my grandmother would have said, meshuggeneh. Still, there's much to savor in the …
  • Ms.
    I love the image of Wonder Woman floating on the cover of Ms. Magazine's 35th anniversary issue. Timely and clever, it's even smarter on closer inspection. Constructed from hundreds of teeny little rectangles, each miniature box turns out to be actual cover of Ms. dating back to the magazine's inception. It also recalls an iconic cover image from that founding year: a cartoon depiction of a 50-foot Wonder Woman madly running along a highway, carrying an entire city in her golden lasso of truth under the headline, ''Wonder Woman for President.''
  • Cottages & Bungalows
    My nesting instincts started exceedingly early. As a toddler, I was reading my mother's Better Homes and Gardens from cover to cover before it occurred to her that maybe she should get me a subscription to Highlights. However, I've developed an appreciation for old houses, despite my upbringing (and early magazine reading) in two mid-century ranches. I subscribe to two niche publications that cater to that genre, American Bungalow and Style 1900, and recently discovered a new kid on the block, Cottages & Bungalows.
  • Heeb
    Jewish humor has always walked the line between self-deprecation and self-loathing, between not taking oneself too seriously and seriously wishing you were someone else. Everyone from Woody Allen to Larry David to Sarah Silverman has made careers out of exploiting that tension, making us laugh at their neuroses while simultaneously feeling kind of bad for doing so. Think of it as Jewish guilt for the masses. And at its best, Heeb is a brilliant 21st century link to that tradition.
  • Yoga Journal
    Just how mainstream has yoga gotten? Popular enough that when Valerie Plame Wilson was suffering from outed-spy stress, "It got to the point where I thought if one more person suggested that I take up yoga I would run screaming from the room," she writes in her book "Fair Game." So even in government circles, downward dogs have moved beyond the province of so-called "weirdos." And Yoga Journal now reports a readership of 1.2 million, comparable to many mainstream women's mags.
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