A Guilty Pleasure Validated
I don't know why, but I have been obsessed with magazines for the majority of my life. There's something about obtaining information through a slick, glossy medium with vivid photographs that you can easily shove in your bag that delights me to no end. My parents are similarly addicted so I grew up reading Time, the New Yorker, Esquire, the occasional Vogue, House Beautiful and Architectural Digest. When I became old enough to select my own magazine reads I flocked towards Cricket (not glossy, but magazine-like nonetheless), Seventeen, Sassy, and when Sassy grew lame, Paper.
Since then my stable of favorites has waxed and waned but my love of the medium remains constant. It was for this reason that I was thrilled to stumble across the New York Review of Magazines a while back in a search for media-centric websites. I fell in love instantly and have been hooked ever since. The current issue features interviews with prominent media types, and poses three questions to each:
1.What magazines do you read?
2.What magazines are your guilty pleasures—picked up just to indulge yourself?
3. What are the magazines you think you should read but seldom do?
Their answers reflected a common love of the New Yorker and Vanity Fair and the desire to read the New York Review of Books although most of them seldom do. Here are my answers:
1. I read the New Yorker; Fast Company; Vogue; Elle; Paste; Dwell; Esquire; Interview; Nylon; building trade magazines for work; Bust; and occasionally Blackbook.
2. I consider W; Vanity Fair; and Surface to be great indulgences.
3. I always mean to read the New York Review of Books (does anyone actually read it?); Bookforum, although I SWEAR I will get a subscription soon; and Harpers. I really want to like Harpers but I get bogged down in it whenever I try.
What about you?
posted by Red Photography @ 7:43 PM
3 Comments:
That list is actually half-interesting to look at, if only to see that Terry McDonell, an editor at Sports Illustrated, actually doesn’t read any sports magazines, which explains a lot really. I think there was a copy of SI in my crib as a baby, and it’s been painful to watch the publication navigate through the last decade or so. I’m convinced that I’m one of the few people who could save that magazine from dying in the next 10 years, but what can’t I do better than everyone else? I’d say 80% of the magazines I read are sports related, with the particulars depending on the time of year. I feel it’s important to waste most of my brain power on activities that are ultimately meaningless. I suppose not all of us can be as hoity toity as hey pretty.
One of my roommates reads SI. I can't get into it but that probably has more to do with my extreme apathy towards all sports.
Hoity Toity, eh? You say potato, I say Potahto, I guess. Actually, I say tater tots. Yum.
1.What magazines do you read?
Let's see...I have subscriptions to Marie Claire, Glamour and Entertainment Weekly. I read both Time and Newsweek every week during lunches at work. I read way too much tech-related magazines/newsletters for work (Informationweek, anyone?)
2.What magazines are your guilty pleasures—picked up just to indulge yourself?
In Touch...that is definitely a guilty pleasure.
3. What are the magazines you think you should read but seldom do?
I had New Yorker and Vanity Fair subscriptions for many years...and I wish I still had the discipline to be able to read them regularly. Oh well.
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