For some time I’ve been reading Lanham’s Quarterly http://www.laphamsquarterly.org/, and recently started reading The Economist’s 1843 https://www.1843magazine.com/ .
Both, especially Lanham’s, have a substantial amount of intellectual meat on the bone.
Any recommendations of similar publications? (Please do not mention Monocle, a compendium of high gloss fluff which has the distinction of commending, well before she was famous, Alaskan Governor Sarah Palin for bipartisan common sense).
Aw man, I thought you were looking for physical heft.
I somehow got subscribed to “Vogue” and it’s about 7x the size of “Rolling Stone”. Physically.
I decided to subscribe to Teen Vogue in support of their political stances. Lots of other people obviously did the same thing, because it’s been about 6 months and I STILL don’t have the free purse, which is back-ordered. 
Intellectual heft, it doesn’t have; it seems to be aimed at flamboyantly gay teenage boys and, to a somewhat lesser degree, teenage girls from extremely wealthy families. Oh, well.
“Wine Spectator” is probably the biggest mass-circulation magazine I can think of right now. We get lots of those donated to the library I volunteer at, and we sell them almost as soon as we put them out on the rack.
Intellectual heft? The Mensa Bulletin, perhaps? 
Thanks for the link, Lanham’s looks interesting. Smithsonian usually has some pretty interesting articles, but maybe not the depth you are looking for.
For sheer heft, I don’t think anything can compare to the old Computer Shopper. The last one I bought (sometime last century) was heftier than a Sears catalog.
Arts and Letters Daily is a website that provides links to substantial editorial and research pieces published in places like Laphams, Slate, Smithsonian and I must have missed the Teen Vogue article that time when. It seems like a good place to start looking
Updates usually with a few links per day on a never-ending scroll, so its easy to pop in when you know you’ve got a lazy hour.
Errs towards the more conservative end of the spectrum, but not sure if that is because of their own politics or liking of long-form writing. As title says theres lots of literature in it, but even with no background often these are very readable.
Best part is the search engine copes well with questions like ‘the one about South American hat factory’ quite well, although whether those articles are still live or behind a paywall is a lottery.
The title of my OP is perhaps misleading: I am indeed after something other than a cockroach squasher.
Also, I have perpetuated my error of “Lanham’s”, when it is in fact “Lapham’s”.
I love that site and second the recommendation.
As for the OP, The New Yorker. Excellent journalism, cultural criticism and cartoons.
Yeah, me, too. I was about to opine about how much I miss Computer Shopper from it’s heyday. (If there was a physically larger magazine on the market, I never saw it.)
Back in the days when I was still buying physical magazines (besides several computer related titles) favorites included Scientific American, American Scientist, New Scientist, Astronomy, Sky and Telescope, and Biblical Archaeology Review. When I could read them in a library (because journal subscriptions are crazy expensive) I liked Science, Nature, and Cell.
Second The New Yorker, excellent writing.
Dave Barry suggested that Bride’s magazines were near the top of the heap for physical size, and needed a forklift to get them off the ground. The forklift was the responsibility of the Groom’s side.
I’m another one who immediately thought of Arts and Letters Daily when I read the OP.
One thing the site does not touch is business magazines. I get Bloomberg Businessweek and I’ve been pleasantly surprised at how much good content it carries. *Fortune *used to be that way - it was priority reading in the years of the Great Recession - but it’s been dumbed down too much now to recommend it.
A Barnes & Noble in a big city carries tons of intellectual little magazines hard to find elsewhere. I’d recommend stopping in and flipping through some. I’ve found some gems that way.
Twenty plus years later and I’m still reeling from the shock of discovering that Scientific American had changed overnight from a journal-quality digest for the amateur scientist to a Discovery Magazine clone.
You haven’t been reading Discover recently. It’s basically a picture mag.
Yes, onto The New Yorker and agree it is excellent. Vanity Fair’s non-fashion journalism isn’t bad, either. From a business perspective, there’s McKinsey Quarterly. MIT Technology Review is good, too.
Wallpaper magazine is a bit fluffy.
In my childhood (the 1950’s), the awesome Scientific American. With every line of text in the picture captions fully justified right, including the last line. A thing of beauty. With Martin Gardner’s Mathematical Games and Philip Morrison’s Book Reviews. I got no homework done the day the new issue arrived in the school library.
What I like about Laphams is that their website has the charts and maps as categories of their own, and those are always cool.