History by Magazine -- 1993 was a year of reading dangerously

Long-dead magazines -- Spy, Life, Spin -- and magazines still on life support today -- Time, the Atlantic and Esquire -- served up some of the best and worst articles as the Clinton Age dawned.

A year of reading dangerously

Pittsburgh Post-Gazette

Dec. 30, 1993

Magazines made their share of loud noises in '93.

Michael Jackson's got some great clips for his scrap books.

So do the Clintons, who took their lumps, especially from those nasty tabloidian sleeze-meisters at the archconservative American Spectator.

The Spectator's grinchy current cover story by David Brock on President Clinton's marital infidelities and the lingering questions about the suicide of Vince Foster ruined the Clintons' Christmas. It also set other media hounds to barking (see this week's news weeklies).

But there was more to 1993 than Michael and Bill and Hillary. And here, in keeping with the utterly hackneyed but blessedly convenient journalistic tradition of year-end wrap-ups, are some highlights.

Best remake: Mother Jones' editors vastly improved its look and readability quotient and reduced its stridency without abandoning its left-liberal progressive faith.

Stupidest idea by a satire magazine: Spy's announcement that by next spring it'll ditch the snotty-nasty philosophy of its founding editors and become "a magazine of true dissent."

Strangest article of the year: Humorist Joe Queenan's bold but cryptic attack in Spy on everything about jazz — "an art form, that has been dominated by fat old men in sunglasses." Was he serious or just kidding? No one knows for sure.

H.L. Mencken award: To Time's pop-culture inspector Kurt Andersen, the ex-Spy founding editor who risked having his liberal-media essayist license suspended by writing that "Limbaugh and Stern make the circus-cum-marketplace of ideas quirkier, livelier, more bracing more free, more American."

Luckiest cover stories: Esquire's piece on Michael Jordan 15 minutes after he announced he was grounding his Air Jordans. Mother Jones' current cover on gun control, which caught the news wave created by the shooting massacre of six commuters on the 5:33 train to Hicksville.

Most overdue innovation: The New Yorker's decision after 75 years of snootiness to begin running letters to the editor.

Most tedious political think magazine: Tikkun, the leftist Jewish critique of politics, culture and society, and font of "the politics of meaning."

Bravest AIDS coverage: To pop-culture Spin, for reporter Celia Farber's trip to East Africa's AIDS wards — where all patients there are not dying of AIDS.

Also, Spin editor Bob Guccione Jr.'s interview with molecular biologist Peter Duesberg, who isn't appreciated by the AIDS establishment because he says there's no proof HIV causes AIDS.

Worst Q&A with a Clinton: To Rolling Stone's William Greider for his boring, for-Beltway-insiders-only waste of everybody's time.

Biggest waste of wood pulp: Time Inc.'s In Style, a star-worshipping rag of such nauseating depths that it makes People and Us look serious and substantial.

Best new magazine: Wired, the computer culture magazine. It's out there where the cyber future is, and it's lively, smart, readable and — if you plan to be around in the year 2020 — indispensable.

Story a magazine would most like to retract and amend: Life's super-fawning cover photo spread on Michael Jackson's Neverland, a private fantasyland of petting zoos and amusement rides that has since lost its innocence.

Most ridiculous quote about Pittsburgh in a national magazine by a non-sports fan: Thomas Hoving's pure gush in Travel & Leisure that said, "Contemporary Pittsburgh with its profusion of sinewy sports palaces is, in a sense, shaking hands with ancient Rome … that proud Three Rivers Stadium makes fun of the Colosseum."

Most important magazine article of the year, no contest: Atlantic's April cover story, "Dan Quayle Was Right." Family expert Barbara Dafoe Whitehead's piece provided instant intellectual corroboration for the concerns about the decline of family values that Quayle voiced in his famous Murphy Brown speech. Now everyone takes Quayle's side.