Ezra Klein wonders what the must-read magazines are. I think this is an unduly touchy subject for someone who works in the magazine industry to take on. I'll just say that excluding publications that anyone I know works for, I like Dwell, Monocle, N+1, and (yes!) ESPN the best.
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Must-Reads
14 Mar 2008 05:12 pm
Comments (48)
I challenge you to name a better weekly magazine for international coverage than The Economist (bonus points for naming one that is readily available in the USA)
You guys seriously need to pick up a science-based magazine or two. You can't be reality-based without science. Science and Discover would be the obvious choices.
Make
It's n+1.
Mr. Yglesias,
I read your blog often, and as a tepid Conservative, I often find myself disagreeing with you (sometimes with fist pounds of frustration, particularly when I feel as though I should disagree but cannot figure out how or why). However, I had never felt compelled to leave a comment on this blog until today, when I saw that you believe ESPN the magazine worthy of praise, let alone anything more than cage-lining duty. That magazine is an abomination unto all that is holy and decent in sports journalism, and pretty much the only thing worth reading in it is the Sportsguy's column, which, fortunately, is also available online. Alas that ESPN continues to send it to me every two weeks, perhaps as punishment for the ridiculous amounts of time I spend reading John Hollinger/Buster Olney/Todd McShay on insider.
I challenge you to name a better weekly magazine for international coverage than The Economist
Gngh. To paraphrase Dani and Ezra, The Economist is a newsweekly for aspiring bullshitters with corporate expense accounts. (q.v. CT.)
Harper's is a must-read. n+1 is very good. I like Le Monde Diplo and the LRB. But I'm sick of Monocle's globollocks, in spite of its design sensibility. Tyler 'of course, we stock up on paprika in Budapest' Brulé needs to be beaten with sticks.
I don't know if it's a must read, but NYRB is my favorite.
I never even heard of Dwell or Monocle - shows how out of touch I am.
I vote for Harper's. And if you live in Canada, The Walrus too.
White Holes, Black Poles.
Star
Ron Paul Survival Report
Cabinet magazine. Pretty much every issue so far has been bleedin' awesome.
Dwell is a nice publication. But is a little thin on substance (lots of great projects - building and otherwise, though). For my money in that genre, I'd go with Metropolis.
Don't get to read much else outside of my current discipline, unfortunately.
I'll second the endorsements of Harper's and New York Review of Books. The Economist is highly over-rated and far inferior to The Financial Times (of course, it's a newspaper), and ESPN: The Magzine is, as noted, incoherent and juvenile gibberish. And try Orion.
I'll second the endorsements of Harper's and New York Review of Books. The Economist is highly over-rated and far inferior to The Financial Times (of course, it's a newspaper), and ESPN: The Magzine is, as noted, incoherent and juvenile gibberish. And try Orion.
Blech. Modernist architecture is too cold. Who wants to live in a house with that many flat untextured surfaces?
New Yorker, Harper's, and New York Review of Books.
Also, I'll get slammed for this, but I devour Lucky every month. I don't know who developed that magazine, but it's like a perma-drip of oxycontin. Damn, capitalism is irresistable in their format.
You don't know anybody who writes for n+1? I thought that place was basically Recent Harvard Grad Quarterly. Even I know people there and I'm ten years older than you.
The Believer is no longer flavor of the month but is still very, very good.
But I have to admit that I get more from The Onion than any of the magazines yet named.
Dude...can you say "Atlantic Monthly"? Sacrilege, I say!
Playboy - Entertainment For Men
I second the mentions of The Economist. For its niche, it's not at all overrated, and is a superior replacement for Time/Newsweek/USNWR.
The New Yorker (but does anyone besides me find their fiction to be godawful?)
The Atlantic (Obviously)
Slate (Uneven quality, but there's always something worth reading)
The Economist (Their coverage of the global South and Asia, in particular, is superb. Just because you disagree with their position on free trade, doesn't mean it's a bad magazine, any more than it means that you're a bad person.)
Nature (I'll second Mark's point above, but disagree about which scientific journal oneought to be reading. If you're not following developments in science, you're only half-educated.)
@Chris
Comparing a newspaper and weekly makes no sense. Newspapers are read for the up-to-minute (or, more accurately, day) news, weeklies for a summation of what was important among all that news. Consequently a weekly, especially (in the American market, exclusively) like The Economist is something of a digest.
To the main question, I regularly peruse:
The Economist
The New York Times Magazine
New York
The New York Review of Books
The Atlantic
Smithsonian
Wired
I sometimes pick up The New Yorker, but find it too full of fluffy stuff to really read regularly.
Also, heedless is spot-on on both The Economist and Slate (which I don't really count as a magazine).
Patrick, THANK YOU, THANK YOU, THANK YOU!! ESPN the Magazine? You've got to be kidding. The writing is terrible, the stories are stale, and a lot of it reads more like a gossip rag than a sports mag. I get a free subscription because I signed up for the ESPN.com "Insider." I tried, very hard, to read it. But after three issues, I started taking them from the mailbox directly to the recycle bin.
You need to check out Seed magazine.
There are no must-read magazines.
Fiction in the New Yorker is dreadful? Did you read the exerpt from Absurdistan that they ran? Hilarious. And Vanity Fair if just to see if I can locate the table of contents in less than five minutes, to experience Dominick Dunn's name dropping, and finally, to look at the photo of the editor's wonderful, flowing mane of hair in his designer jeans, feet proped up on the table.
