People Who Only Read Literary Fiction, The New York Times, The New Yorker, Harpers, Vanity Fair, Instyle, Us, And Metal Magazines

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scott, that's a bit extreme (obviously?). There is some good reporting in the Nation. I can't say I'm very happy with the direction it has taken lately, but there's enough good reporting and commentary (although I could generally do without the regular columnists) that I still subscribe. It has been kind of bad lately though. . . Back in the 80's when I was in high school it had a sober look to it. I don't know what it's trying to look like now.

RS £aRue (rockist_scientist), Friday, 25 March 2005 16:55 (nineteen years ago) link

I do feel like I remember even maybe six or seven years ago it had more of a hard investigative bent.

Hurting (Hurting), Friday, 25 March 2005 16:58 (nineteen years ago) link

I'm thinking of subscribing to New Left Review. Go ahead and laugh, but I just read a fantastic article on Haiti from that journal. (On the downside though, I'm not too impressed with the editor, Tariq Ali--I think he's the editor--and I don't want to pay for Alexander Cockburn's writing.)

RS £aRue (rockist_scientist), Friday, 25 March 2005 17:02 (nineteen years ago) link

I only buy metal magazines for the free CD's.

jel -- (jel), Friday, 25 March 2005 17:02 (nineteen years ago) link

Naomi Klein publishes in the Nation and Harper's and she's been doing some great reporting over the last couple years.

RS £aRue (rockist_scientist), Friday, 25 March 2005 17:04 (nineteen years ago) link

I bought the Star Wars edition of Vanity Fair, that was a few years ago, now.

jel -- (jel), Friday, 25 March 2005 17:05 (nineteen years ago) link

they need more reporting. less opining. they need to start making news. they have the forum! they waste way too much space on the hand-wringing. or long articles on CAN YOU BELIEVE WHAT HE'S DOING NOW kinda things. yes, i can believe it. dig up some dirt, for pete's sake!

scott seward (scott seward), Friday, 25 March 2005 17:05 (nineteen years ago) link

I went to a Z Media conference run by the folks who publish Z Magazine. They were constantly snarking about the Nation not being left enough. Lots of harumphing about the Nation not having enough Noam Chomsky. There was a workshop on magazine design. Z Magazine's design is abysmal. The editor basically told us that magazines that look good rouse the suspicion of the left. Her message was keep it ugly.

Maria D. (Maria D.), Friday, 25 March 2005 17:05 (nineteen years ago) link

The Nation looks ugly too but I think it's doing it to cross over.

RS £aRue (rockist_scientist), Friday, 25 March 2005 17:07 (nineteen years ago) link

I started subscribing to Z again, and of course I agree about the horrible graphic design. I thought it was based on a premise of letting everybody do everything/anything, rather than just the best at the top. However. . . they seem to have no compunction about publishing star writers (which is one reason I read it).

I love Chomsky more than most people seem to any more, but he's just one writer. I don't understand focusing that much on his absence from the Nation.

RS £aRue (rockist_scientist), Friday, 25 March 2005 17:10 (nineteen years ago) link

(As if Noam Chomsky were Walter Cronkite or something. I mean "as much as most left/left-leaning people who read books and magazines about politics.")

RS £aRue (rockist_scientist), Friday, 25 March 2005 17:11 (nineteen years ago) link

The editor basically told us that magazines that look good rouse the suspicion of the left. Her message was keep it ugly.

HAHA. God forbid it should appeal to anyone outside *The Left*.

Hurting (Hurting), Friday, 25 March 2005 17:13 (nineteen years ago) link

Besides, what about Mother Jones and Utne? They look ok. But then again, they're flaky crap.

Hurting (Hurting), Friday, 25 March 2005 17:14 (nineteen years ago) link

scott, I agree about the Nation. More real reporting please. Or even better analysis and commentary. They are squandering their position as a leading liberal-to-left magazine.

x-post

Mother Jones sometimes has good stuff (water privatization, corporate campaign financing), but not enough to make me subscribe. Utne is atrocious.

