Harper's Magazine: C/D

Nice!

guys i want a mag subscription, do i get

--harper's
--nyer
--atlantic
--other (suggest, plz!)

nyer has some good stuff sometimes but since it's a weekly it piles up all over the place but you feel guilty about just throwing away old copies so soon you have old copies of the nyer all over the place like some kind of urbane hobo

that is what happened to me with the economist

economist is pricey!! but the snide photo captions are worth it imo

i have some insanely cheap nyer subscription--like 29 bucks a year?--and i've had it forever, so i suffer from the urbane hobo problem, but i don't feel bad about it, since it's so cheap. i've had harper's, too, on and off, but their non-fiction just isn't as good as the nyers. though i think *generally* the fiction in the nyer is suckage.

if time is an issue (lol doctor gbx) i would suggest a monthly, like harper's? i dunno, depends on much time ya got

only one with cryptic now = harper's, so I vote for that.

vladimir-putin-in-tuxedo.jpg
Putin on the ritz

atlantic has changed so much in the eight years i've subscribed. william langewiesche's series on the unmaking of the wtc is what hooked me. he's long gone. david bradley bought it and it hasn't been the same--feels ever more bloggy, or like an expanded economist. the long articles aren't as long. there's at least one jeff goldberg or andrew sullivan "how to fix the world" article per, which doesn't do much for me.

yeah see that is the thing, the piling up, and the lack of time. :-/

my suggestion to you is no nyer, then :/

no more fiction in the atlantic either, though at least that means i never have to encounter christopher buckley again. c michael curtis has bizarre taste.

sandra tsing loh is always a treat.

i think the atlantic does a once a year fiction issue in august

so harper's, then, huh

yup. newsstand only. xpost

I cancelled my Harper's sub after the coup article a few years ago...it was getting too much like a left conspiracy mag.

yah i get that vibe from it too--why i never subscribed

but now lewis lapham has his own joint right?

assuming that kind of thing was coming from him...

the readings section in harper's and the fiction are the best parts, i thinks

plus if you subscribe, you get access to all of the back issues on line, which is awesome

The Atlantic works well as a bathroom mag, because the writing is generally pretty easy and lacking in insight, so when you finish your business and the article sucks it's no prob to move on. And since you prob don't use your bathroom very many times a day, it lasts a month. Good grief @ Sandra Tsing Loh; her articles drive me nuts. She had some thing about how she was getting divorced recently, and I was like, "really, that's a shock".

Lapham would write these long rants at the beginning of each mag too; I think the coup article was by someone else, but I take it Lapham commissioned or at least accepted it. If he's gone, I might go back, because yeah their archives are rad, and the fiction is nice.

new yorker, evan. i kind of hate harper's.

i had a subscription to the economist one year but it made me feel so guilty because i never read it and it came like every day it seemed so the piles of it i had lying around unread were physical testament to the many, many things i didn't know.

sometimes the nyer piles up, yes, but it is more fun to read than the other magazines you're considering imo and you can take your back-new yorkers on vacation with you and they are very relaxing reading in my experience.

yeah go w/ new yorker, smart enough to not make u mad but not so taxing that u avoid it because it will be difficult

if u have a commute on public transportation its great--never piles up for me cuz i read it on the subway/train

atlantic is totally ridiculous now, they should just change the name to "challops bimonthly"

i dont hate harpers but i only ever read the "readings" and the index and the "findings" im always way disappointed by the essays and whatnot

fuck the atlantic for real

I should just get a sub to New Yorker, my mother-in-law gets it and every time we visit I spend lots of time flipping through them.

i have a visceral hatred for the economist because its a big signifier for "im a white douchebag poli-sci major who will describe himself as a 'moderate' and be totally dismissive of anyone to the left of joe lieberman despite having picked up all of my opinions from my advisor and this magazine" or at least it was in my school

i was sort of hoping that the atlantic having hua hsu and ta-nehisi coates would make it better but ummm so far it hasnt

yes i would like to except ta-nehisi coates but he can't write all their articles, unfortunately

i dont know why not it only comes out like every three months and is like 20 pages long

harper's had a very good run in the 90s but lapham became increasingly tiresome during the bush years. i know he's not there anymore but i haven't checked it lately to see the changes

i never understood what people see in the economist

i subscribed because i thought it would make me know a lot of things all at once. i cannot remember a single thing about it, though

the few times i picked it up i noticed its articles on america tended to have lots of errors, so it made me question what i was reading about the international stuff, which is why you'd pick it up in the first place (as an american)

i had a subscription to the economist one year but it made me feel so guilty because i never read it and it came like every day it seemed so the piles of it i had lying around unread were physical testament to the many, many things i didn't know.

― horseshoe, Thursday, October 15, 2009 11:04 AM (25 minutes ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

this is precisely what happened. i let the subscription lapse, it was just too much to handle

and reading back issues of the economist is pretty much a non-starter

nyer is the best of these imo. totally OTM upthread about harper's seeming more & more like a leftist conspiracy mag. by contrast the political writing in the nyer is pretty good and usually a pretty reliable part of the magazine. the 'profiles' are also usually really good

i almost never read the fiction tho, and there are a lot of issues that i just don't have time to read. i wish they did more regular music crit, too, seems like only 1 or two issues a month has it.

i used to keep all of them too, but it got too crazy w/ all the back issues everywhere. i'd pick up an older issue and swear to myself that i had never seen that particular cover before. now i clean them out every month, so i only keep the 3 or 4 most recent issues. if there's an article i really like, i know that as a subscriber i can always access it online

but it's super cheap 4 realz - i pay like $40 a year for weekly issues, and it gets cheaper the longer you subscribe.

new york review of books!

i think they do music essays every issue--pop music reviews are more like every other issue

i am of the opinion that a lot of their critics are stupid and/or irritating

i have a visceral hatred for the economist because its a big signifier for "im a white douchebag poli-sci major who will describe himself as a 'moderate' and be totally dismissive of anyone to the left of joe lieberman despite having picked up all of my opinions from my advisor and this magazine" or at least it was in my school

― Bobby Wo (max), Thursday, October 15, 2009 11:15 AM (27 minutes ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

;_; why you gotta cut to my core like that

(fwiw i like but do not subscribe to the economist, dislike lieberman, and i was a poli sci/econ double major, SO THERE)

i agree with mookieproof - it's the best by far of this bunch

"eat shit - 1,000,000 flies can't be wrong" -- the economist

i was a poli sci/econ double major

fwiw u are worse than a theater major