History by Magazine -- Christmas in 1993 was a good time to gift magazines to your loved ones
Giving magazine subscriptions as last-minute Xmas gifts can still work today but most of the ones I plugged 30 years during the Golden Age of Print are dead, shrunken or irrelevant.
Magazines
A gift idea you can subscribe to
Pittsburgh Post-Gazette
Dec. 23, 1993
Magazine subscriptions could be one of the best last-minute gift ideas ever for pitifully desperate Christmas shoppers — i.e., men.
Here's what to do, boys:
Buy a current copy of a magazine you want to give to your lucky loved one, say, the New Yorker, Mirabella or Guns & Ammo.
Then shake it until two or three subscription cards fall out. Fill one out with your loved one's address and mail it off today (stamps are sold at post offices).
Next, get your wife or mother or sister to wrap the magazine with pretty paper and a bow and put it under the Christmas tree before dawn tomorrow.
Remember to attach a note explaining how this thoughtfully chosen periodical will make your loved one happy all year long (just make sure you get the bill and the lucky loved one gets the magazine).
Actually, this deadline gift gimmick can be easily employed by all sexes. The biggest problem is choosing from among the thousands of magazines out there.
What follows is a completely subjective, capricious and unscientific — not to mention politically biased and culturally arbitrary — guide to magazines that would make good gifts for somebody you want to please, surprise or merely propagandize on a regular basis.
For the young: Spy still offers a rare commodity good, nasty and cheap satire.
Wild and wacky Wired or Mondo will keep the growing computer masses on the cutting edge of the Cyber Age.
Spin covers rock and pop culture with the edge that Rolling Stone once had, though RS has P.J. O'Rourke in its stable of horses.
And Film Freak is the perfect movie magazine for those who suspect that toadying Premiere and the less idolatrous Movieline are too much in love with Hollywood to see its warts and idiocies.
For news hounds:
U.S. News and World Report stresses news you can use and offers conservative cultural commentator John Leo (older politicized brother of the PG's own Peter Leo).
But Newsweek consistently outperforms it and Time. Its multi-page packages on major events — the L.A. riots, skyscrapers being blown up, the appointment of an Arkansas state trooper as the new FBI director, etc. — are usually bigger, better and more in depth.
Britain's Economist, which has a special American edition, is for the globally oriented.It’s authoritative, witty and intelligent. It also costs about four hours of reading time a week and $100 a year.
For deep-thinkers: The Atlantic Monthly is a bargain at $18 for two years. Though always interesting, idea-wise, it can torture its readers with windy three-part series on things like the differences between Asian and American economic philosophies.
The Atlantic proved its enormous power to set the country's intellectual agenda with its cover story "Dan Quayle Was Right," which supported the ex-veep on the Murphy Brown-family values issue.
Harper's is always eclectic and bright and usually rich with surprises and enlightenment.
American Heritage has figured out beautifully how to make history interesting and relevant to today's headlines.
For the politicized: American Spectator, the rapidly growing bad boy of the right, is the best and most journalistically aggressive conservative magazine (ask the Clintons).
The New Republic, centrist but always leaning liberal, is not as important as it was in the Bush Age. But it can come up with excellent surprises such as its current approving piece on the good works and good people of the Salvation Army.
Out on the left are the Nation and the Progressive, which have little or no influence in the post-socialist era but don't care.
And somewhere between left and right is the free-market libertarianism of Reason, which has been pushing such once-radical ideas as deregulation and privatization for 20 years.
All of these magazines can be found at a bookstore such as Border's in the South Hills. Wrapping paper not included.