Vote here: Most irritating mainstream magazine...

In My Humble Opinion
1

There’s a thread from November called What’s the strangest/stupidest magazine you’ve ever read? However, all the mags mentioned in that thread are off-beat or hobbyist magazines, like Humiliated Transvestite. I want to talk about mainstream publications, sold at every newsstand across this fair nation.

My nominee is Yankee, for the relentless way they push the whole “Yankee/New England” myth. (Their website is even http://www.newengland.com/, like they personally embody the entire New England experience.) “Yes, this is how life really is, Down East.” The non-stop stream of interviews with crusty old lobstermen and picturesque eel fisherman, “real” lumbermen, honest Yankee dairy tanker drivers, that sort of thing. What about the unemployed “Yankee” carpenter in Springfield, reduced to doing kitchen remodeling in the new suburbs? What about the lobstermen who couldn’t make a living and got jobs at the paper mill? Are there no welfare mothers in scenic Concord, Massachusetts? Has there ever been a Fall Foliage Season which could fairly be characterized as “sucky”? Not on your tintype, George.

And then the nauseatingly quaint stories, like the one about a Chippendale desk in a New England bed and breakfast, whose secret drawer was found to contain a love letter from 100 years ago, so instead of saying, “Oh, an old letter” and throwing it away, they leave it there and everybody who stays in that room has to add a letter to the collection. Glarg.

And I love the ads in the back. Everything is “authentic Yankee” this and that. Rocking chairs, molded resin collectibles (lighthouses mainly), house slippers.

All in all, a real treat as bathroom reading material.

P.S. I am perfectly aware that “one man’s meat is another man’s poison”, so in this thread, let’s call a moritorium on “how DARE you say that about my favorite magazine?” posts, okay? :wink:

2

Hey, Yankee sounds like the magazine for me! Lemme just check out the site and buy a subscription! (Just think…a hundred-year-old love letter! That is SOOOO romantic! Molded resin lighthouses? I own SIX!)

Okay, enough. My choice is TIME magazine. Anyone who bothers to look into a daily newspaper will find that TIME magazine is giving him shoddily-written news retreads. The book/movie reviews are uniformly worthless. And the shoddily-written retreads are irritating to locate because of the page after page after page after page of advertising.

Oh, I like Calvin Trillin, but he only gets a column once a month. The other three weeks it’s written by some witless toad named Joel Stein, who should be tied up in a burlap sack and thrown into the river.

3

Well I’ve only leafed through it once, but I vote for Maxim. Someone gave me an issue before I got married because it had an article about bachelor parties in it.
It’s a male Cosmo. I visualize all these Poindexters sitting in their mom’s basement, poster of Brittney Spears on the wall, pet lizard on their shoulder and the Playboy channel scrambled and playing on the TV as they flip through articles such as “How to Get Broads to Dig Your Penis” and “The Best Muscle Car to Own to Pick up Chicks”. It borders on mysoginy and floats through fantasy thoroughly.
I’m convinced that no cool guys read it - only guys who think they’re cool.

4

I’d have to go with Interview which appears to be one (not so) cleverly disguised advertisement masquerading as a magazine.

5

My vote is for MAD magazine. It used to be fairly edgy and for years, they ran no ads. Now, in reading some of the most recent issues, it’s turned into a commercial vehicle for other MAD products. Very annoying. And the articles aren’t nearly as funny as they used to be. Now it’s all in-jokes for teenagers and phoned-in parodies. Ah, I long for the days of “Antenna on the Roof”.

Robin

6

It is my opinion, from having read MAD in the late 1970s and early 1980s, that MAD magazine was always targeted at teen-agers. It just seemed better at the time, because at the time, I was a teen-ager.

My vote for most irritating mainstream magazine is: All of the magazines in the rock next to the check-out aisle in any supermarket. I’m talking about Vogue. Cosmopolitan. Teen Cosmopolitan. The Star. Redbook. National Enquirer. Young & Modern. Weekly World News. Bleah. Uniformly, bleah.

7

Er, rack, not rock. Damn typos.

8

Maxim annoys me to no end.

