Magazine heaven

I love magazines. When I was in high school, my parents always had a couple of subscriptions -- sometimes Look and the Saturday Evening Post, sometimes Life and Reader's Digest. Cracking open the newest issue of one and devouring it cover to cover was one of my favorite things. (I usually read all the short things first, then went back for the long ones one at a time until I had read them all, too. That's still the way I read a magazine today.)

And when I first started here, we had a big, fat budget for things like newspapers and magazines. We subscribed to everything from Newsweek and U.S. News & World Report to National Review and Psychology Today and even the Atlantic and Harper's. We didn't use the magazies for research, but fascinating articles we found in them often became fodder for editorials. (That's also back when we had an actual editorial page staff that had the time to meet regularly to engage in lengthy discussions of fascinating magazine articles.)

I don't read magazines as much these days. For one thing, they're awfully expensive. And when I subscribe to one at home, I tend to leave them in stacks unread, vowing to get to them any day. Mostly I pick one up now and then when I'm at Border's or Barnes & Noble.

But I've just found a wonderful site called maggwire that you might like, too. It links to, I think, nearly 700 magazines (and counting). You can sort them by most-linked-to article, by category (news magazines, for example, or entertainment or women's issues) or by most recently received. Or you can just bookmark your favorite magazines and keep up with each new issue. With a laptop and this site, waiting around some office for your appointment will never be boring again. Click on "How To Use Maggwire" at the bottom of the page -- it's straightforward and helpful.

I could stay there for hours. The cooking section has about every magazine I've ever looked in for recipes -- bon appetit and Gorumet and Tast of Home and Woman's Day and Redbook and . . . Under politics, there is Time and Reason and the Atlantic and Vanity Fair and Newsweek and . . . Well, you get the idea.