What spurred me to sign up for the AIDS Marathon? A mailer that arrived at my office. Why did I get that mailer? I’m sure it was because of my subscription to Men’s Health.

(The very same reason I got a somewhat graphic postcard mailer from Playboy — delivered to my office — which I didn’t appreciate. And which I continued to unappreciate for at least a couple of minutes before tossing.)

I get a lot of magazines, and accordingly wind up on a lot of lists. Sometimes I wonder what the magazine marketing people make this somewhat eclectic grouping of 13 different publications.

There are the Men’s magazines: Men’s Vogue, and Men’s Health. (If it’s a men’s magazine but doesn’t say “Men’s” in the title, I don’t get it.)

There are the business publications: Portfolio, Inc., Fast Company, Los Angeles Business Journal, and San Fernando Business Journal. The last two are, respectively, weekly and biweekly. Fall behind by one issue and the next time you’re driving around and your wife says, “What’s that they’re building?” you’ll have no idea. I know: I’ve been there.

There are the general interest magazines: the New Yorker, the Atlantic, and Harper’s. I never know what’s going to be in any of them, and I like it that way. I dislike the New Yorker’s “special” issues — The Money Issue, The Style Issue (especially loathed), the current Innovation Issue, even the Winter Fiction and Summer Fiction and Cartoon issues. Argh! If I wanted theme issues, I’d subscribe to magazines covering those themes! I know these are just thinly disguised plots to sell more ads around those themes, and to do it with my hard-earned 37 cents an issue or whatever.

And there are the one-offs: Wired (I’m a tech junkie, although mostly a window shopper), Reason (if only the Libertarians weren’t, well, nuts I’d join them), and the Dramatist.

My favorite of all these magazines will surprise most people who read this blog: Whenever it arrives, I lunge for that Inc. magazine. I actually have two subscriptions to the same magazine — one at home and one at my office — so that I’m never Inc-less. Every story is essentially a profile of someone somewhere in the U.S. faced with some odd opportunity or challenge, and how they resolved that problem — or failed. It’s like a monthly magazine of bitty biographies straight out of Sinclair Lewis. The writing is strong and the photography is excellent. I’ve taken to clipping out photographs of the people profiled and using them as writing prompts for students: who is this guy? What does he want? What is his problem? And so forth.

I love the New Yorker too; bless them for bringing Roz Chast into my life, and Jin Ha (with that recent short story about the Chinese house brothel in Flushing, NY; now I have to pick up the novel!), and Anthony Lane and so many others. I like the hard-hearted simplicity of Reason, which mandates that every judgment should be made completely free of compassion for one’s fellow man or of optimism for the future — surely, this is a model we need more of, hence my interest in learning more about it every month. And I like the Atlantic for reminding me seemingly every month that global warming already happened and now is the time to buy a retirement villa in soon-to-be sunny Siberia.

The subscription that I’m going to let lapse? Harper’s. It’s just too twee for me. I don’t understand the front section at all — the “Readings” are snippets yanked wholesale from other publications of any sort and any era; being unclear on the organizing principle, I’m unclear what I’m to make of it. It’s like the egghead equivalent of dropping acid: “Look at the bright colors of this writing!” You can see how reading both Harper’s and Reason in the same month might drive one to psychosis — and scuttling back to the safety of Men’s Vogue, where one can look at the smart Burberry jackets (the preferred label of Obama!) in peace.

This entry was posted on Saturday, May 10th, 2008 at 10:34 pm and is filed under On reading, Thoughts. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.