I also have a special, bitter place in my heart for “women’s” magazines. Especially those that are teen oriented.

Oh, you’re hair’s too straight? Try this! Too curly? Do this! If you’re too fat or your chest is too big or it’s too small or you have funny ankles… let’s face it, reader, there is something about your body that needs to be changed or you will be considered incredibly ugly by humanity at large!

And they wonder why girls get eating disorders.

9

As someone who actually subscribes to or trades with friends over 40 or 50 magazines a month, I feel I’m in a pretty good position to make this judgment.

So I nominate the following:

** Vanity Fair ** for most bloated mag I actually like to read sometimes but barely can because who can find the text with all those ads?

** Wired ** for most * thoroughly * obnoxious and irritating graphic design. It is virtually impossible to know whether one is looking at some overly hip, trendy, hyper-photoshopped AD, or some overly hip, trendy, hyper-photoshopped ARTICLE. ARGH! I hate that damn magazine. It is SO fukkin ugly…

** People ** for…well, just being ** People **, isn’t that enough?

** Movieline ** for sliding slowly, then more rapidly, and now completely, into utter irrelevance. For having once been a truly irreverent, snotty, hilariously funny magazine about the movies and celebrity, and becoming… ** People **.

** Ebay ** because it is the most pointless magazine to emerge from the Internet so far.

** Mother Jones ** for becoming unreadable.

** O ** for being a wonderful magazine that is just a tad too Oprah-centric. The stuff inside is great stuff, but can we have an issue that does not have a gleamingly retouched Oprah on the cover? It’s starting to creep me out.

** Martha Stewart Living _Wedding Issue ** for only coming out twice a year. Mostly I hate Martha, (read “Just Desserts” - she is EVIL!) but she’s got the goods when it comes to weddings, and one of these days we are going to get around to getting married. In the meanwhile, hers is the only wedding mag worth reading.

stoid

10

People – there is obviously a huge market for this magazine, but I can’t imagine why. These are my People peeves:

The photos … usually look like those Glamour Shots that you can buy down at the mall, or really weird candids that were taken by a drunk neighbor. The magazine should be called Grainy Pictures of Famous People.

The gossip … celebrity gossip is not really my thing, but if it was, I would be perpetually annoyed that People will mention something about a celebrity, and provide no background, no insight, no follow up. Whenever I do pick up People and read some gossip, I always feel like I am waiting for the other shoe to drop. They will do something like mention “After many years of fighting with her sister, Actress X did so and so …” Who’s her sister? What were they fighting about? Are they still fighting?

The best and worst dressed feature … what a joke. Reading this is like listening to my Aunt Mona critique what the neighbors are wearing at the annual block party. What is Aunt Mona basing this on? Her own likes and dislikes of the people, whether she feels they are too fat or too thin compared to her, if she feels slighted because they didn’t compliment her on her Jell-o mold, and essentially the satisfaction she gets out of hearing the sound of her own voice yammer on and on. As far as I can tell, this is also the basis of People’s fashion commentary.

11

** Town and Country ** This mag is so far off of planet earth…it is bizarre. I have only really read one issue, but that was more than enough.

My favorite piece in it was written by helen Gurley Brown’s husband, on the hell involved in being a *guest * in the Hamptons. His horror stories included:

The nightmare when the gate to the estate was locked and the bell didn’t work, and Helen had to crawl under a bush, losing her earrings, which required the staffs of several neighboring estates to drop everything to go look for them.

And the poor guest who forgot their prescription, requiring their host to * ** charter a helicopter ** * to go to New York to an all- night pharmacy to get it filled.

Unbelievable. What a perfectly weird life.

stoid

12

Reader’s Digest–for it’s poorly written articles, but more importantly for it’s Neanderthal politics.

Reader’s Digest— the magazine for suburban white people who would drain the pool & start over if a minority went swimming. (But hey, only after he left.)

13

Jack Batty and andygirl,

Have you read more than one issue of Maxim? I’m not saying it’s a great piece of literature, but it’s really funny. How many other magazines would run an article about the problems with movies and say “Women can’t drive” is the only problem with “Gone in 60 Seconds”? They prefaced this by saying that movies aren’t all supposed to be physically possible, which is why they are movies. They are just trying to have some fun with it, not enlighten everyone.

