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Magazines that make it a good mail day
Here are the magazines I subscribe to, roughly in the order in which I look forward to reading them
Wilson Quarterly. This journal of culture and history is deeply informative and takes a perspective that seems to me to be truly middle-of-the-road. Untainted by either political correctness or right-wing axe-grinding, it deals with current issues so thoroughly and fairly that even the obscure, off-the-wall topics become fascinating.
Commentary. I'm not Jewish, but I am a member of a demanding and isolating religious community, so that even the Jewish-insider articles in Commentary interest me by analogy. However, partly in spite of and partly because of its roots in the American Jewish community (if that can truly be said in the singular), Commentary is simply the best magazine of social criticism in America, with the highest standards of accuracy and fairness, while definitely putting forward its agenda, which is a defense of what used to be called "liberalism" but now is almost nameless: The commitment to an American civilization with a great deal of freedom surrounded and upheld by a strong commitment to public responsibility and safety.
Atlantic Monthly and Harper's. True, these magazines see themselves as rivals, and Atlantic tries endlessly to fight its own stodginess without ever quite achieving Harper's liveliness (Harper's list is older — and, in many ways, both funnier and sharper — than Letterman's). However, time after time I've read pieces in both magazines that didn't become public issues until months or years later, and even after the news media were through with the stories, I almost never learned anything from the current-events crowd that I hadn't already learned from Atlantic and Harper's. Not only that, but while both magazines are clearly rooted in old-line liberalism, they have the courage to publish pieces rather often that express ideas that are, to say the least, not politically correct.
(In fact, one can say that Commentary is as close to the middle as you can get, coming from the right, and Atlantic and Harper's are as close to the middle as you can get, coming from the left. And check out the letters columns in all three magazines. You'll be astonished, not just at the names of the people who read and respond to the articles, but also at the sheer quality of writing in the letters and the responses.)
American Heritage. A history magazine? Month after month, well-chosen articles provide the history that's needed to understand American culture and politics today. Subscribe to this all your life, and it will be a history education by itself. Not only that, it will keep your standards high, so you have little patience with the nonsense that passes for historical overviews and analyses in newsweeklies, dailies, and tv news programs.
The New Yorker. The fiction is generally unreadable, and while some of the changes under the new regime are laudable — a letters column! authors' names where you can find them! — others are annoying. (I'm really sick of arty photographs where the photographer clearly sees him- or herself as the star of the photo, while the subject of the photograph is more often its victim.) I miss the little fillers that used to come at the end of various pieces. But as an eclectic you-might-find-anything magazine it's still, if not the best, then the most thorough. If this week's issue is filled with losers, next week's might not be. And the reviews are, while often wrong-headed and always snooty, at least interesting, and in the books section are not always of books that are either trendy or bestsellerlist-bound. The cartoons remain the best in America.
Poetry. Published by the Modern Poetry Association, this slim journal is, month after month, the best anthology of English-language poetry you can find. Sick of unreadably bad verse in most literary journals, I came to this magazine like a dying man to an oasis. Now and then there's a loser issue, usually the ones where the poets are chosen for their nationality rather than the quality of their verse (the Irish and Australian issues were mildly interesting but not really very good). But in almost every issue there are at least one or two poets who prove that verses can still take your breath away.
Movieline, Premiere, and Entertainment Weekly. I'm a movie-lover, not a film buff, which means I can't remember much movie trivia and I'm always at a loss for the names of actors, characters, or the titles of films. And I almost never know who directed what, or who wrote this or that film. Still, I watch with great anticipation as new movies are developed and premiered. I've subscribed to Premiere from the first issue, and we picked up Entertainment Weekly early on. Sure, both of them have a lot of fluff (EW especially is notorious for wasting space on pointless jokey sidebars and stupid fluff pieces like their perspectiveless "best all-time album" list which was, as one letter to the editor pointed out, weighted heavily on the most recent decade), but both also give me a lot of information I'm interested in, and it's the only magazine that takes television seriously. (EW might as well drop its book section, though, it's so shallow and subservient to the academic- literary establishment without ever finding anything new or interesting to say.)
