There is a great deal of information packed into Organic Gardening's 76 pages. For vets, the magazine is a handy guide; for beginners, it's useful without being overly technical.

I understand that AARP has an enormous audience to satisfy -- the publication bills itself as "the world's largest circulation magazine" -- but in shooting broadly, it comes across more as Aging For Dummies than as the all-things-for-everybody resource it clearly aspires to be.

Quick! Read this review of Radar before the mag ceases once again to exist. Grab your bifocals and your lamp and your sarcasm mittens and... Shoot, too late. It's gone, man. Oh well, we'll always have our memories -- like that Paris Hilton/Dubya cover. Outrageous! No, wait. Radar lives! For real this time! Haven't you heard? Now it's backed financially by a consortium including Ron Burkle, Jesse Jackson's kid, the Sultans of Brunai and Perak, and no fewer than three members of the 1987 Washington Redskins' offensive line. And it's not going anywhere, at least not for a few weeks.

Western Interiors & Design has a new cover look but the same editorial mission: showcasing, in the words of its editor, "the best, most innovative interior design and architecture coming out of the trend-setting western region." In large measure, it succeeds, thanks to gorgeous photography and straightforward prose.

I'm Jer-Z to the core, though probably not in a way that would endear me to the folks behind the upscale New Jersey Life. They say "contemporary Mediterranean cuisine," I say "chili dog." They say "pricey houses," I say "chili dog." Et cetera. After cranking "Tenth Avenue Freeze-Out" and perusing pix from last summer's Great Adventure day trip, I returned to my mag lab (a.k.a. the couch) with a renewed sense of mission.

Taking up prime real estate on the cover of In Touch Weekly, plastered right over the ''first photos of Baby Jayden!'' is its price: a very slender and alluring $1.99. Compare that to the bloated $3.49 cover price of its tabloid great aunt, Us Weekly, and in the celeb gossip world, you suddenly have a magazine's entire reason for being.

What the hell happened to Giant? Not only is it a fully different publication than it used to be, but one so wildly scattershot in its execution as to evoke pity. When we last checked in with Giant, it offered male-skewed entertainment coverage with post-fraternity bite. Some time over the last year (what, you weren't paying attention either?), it swung a U-turn and morphed into a chronicler of urban culture. Overnight, it went from being Stuff without the starlets to Complex without a clue.

For lack of a better word, I'd describe PC Magazine as nifty -- and as much as "nifty" is often employed to characterize minuscule USB drives or anything involving velcro, I intend its use here as a high compliment. Whereas other tech titles can't decide whether they want to appeal to true believers or newbies, PC Magazine simply throws out a bunch of material that should resonate with anybody who digs technology. It's a title for people who are curious as to what's under the 'puter's hood, whether or not they'll take the next step and pimp it out.

The rules for the second semi-regular edition of Uncle Larry's Magazine Rack Funtime Family Mailbag: You write, I decide. Some questions come verbatim from your mouths/fingers, some come from the Mag Rack blog thing (which I really oughta check in on occasionally), others are a Larry-tweaked composite of 20 variations on the same theme. Without further ado...

As readers of this column know, I am partial to regional magazines. So today, in my ongoing series -- "America: Just Read It"-- we turn to Yankee, published by a family-owned company. It's now bimonthly, but beautifully retains, in the words of its founder, "the preservation of our great New England culture." Yes, some of the design pieces are useful in any region and a moving human-interest story isn't bound by geography, but Yankee always supplies a local topspin.