must-have magazines

I knew you would like that one Boom!

 

It was like a batting-practice fastball to Wily Mo Pena, FSC. Well done!

 

Buddy of mine at Fox News Channel says they get huge stacks of TWS delivered to the newsroom ... and then they sit, gathering dust. Even the folks and FNC won't read it!

 

This week's GQ is heavier than the Gutenberg Bible. More than 400 pages; first 100 pages are ads.

Anyhoo, cool feature on my, and Angola's, favorite QB, Antonio "Nieto" Romo.

 

Correction: I believe it's Tommy_Dreamer who also loves Romo, not 'gola; my apologies to 'gola.

So, there's a kickass -- and long -- story about the Doomsday (seed) vault in the new The New Yorker. Everything you ever wanted to know about the history of crop-producing seeds, and how a quarter of a million seeds are being stored in one facility near the North Pole just in case boom goes the dynamite world and we have to start all over again.

 

i agree that atlantic is getting better. for those of us who don't want to read 11,000 words on the presidential campaign - albeit 11,000 words not available anywhere else - atlantic used to be worthless, but it's improving by leaps and bounds.

and vanity fair is simply excruciating. i'll pick it up only in an airport if i've read pretty much every other general interest/men's mag that month (GQ, esquire, men's health, etc.).

i'm wondering what people think of GQ these days. i often buy it at the news stand in an airport and like what i read, but i'm thinking of getting a subscription.

 

If you're going to read a conservative opinion magazine, National Review is the one to have. It has a nice mix of current events, political commentary, reporting and some good stuff (e.g., book reviews, et al). It's written to a higher-brow audience, but it's one of my must-reads.

The American Spectator has never really appealed to me (it seems to be a bit too kooky ... a right-wing version of Mother Jones). Neither has the Weekly Standard (for reasons I'm not sure why, maybe more of a preference for Buckley over Kristol).

 

So the new Maxim has Amber Heard on the cover. It's a quick-hit interview. She's quite a sassy Texan who likes guns and the NRA.

 

The New Yorker
Foreign Affairs

 

tremendous story by erik hedegaard on robert downey jr. in RS.

 

even better story on that teen who went on the shooting rampage in Omaha. that reporting blew away anything AP or Omaha did on the kid.

 

My monthly must-reads:

F1 Racing - Brilliant F1 magazine, imported from England. Costs an arm and a leg to subscribe but it's well worth it.

FourFourTwo - Best soccer magazine around, also imported, also expensive.

Paste - It's getting pretty smug - last month's issue was strictly about world music with no mention of any American artists, and held my interest for maybe 3 minutes - but it's still the music mag that best matches my tastes. And I'm glad to see they have reconsidered their "who are we to judge?" review policy.

Esquire - Consistently good writing.


Mags I still have subscriptions to but don't know why:

Entertainment Weekly - I've grown very tired of snarky celebrity bullshit, and it's about all EW does these days.

The Week - Actually a very good magazine but the circulation department fucked up and my subscription has been going to my father-in-law for about 9 months now.


Subscriptions I didn't renew:

Blender - Better than you would expect from a Maxim music magazine... but still a Maxim music magazine.

Racer - Just a genuinely awful auto racing magazine. If you follow racing at all you know everything that's in the issue a month before it arrives in your mailbox, and the features are mediocre at best. Final straw: the Indy 500 preview issue arrived at my home 6 days after the Indy 500.

Rolling Stone - Just a horrible shell of what it used to be, all across the board.

GQ - Does anybody buy so many suits that they need this magazine?