Check the Mailbox, Biatch!

Vox asks lots of personal questions. Today:

What magazines do you subscribe to, and why?

It's a little hard for me to distinguish which magazines I subscribe to, and which ones I merely buy at the airport every month, but off the top of my head, these are the ones I read regularly (at least monthly):

• Time
• Wired
• Baseline
• eWeek
• PC Magazine
• National Geographic
• The New Yorker
• Business 2.0
• Fast Company
• Inc.
• Fortune
• Seed

I can't remember if I still have a subscription to BusinessWeek, but I still end up reading it almost every week regardless. We also get FHM at home, from a former tenant of the apartment, I think. I was surprised how unsexy FHM is, because it's basically a gadget catalog with boobs. And we've got a subscription to Saveur about to start, which I'm happy about because I love that magazine. I also really like reading The Economist, but it seems like too much of a commitment to actually subscribe to. We used to get the Sunday NY Times, exclusively for the Sunday Times Magazine, which I love. But getting the entire Sunday Times every week is an awful lot of packaging for just the magazine -- why don't they sell it on its own?

Because I spend a lot of time in airports, I end up skimming a lot of other magazines as well. I tend to see stuff like PC World, Vibe, maybe Rolling Stone or Spin, and the occasional Details or GQ. Does Red Herring count? It's basically a pamphlet at this point.

Anyway, i've always loved magazines. When I had my own company years ago, I worked a few blocks from a decent newsstand, and I'd end up reading about two magazines a day, ever day, for years. And I never threw any out. So I had an absolutely enormous magazine collection, and it was really costly, too, because I would buy them at the newsstand instead of subscribing. (To be fair, I got a lot of different magazines, so maybe subscriptions wouldn't have been practical.) These days, I figure I've substituted reading the web for a lot of that magazine reading.

But the great thing is magazines are so focused on short, info-dense pieces. That fits my personality perfectly. Especially with the recent spate of pub quiz appearances, people ask how I know so much trivia, and I think the answer is entirely due to my years-old magazine addiction. Viva magazines!