All the other magazines are too worried about what everyone’s going to think to try to print anything that might be funny. And for all those people who buy the Sport Illustrated Swimsuit Edition every year, every issue of Maxim makes the Swimsuit issue look like a children’s magazine.

See, Jack, I read Maxim and I don’t live with my mom, I don’t have a pet lizard, I think Brittney Spears should go into porn, and I don’t care which car is going to get me chicks. I just read it for the laughs.

The magazine that annoys me the most is Rolling Stone. Does anyone really need to be told what music is good and what music sucks? Or does anyone really care about an interview with Brittney Spears? Or what song is more over played than the rest of them? Anyone else?

14

Yeah, Rolling Stone annoys me, too.

What was once a great voice of the counterculture and, after that waned, just a damn good music magazine has turned into a pop cultural wasteland. Want proof? They put …Baby One More Time over Good Vibrations on their list of the top 100 pop songs. I could have vomited when I saw that.
The only saving grace it has is sometimes decent photography and the occasional piece by Al Franken or P.J. O’Rourke. But I wish they’d bring back good ol’ Hunter.

Ironically, Hunter S. Thompson is on ESPN.com. Why ironic? Because ESPN the Magazine ALSO sucks. Nowhere near the photo quality of SI and it’s all style with no substance. I didn’t read either SI or ESPN’s coverage of this, but I would think that when A-Rod got his quarter-billion dollar contract, the two mags would have covered it like so:

Sports Illustrated: Is A-Rod’s new contract a sign that baseball is still dying?

ESPN: A-Rod! The quarter-billion dollar man!!

Sad, considering that ESPN the network has some fairly good sports documentaries and other great programming.

15

It seems like cheap laughs to me. Not the most witty satire in the world you know, but, eh, to each his own.
I think if you’re going to go for that kind of humor, you should comit and just go get a Hustler magazine (which is also mysoginistic I realize, but at least they’re blatant about their offensiveness).
And for the record, when Britney Spear does go into porn, let me know.

16

My vote is for * Cosmopolitan, * or, as I like to call it * The Whore How-To Guide. *

I had a subscription for a while, a gift from Hubby when we first got together, and he was still unsure of my tastes.

The “Confessions” page irked me the most. “This is SO funny! I cheated on my honeymoon cruise with a steward, and my husband almost caught me! Whew, was that one close!” Or, “My boyfriend dumped me, so I made a thousand xerox copies of his picture and telephone number, and put them all over the place with ‘Gay men, call me for a good time!’ typed in big letters on the top!”

The whole magazine trumptets the idea of being an independant woman, but their idea of an independant woman seems to be screwing anything that moves even if you’re married (with pointers on how to get away with it) using your feminine whiles to advance your career, and royally fucking over anyone who gets in your way. They also give you pointers on how to find a rich man, how to decieve him, “The Rules” style dating tips, and how to apply your mascara in the latest fashion.

The whole magazine was so vapid, actually INSULTING to women and sometimes downright cruel that I read it merely for the amusement factor, reading it as a how-not-to-behave treatise. I had horrible visions of men reading the magazine to get insights into women’s minds, and in a fit of abject horror, deciding to join the priesthood.

17

I second Lissa on this one. Cosmo is just the worst!

18

I gave up on Games Magazine

They keep saying the readers want puzzles, but the advertisers want revues of games. Duh.

So they have more and more reviews, mostly of boy fantasy videogames. And less fun stuff to actually do.

19

I have to chime in with an agreement for ESPN: the Magazine. It’s like watching ESPN 2; that is to say it’s nothing but “cool” graphics and “in your face” crap, instead of real sports coverage.

Sports Illustrated is better. The only exception is the issue FOLLOWING the Swimsuit Issue, where every whining prude across the country has to write a letter condemning said Swimsuit Issue. Don’t like it? Don’t read it.

20

Another vote for Time.

The only time I ever agreed with Rush Limbaugh on anything was when he referred to Time magazine as “People East.”