RS £aRue (rockist_scientist), Friday, 25 March 2005 17:17 (nineteen years ago) link

Yeah, I suppose MJ is better than Utne. I tend to get them confused sometimes.

Re: The Nation, Scott OTM. My guess, though, is that it may partly be a budget issue, i.e. reporting costs more money than opining. But I lost all respect for The Nation when in their music issue a couple years back they had each staffer print their top 10 "desert island discs." Katrina Vanden Heuvel likes Bob Dylan SHOCKA!

Hurting (Hurting), Friday, 25 March 2005 17:19 (nineteen years ago) link

susan watkins is editor of nlr, RS, not tariq ali (though ta is on the edit board)

i'm not entirely sure what being editor really means, there: perry anderson owns and runs it, tho i guess probably doesn't oversee day-to-day stuff

zmag is a cia front to undermine the left by promoting utterly lousy writing style as the only acceptable radical approach

mark s (mark s), Friday, 25 March 2005 17:25 (nineteen years ago) link

zmag is a cia front to undermine the left by promoting utterly lousy writing style as the only acceptable radical approach

I like a lot of the writing. Maybe I'm sick. Actually, I haven't even been reading it lately. I like John Stuart Mill's prose--does that make me strange?

RS £aRue (rockist_scientist), Friday, 25 March 2005 17:29 (nineteen years ago) link

haha no jsm could write!!

some zstuff is fine, esp. one-offs, but the more prolific a contributor is, the more tedious - or just generally awful - their prose seems to become

mark s (mark s), Friday, 25 March 2005 17:37 (nineteen years ago) link

I'm going to go read all those Z magazines that I haven't read (which is every one I've gotten since I re-subscribed) just to be contrary.

RS £aRue (rockist_scientist), Friday, 25 March 2005 19:48 (nineteen years ago) link

one month passes...
So is there anything like the Nation or Z out there that doesn't look like crap? I really have been hating the cover of the Nation lately. (I think the Schiavo cover was inappropriate. If she became a public figure of sorts, it was not by her own choice.) Z Magazine is full of idiotic, poorly drawn (or overdrawn, if that makes sense) political cartoons that generally aren't remotely funny. (I don't even like good political cartoons that much.)

RS_LaRue (RSLaRue), Tuesday, 26 April 2005 10:55 (nineteen years ago) link

one year passes...
Has anyone read the article on Bill Clinton in this week's issue of the New Yorker? Pretty evenhanded, I'd say, although, at first, I thought Remnick didn't like Clinton, particularly, personally, but I think he was just wary of his outsize personality. I did get the feeling that Remnick really doesn't want Hillary Clinton to run. I even began to think it could be a mutually reinforcing obligation for everyone who supports her.

youn (youn), Saturday, 16 September 2006 22:13 (seventeen years ago) link

six years pass...

A friend talking about Vanity Fair:

it always follows that formula. "but john didn't care about the women. he had the women. john wanted to feel important. and when he wanted to feel important, he needed medication. his medication: Nicaraguan cocaine."

you needed energy. when you needed energy, you needed coke. when you needed coke, you called jim wasserman.

everything's gotta be a narrator from a really terrible scorsese movie

Cunga, Thursday, 10 January 2013 00:18 (eleven years ago) link

three years pass...

in 2013 though:

Of all the new careers one might expect for a 55-year-old former publishing executive, part-time record producer is not the most likely.

Yet there was James Truman one night last winter, standing in the Boom Boom Room on the top floor of the Standard Hotel, sipping a vodka gimlet as he awaited a performance by Sebastien Leon, the young musician with whom he had been working for 18 months.

The two met in Mustique a couple of years back. Mr. Truman was staying with his friend Bryan Ferry, and went into a restaurant at which Mr. Leon showed up, guitar in hand, to serenade the crowd. They bonded over a love of Serge Gainsbourg, and in short order Mr. Truman booked a studio. There, they recorded a debut album filled with melancholy songs, many about the recent demise of Mr. Leon’s marriage.

