must-have magazines

Good column by Reilly this week. Not sure if he's done this type of thing before, but it was cute and humorous.

 

What was the cover?

 

Wasn't there a comedy blog who did this (better, though with fake quotes) & was linked here last year?

 

Yeah, that's the thing: seems like it could've been done before.

 

Moving a bunch of stuff right now and I've been going through my "keepsake" magazines. I've got the Sports Illustrated from right after 9/11 with the flag draped over the empty seat, the Newsweek with a sportsbra-clad Brandi Chastain, the Newsweek memorial issue right after Katharine Graham died, the last issue of Jane and the first issue of Real Simple.

The SI with the Smith story had "Florida beat Ohio State for the national championship, sound familiar" on it, I think. I passed it along to a friend, so I'm not 100 percent sure.

 

I read that article, too, but found it pretty pedestrian -- I felt like it was written by a Gannett spokesman.

But I also then clicked on the Enquirer's website and he's right, the site is a great example of what hyperlocal journalism should be. I wish the Tennessean (which I read from afar online daily) would do the same.

 

I've found The Atlantic to be my must-read lately. Two months ago they had several great articles on Condi's travels and on how much boot camp has changed over the last 2 years. Both were well reported and written. This month, there's a (too short) article on flying inside a B-2 bomber that is a great read.

As for the exact opposite -- magazines I used to read cover to cover but which I now wish I didn't have long-term subscriptions: Vanity Fair and Car and Driver. VF has lost the plot, replacing long, well-written and reported stories with massive portrait series; Car and Driver has decided it needs to cater to 22 year old video-game playing car nerds living in their mom's basement. Their stories are short, their redesign is terrible, and their right-wing, knee-jerk attacks on hybrids are getting stale.

 

Re: pedestrian ... Perhaps he wrote it in layman terms for the mag crowd who might not give a flying fugget about the newspaper biz.

 

Agree on The Atlantic.The new publisher has really thrown some money at it, and as dour and stale a thing as it was two years ago, it's become pretty reliably vibrant.

I'll likewise throw in a plug for the NYT sports quarterly, Play.

 

Mother Jones

 

How about the Weekly Standard?

 

The thread is titled "must-have magazines," not "magazines totally discredited by events of the last four years." It's amazing that Kristol keeps getting punditry jobs, given that he's been so profoundly wrong on the Iraq war.