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Slashdot's currently got a discussion going on what magazines are worth reading. There are already too many responses to be worth responding there, but I thought it would be interesting to put it here.
Since Amy and I get way too much mail and fall behind on almost anything we subscribe to, we're pretty picky about what we subscribe to. They fall into a few categories:
The first cooking magazine worth subscribing to is Cooks Illustrated. Completely free of advertising, each issue the staff takes a few timeless dishes and exhaustively tests variations, trying to find the best-tasting, most authentic and easiest recipe. The recipes we've tried from it have invariably been good, with a high percentage of keepers. It also explains the food science behind why certain ingredients or techniques make such a difference.
The next magazine is my reason for filling out all the warranty registration cards I can. I got a year subscription to Saveur free and unsolicited, but fell in love with it. It's a cooking-oriented travelogue. Each article has a description of some amazing far-away place and recipes from there, and each recipe we've made has been a keeper. The Frango Piri-Piri recipe we got from there was, I believe, the first recipe we made from the magazine and we have it every couple months now. It's just delicious. If I were limited to only one magazine subscription, I'd choose Saveur.
The last cooking magazine we subscribe to, the one we'd ditch if they didn't keep sending me $12 subscription offers, is Bon Appétit. The percentage of recipes that we like isn't as high as the others, but it does have a lot of recipes and we find a few each issue worth trying. All their recipes are on Epicurious, but it's nice to have paper to browse.
There are a few cooking magazines we aren't interested in. Gourmet keeps asking us to subscribe, but the recipes we've seen from there on Epicurious haven't been worth trying, so we really aren't interested. Fine Cooking keeps sending us the same sample issue, but as far as I can tell they're the dumbed-down version of Cooks Illustrated: full of pretty color pictures and a similar set of departments, but with less depth and interesting food. Compare Cooks' Beef Wellington recipe with the weak version in Fine Cooking.
Few magazines are worth the paper they're printed on. We get a copy of Wired because it was free from Salon, but it's a brainless waste of paper. For something covering a variety of interesting subjects, take a look at IEEE Spectrum, publication of the IEEE (of which I'm a member). Since most of their audience are engineers, it's got enough detail to dig into but is written generally enough you don't have to be a specialist to understand.
In a similar vein for computing are Computer and Communications of the ACM, from the IEEE Computer Society and Association of Computing Machinery, respectively. Both have articles on a variety of subjects, targeted at computing professionals. For software developers in particular, ACM Queue discusses new trends and technology. For example, they recently had a fascinating look at the technology and challenges of search engines.
My wife gets a number of journals and publications in this department, but she'll have to write her own blog. I don't have the background to appreciate most of it.
What don't I like? Besides Wired, Scientific American gets a thumbs down. It may have improved in the last year or two, I don't know, but last time we subscribed it was severely dumbed-down from its glory days. Even though I don't have a hard science PhD like Amy, I was bored by many of the articles.
I also don't follow any of the more general computing or technology publications. Just not interested in them. Their level of detail is about what I could get from an hour's web-search, so I don't want to clutter up my house with useless paper. Same goes for the Linux-specific rags: anything they report on is meaningless to me because I've done it, or because by the time I'm interested in doing it, everything will have changed and I'll have to do the same research I'd do without reading the article.
We subscribe to Family Handyman and Outdoor Photographer magazines at the moment. They're both decent enough looks at things we're interested, so they get a year's subscription. Don't know if we'll renew them, but we currently read and enjoy them.
Incidently, the use of headings in today's blog necessitated some changes with the way paragraph tags were inserted in story content. So if you happened to see strange results, you hit it while I was getting things validating true.