I think Matthew is right on about ESPN. Mind you, I wouldn't actually pay for it were I not getting it with my Insider subscription. But for a quick read here and there, in the bathroom or whereever, it's perfectly good.
I've gotten rid of all my political magazines - that's what blogs are for. My favorites reads are Old House Journal, Outside, and Alpinist.
Hot Rod, Peterson's Off-Road, Classic Trucks, and JP. I read magazines to relax. I go on the internet to get angry.
Also, I too got an ESPN Mag subscription when I signed up for Insider. That's a heavy price to pay for Rob Neyer. I could read the whole thing cover to cover in the bathroom. Standing to pee. More pictures than Us Magazine with less substance.
If you can only get one magazine the Economist is a good one. But if you get more than one, it's overwhelming.
My favorites are Good Magazine, Esquire (Klosterman alone warrants that), McSweeney's and possibly the Atlantic.
The New Yorker is a consistently good and it's weekly. Of all the subscriptions I've tried over the years it's by far the best value. You have to forgive its eccentricities, though. The fiction gets a bum rap for some reason but I think it's actually fine, occasionally great, occasionally godawful. I'm not expecting as much as some people, I guess. Same with the issues--some grand slams, some whiffs, but a really good average.
When I saw that you ESPN the Magazine is so important to you I had to leave a comment. ESPN the Magazine? Really? It's such a rag...it's hard for me to imagine anyone getting anything out of it. The big articles are usually mindless hero worship, and to me the columns are utterly forgettable. For what it's worth, here are the magazines I look for when I go to the library (i.e. Borders or Barnes & Noble):
The Fortean Times
Harpers
Bizzare
2600
Newsmax (because I have an undying love of crackpots)
* I didn't include Vanity Fair because I have a subscription.
The Atlantic (first subscription, primarily because of getting to know it through the hosted blogs, love it)
Entertainment Weekly
Men's Journal
Penthouse Letters
Dwell (first subscription, on the fence about renewing)
Esquire (tired of it, won't renew)
Nice call on GOOD. No love for Wired?
Wired was good in it's hey day, but now it's just shiny ink and advertisements and it still pisses me off they only put page numbers on about 1/5 of the pages.
Nature and Make for me, full on geekdom.
ESPN THE MAGAZINE??????? Dear god no.
NYRB
London Review of Books
Harper's
New Scientist (in lieu of a proper journal, and if you take the bleeding edge stuff with a pinch of salt)
Private Eye (UK only, really)
Edge (if you're a gamer)
NYRB is my only subscription. Otherwise I rely on links.
NYRB, Harpers, The New Yorker. All only mildly infected with Obamamania.
Gngh. To paraphrase Dani and Ezra, The Economist is a newsweekly for aspiring bullshitters with corporate expense accounts. (q.v. CT.)
You know, not everything that the guys at CT happen to come up with on a lazy Friday is necessarily true or even clever.
methinks we all- the center-left, as it were- has very similar reading habits.
The Economist is crap.
The New Yorker is the finest magazine around.
Harper's has declined in quality since lewy lapham left, but is still the 3rd finest magazine
The Atlantic, obviousley, second only to TNY
Embarresingly, I still read TNR
n+1; even I, a lowly NYU graduate have friends who work there
and then, the crown jewel, Entertainment Weekly. because- well, you know why
My guilty pleasure is Empire Magazine - as with a lot of such formats it's comprised of really good and funny writers, film-buffs who know and love their stuff, who are trapped in a terrible corporate money-spinning shell.
Glad to see n+1 get some dig. I've read a lot of great stuff there over the last few years.
I don't love the Economist, but don't always hate it. Avoid all coverage of the US whatsoever. Avoid all coverage of..economics (as has been noted, whatever the question, the answer is always the same). Book review section can be OK. Obits can be OK.
NYRB (online)
Atlantic
New Yorker
Stop Smiling
Yes, the Economist is more intelligent than Time, Newsweek and USNWR, but it can also be quite lame, as readers of Lexington know. They can't beat the Joe Klein-Ann Marie Cox or Rove-Kos tagteams, but they once did a column on Dollywood where they suggested that people with "East Coast accents" were not quite Americans.
Entertainment Weekly? I already know what music and films the entertainment industry wants me to buy; I don't need to pay for a magazine which lays it out in explicit detail.
Is Foreign Affairs a magazine? If so it should be on the list.
ESPN the magazine is annoyingly dominated by their graphic designers. Every other page is a bit of writing or an interview chopped up into a collage of silly photos and other images. The presentation is an insult to my intelligence and attention span.
The New Yorker
TAP
The Economist
Another great magazine is The Baffler, but it's been putting out an issue every 3-5 years lately. What's the Matter?
The New Yorker
TAP
The Economist
Another great magazine is The Baffler, but it's been putting out an issue every 3-5 years lately. What's the Matter with The Baffler?
I think the last magazine I read was The Economist, sometime back in... um... November? I pick it up when I go to airports.
I'll read blogs and websites, sure, but an actual, physical magazine? Why bother?
Comments closed March 28, 2008.
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Heads in the Sand
As a person who has zero interest in sports but whose gym usually has a piss-poor selection of reading material (Anyone ever try and read The Sporting News, Gotham, Men's Vogue, Science or MetroSource while doing cardio?), I must say ESPN is a damn good read.
Posted by 24play | March 14, 2008 5:36 PM