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/08/18/fashion/james-truman-a-crown-prince-in-a-new-kingdom.html

scott seward, Wednesday, 6 July 2016 15:28 (seven years ago) link

Mr. Leon was somewhat surprised it took as long as it did to complete the album, but as he put it after his show, “James is very busy.”

That he is. In just the last eight years, since resigning from his perch at Condé Nast, Mr. Truman has taken on a somewhat surprising array of projects. He is a creative adviser to Francis Ford Coppola on his wine business and growing hotel empire; with the hotelier André Balazs, he has been running an organic farm upstate called Locusts on Hudson, which supplies organic foods to the Standard Hotel; and with Sunny Bates, an entrepreneur involved in the TED Conference, he started a short-lived circus that Ms. Bates described as a “kind of mashed-up TED, Burning Man and the circus coming into town.”

scott seward, Wednesday, 6 July 2016 15:28 (seven years ago) link

wow, i started this thread before my sci-fi awakening.

scott seward, Wednesday, 6 July 2016 15:39 (seven years ago) link

eleven months pass...

Texas Monthly is so awesome. Well, what i read from it online anyway. And they have the best website. Every magazine should look at their website and then copy it.

scott seward, Saturday, 24 June 2017 04:24 (six years ago) link

i can't listen to npr anymore. i haven't since the election. these two things MAY be connected.
― scott seward (scott seward), Thursday, March 24, 2005 2:49 PM (twelve years ago)

diff election but this is true for me also :(

(The Other) J.D. (J.D.), Saturday, 24 June 2017 05:03 (six years ago) link

Economist, Financial Times, subscribe to but only selectively read NYT and WaPo, VideoScope, Screem, Filmfax, Shock Cinema, Rue Morgue, and most of Marvel's output. Occasionally also Make, Education Next, and (unsurprisingly, perhaps) ADDitude. There's probably something wrong with my brain but I'm okay with it.

President Buttstuff (Old Lunch), Saturday, 24 June 2017 05:19 (six years ago) link

i have to break down and get a stupid subscription to the stupid washington post. i never thought i'd have to do it but i guess i do. thanks, trump.

scott seward, Saturday, 24 June 2017 13:50 (six years ago) link

the only print mag i still read is decibel. and that's because they send me a copy. i was reading tape op because i got one of those free subscriptions. i never thought i would be such a magazine-less person. i was such a magazine person!

scott seward, Saturday, 24 June 2017 13:53 (six years ago) link

I want to move next to OL so I can loot his recycling bins

El Tomboto, Saturday, 24 June 2017 13:57 (six years ago) link

people who only read extensively footnoted history books, wikipedia articles, and cracked.com

Rodney Stooksbury for President (rushomancy), Saturday, 24 June 2017 15:40 (six years ago) link

I get a free subscription to Down Beat because I vote in their critics' poll (and have written a couple of articles for them). I read The Wire digitally. I read individual articles from the Washington Post and, less frequently, the New York Times via incognito browser windows. That's about all I have time for these days.

grawlix (unperson), Saturday, 24 June 2017 16:07 (six years ago) link

Back when I was commuting into NYC every weekday I used to buy the New Yorker almost every week. Now I don't even remember to look at their website to see if there's anything I might want to read.

grawlix (unperson), Saturday, 24 June 2017 16:08 (six years ago) link

i stopped my new yorker subsription when i realized I had 2 years worth of unread editions and I would never ever catch up

akm, Saturday, 24 June 2017 16:43 (six years ago) link

maria gets the maria delivered to the house and i never even look at them! so weird. i used to read them cover to cover years ago.

scott seward, Saturday, 24 June 2017 18:09 (six years ago) link

maria get the NEW YORKER delivered to the house...

scott seward, Saturday, 24 June 2017 18:10 (six years ago) link

I wish to point out that I have never contributed a word to this thread. btw, I wish to point out that this post in no way contributes anything to this thread.

A is for (Aimless), Sunday, 25 June 2017 02:57 (six years ago) link


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