Magazines

There are three magazines I subscribed to over the past year: The New Yorker, Texas Monthly, and Monocle. Reading the New Yorker and Texas Monthly have been very rewarding to me, and I consider the magazines worth subscribing to. Monocle is a different matter.

Monocle is a very well designed, wonderfully illustrated magazine. What is it about? I can’t tell you. Sometimes it’s about great places to live, other times trends in business, or developing cities. There’s a manga magazine attached in the back (which I never read) but when I saw it on the newsstand, I thought it was really cool, so I would subscribe.

A yearly subscription to Monocle is $130 per year! You get all of the issues of the magazine (10), and access to their website, which they say has lots of added content, but it’s really just fluff - much like the magazine. Many of the articles both on line and in the magazine are too short, and do not explore any given topic fully. The design and the photography try to give the articles more gravitas, but when there’s really nothing there to begin with, they can’t add much. Unlike the New Yorker, no themes get explored in a meaningful way. It’s more about how you can drop your very shallow knowledge from the article into party conversation. The content of the magazine certainly does not justify the cost.

Also, I had problems with the website itself - several times I had to contact customer service to get them to assist me. Ridiculous for 130/year. So basically, you are just subscribing to it because of the good design. Not because of the articles, and not because of the website. If it was 40 dollars, I might re subscribe, but 130 is ludicrous.

So, if you want people to think you are in the know, but not really, then subscribe to Monocle today. If you want a good magazine that thoughtfully explores issues, then subscribe to The New Yorker.

- Jason Dean