I just saw that the editor of Vanity Fair is stepping down and for some reason the NYT and others are treating this like a big deal. That magazine has always annoyed me though I will say one thing for it: they employ James Wolcott, and he’s the only magazine writer I enjoy reading. I used to like Matt Taibbi but I got sick of him, plus he’s a Russiagate denier and possibly a sex offender. James Fallows and TNC are good, too, of course, but that’s a different type of article, more like serious reading.
I used to be a big New Yorker reader when I was younger. In high-school, it was probably my only contact with the larger world, other than David Letterman (I grew up in the middle of nowhere), and even now, I’m one of those people with an unhealthy reverence for Pauline Kael. I still remember the great profiles I read of Paul Schaefer and Penn & Teller. But when I try to read the New Yorker now, a lot of it seems either corporate (profiles of Jeff Bezos and that kind of crap) or pathetically trend-chasing (read the part of this about Bien Cuit etc. — whatever that stuff is — if you want to be mildly nauseous). I know there’s important stuff too about how the world is going to end because of plastic and so on, but again, that’s too serious for me. Plus, the style generally annoys me.
Do you all read any magazines? Who’s a good magazine writer in a lighter style?