While the Oscars got all the press, the magazine industry also held its recognition banquet this spring. A billion people watched Billy Crystal host the Academy Awards, but the National Magazine Awards had to make do with a short summary article in the lifestyle section of my morning newspaper. Perhaps Rodney Dangerfield hosted.

I will not harp on this evidence of humanity's fallenness. (Movies have their place, after all.) But it's important to listen in on magazines. Like no other medium, they document our cultural conversation. Their high-shutter-speed reflections show us what interests us, what we fear, what we long for, what we think at that moment. Of course, a new movie becomes the next obsession, or a war starts, or the stock market slides, and you have to throw out the old issues. Radio may glom onto the latest happenings more quickly, but it stays on the surface. Books go deeper but make us wait too long. Magazines are, therefore, the happy medium (I love this!): They stay current and can go deep. (If anyone wants to argue for the still amateurish Internet, I dare you to read a 10,000-word analysis of anything online. Discourse on the Net is the best argument I know for why we need editors.)

I say all this to justify my purchase (on expense account) of the May issues of this year's four winners in the "Gen-eral Excellence" category (by circulation level, from larger to smaller). The envelope, please:

Winners

Vanity Fair: A well-written, stunningly illustrated journal that celebrates all that Christians used to dismiss as worldly (riches, celebrity, power).

Outside: A monthly guide for restless rich people who long for adventure--at least vicariously.

Wired: The monthly guide to cyber chic (Rolling Stone for the plugged-in generation).

I.D.: A bimonthly that bills itself as "The International Design Magazine" (i.e., lots of cool stuff pictured).

What's most interesting (cover stories).

Vanity Fair: A you-are-there interview with movie phenom Liv Tyler ("Wearing a black T-shirt, black jeans, and tattered black Converse All Stars, Tyler plops down cross-legged in a velvet wing chair"), the 19-year-old daughter of Arrowsmith's Steve Tyler and former model/groupie Bebe Buell. Payoff: Come on, she's 19!

Outside: On a return visit to the subject of their all-time best-selling issue, they interview Jon Krakauer, their reporter who participated in and documented last year's tragic climb of Mount Everest, where eight people died. His observations: "When I got back from Everest, I couldn't help but think that maybe I'd devoted my life to something that isn't just selfish and vainglorious and pointless, but actually wrong. . . . And yet I've continued to climb." His prediction: The tragedy will be repeated. "Everest doesn't attract a whole lot of well-balanced people. . . . Everest clients tended to come down pretending they weren't guided."

Wired: Katie Hafner takes a lonnnng nostalgic look at the Well, "the world's most influential online community." Started by Whole Earth Catalog pioneer Stewart Brand in 1985, the Well (Whole Earth 'Lectronic Link) is a virtual community of a few thousand wired ex-hippies, mostly living in the Bay Area (the most popular subject area used to be the Grateful Dead). Through e-mail and message boards, they became "a salon of creative, thoughtful, and articulate participants who are interested in one another's stories in a self-absorbed, cabalistic way." According to one participant: "I would have walked through fire for these people. I had never experienced this kind of closeness with so many different people all at once." Never answered: Why the Well is so significant.

I.D.: A profile of Issey Miyake, the renowned Japanese fashion designer who wants to make clothes for "real people," who incorporates new "synthetic fibers and new technologies," whose clothes "break through national boundaries" and are "a form of self-expression, clothing that needs the wearer's participation." His optimistic view of young people: They are "increasingly free of the old mores that mandated explicit attire for specific occasions."

People worth knowing

Vanity Fair: Sir James Goldsmith, Britain's Ross Perot, the Anglo-French multibillionaire financier who has funded the Referendum Party to preach against European unification. Biggest revelation by the corporate raider and father of eight (with four different women): "I have always been shy."

Outside: Jeannie Logo, the most dominant woman cyclist ever, the winner of 11 world titles, and one of the nastiest people in sports. She whines and spits when she loses and cajoles judges, coaches, and teammates. In other words: "[She] is a forerunner in the fight for equal rights for women athletes--including the right to be unsisterly and hostile."

Wired: Toshio Iwai, a 34-year-old Japanese multimedia star who "has the soul of an artist--but the head of a nerd." About adding visuals to piano playing: "[Nonvisual musical experience] only dates back as far as Edison. Before that, a musical experience was always a visual experience."

I.D.: Henry Dreyfuss, the late industrial planner whose creations still haunt us: the ubiquitous Bell phones with the numbers and letters outside the rotary dial; the olive-colored, round Honeywell thermostat; the Polaroid Automatic 100 Land Camera--not to mention trains, tractors, and the War Room for the Joint Chiefs of Staff. He embodied the ideal of "remaining in the background while [his] work did its job." His legacy: "Design became seen as a 'capitalist tool' in itself."

Reviews

Vanity Fair: Echo House, by Ward Just (Houghton Mifflin). A Vietnam-era war correspondent for the Washington Post, Just is, according to David Halberstam, "one of our best and yet least-appreciated novelists. No one, I think, writes better about the lives of modern politicians."

Outside:Questions of Heaven: The Chinese Journeys of an American Buddhist, by Gretel Ehrlich (Beacon Press). Upon arriving at "a holy Buddhist mountain," Ehrlich meets some less-than-zealous monks: "We chant twice a day. Then we watch television."

Wired: Within the Context of No Context, by George W. S. Trow (Atlantic Monthly Press). From the book: "The important moment in the history of television was the moment a man named Richard Dawson, the 'host' of a program called Family Feud, asked contestants to guess what a poll of a hundred people had guessed would be the height of the average American woman. Guess what they guessed." From the review: "Fact and merit have all but vanished. . . . Who knew that the Family Feud approach to trivia would later resemble presidential election coverage."

I.D.: Wired Style: Principles of English Usage in the Digital Age, edited by Constance Hale (HardWired). The reviewer calls it "a self-referential showcase of deviant literary shtick" that has "a tone of moral superiority."

Secularity watch (the most explicit mention of religion)

Vanity Fair: Goldsmith: "We were not part of an established church. That doesn't mean I have no spiritualism or that I am an atheist. If there was a debate between Thomas Aquinas and Galileo . . . I would side with Thomas Aquinas. I don't believe in material rationalism as the be-all and end-all."

Outside: None.

Wired: From the Well: "Some people in the Spirituality conference invented 'beams'--good vibes, essentially, or . . . healing prayer sent by request. Beams weren't a substitute for other therapies, but an augmentation, a way to ask for comfort without having to mention the word prayer."

I.D.: None.

Eschatology

Vanity Fair: The rich and famous you will have with you always.

Outside: The frontier is still out there.

Wired: The wired era is now and not yet.

I.D.: The new and wild are still possible.

Copyright(c) 1997 by Christianity Today, Inc./Books & Culture magazine.

July/August, Vol. 3, No. 4, Page 13

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