In recent months, however, I've come to rely on Movieline as the movie magazine I most look forward to. Despite lame choices like the naked-Terri-Hatcher cover (distributors in conservative regions of the country could opt for a much more chaste alternate cover — which meant North Carolina got the modest white dress, but Salt Lake City got naked-with-the-rope!), Movieline manages to be bitingly incisive in its interviews and thought pieces, while mocking itself (can Premiere ever do that?) with hilariously snide gossip and wonderfully funny bits like listing stores and restaurants in L.A. where you can run into celebrities. (Celebrity spotting is one of the main sports in Los Angeles, where everyone is too cool and well-mannered to make a fuss, but too movie-mad not to notice. Just this year I saw cast members of Murphy Brown in restaurants on two separate occasions and had a drive-by sighting of Jack Nicholson. My friend and collaborator, Robert Stoddard, mocks this by getting excited and pointing at "celebrities" who have only the vaguest resemblance to the person he's naming — but we all play the game!)
Rhinoceros Times. If you don't live in Greensboro, you'll never see this quirky paper. It's way too right-wing for me, politically (I'm a registered Democrat who thinks of Daniel Patrick Moynihan as a prophet and Jesse Helms as the anti-Christ), but it's the only paper that gets down and dirty with local politics and holds their feet to the fire, and even though the editor and I don't see eye-to-eye on philosophical issues, he clearly share my bias in favor of filling public offices only with honest, decent people. His "Clinton Watch" column is a hoot, for someone like me who regards Clinton's election and then re-election as proof that America has lost its right to lead the world. It has the second-best collection of cartoons I've seen (after The New Yorker), though it has its share of losers. One of the best features is "The Sound of the Beep," which consists of transcriptions of messages left on the Rhino Times's answering machine — an amazing array of inarticulate but passionate statements from local people talking about local issues. It's almost like living in a neighborhood again! Every community should be so lucky as to have a rag like this around.
Windows Magazine, PC Magazine, and PC Computing. I read PC Magazine for the columns — especially Dvorak's and Seymour's — and for the advance looks and exhaustive comparisons. I read PC Computing for the how-to stuff and the occasional article. But the one I enjoy most is Windows Magazine, I guess partly for the attitude. Not being a Ziff publication, maybe they have to try harder — or at least write better. Let me tell you the truth, though: I view all these magazines the way I used to view the Sears Christmas catalog. Wish books, all of them, and I'm looking at the ads almost as much as at the stories.
Wildlife Art and American Art Review. Unlike buyers of Playboy, I'm willing to admit that I only buy these to look at the pictures. In fact, my favorites from the ads and articles end up scanned in as backgrounds for my computer. I look forward to every issue.
American Enterprise. This is a pretty good second-choice after Commentary, with intelligent and serious social criticism and news commentary from a conservative viewpoint. Unfortunately, it is also deeply in love with capitalism, and when it gets into free-market apologetics it goes blind to the holes in that line of reasoning. But by and large, it's worth reading if only as an antidote to the so-called "mainstream" media, which are in fact out of touch with what America is. Or at least was, and wishes it still were.
Scenario: The Magazine of Screenwriting Art. I don't subscribe yet and only just found this expensive ($20) magazine, but from the few issues I've seen, it's a wonderful way to learn the art of screenwriting — or to understand it, if you're merely an aficionado and not a would-be practitioner. However, there is at least one competing magazine I haven't had a chance to read yet, so my judgment on this one is still tentative — it's good, but I don't know yet if it's best.
Locus, Hollywood Reporter, Publishers Weekly, and Writers Digest all come to my house and each is my favorite in its category (though Publisher's Weekly doesn't actually have a competitor). When I can, I read them, but they serve as trade journals and I can only recommend them to those who are actually in the business.
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