Feel like hunting your own Thanksgiving turkey or some whitetail deer before the New York City-area season ends? Try bagging a hunting magazine.
Bowhunter is the obvious choice for those using bow and arrow to hunt, but the current issue contains painful writing published in a font you’ll need a hunting sight to see. There’s a feature on the latest science behind catching whitetail deer, and on how to sound like a deer in order to get a buck in the brush. But the mag takes a bad shot with a teaser instead of a full story on New York Giants star Justin Tuck joining the Bowhunter TV crew on a hunting expedition so people will watch it online.
The November issue of Outdoor Life is the Whitetail Skills edition just in time for the New York City deer-hunting season, which ends Dec. 8. Like Bowhunter, it has a story on how to attract a deer. “If you want to bag bigger and better bucks, then you’ve got to add more emotion” to your deer calls, it suggests. A short feature on turkey hunting might be helpful if you plan to bag your own Thanksgiving bird before turkey-hunting season ends Nov. 20.
Petersen’s Hunting is easy to read with many interesting short items. These include features on peak deer breeding times, and the top 10 days of the rut (deer-mating season). Pictorials on the best Western rifles and point-of-view cameras are also helpful for the hunting inclined. We also liked the story about how a rookie bowhunter outshot the pros when whitetailing it in Colorado.
The November/December issue of Sports Afield goes way afield of most local hunting grounds, with stories on the thrill of hunting in the Caucasus, and elk deer hunting in Alberta. Thinking of shooting in a former war zone? Sports Afield shares the chase in Liberia, where the game is wild beasts. Must be quite ironic to the locals, who have been trying to avoid bullets during two civil wars.
New Yorker’s technology issue is as timely as a tweet, though not quite as concise. A 12-page feature on Google’s self-driving car, or in this case cars — one a Prius and the other a Lexus — is worth a spin. The car is not quite ready for sale, and surprise, surprise, General Motors is not interested in making it anyway. Too bad, as Google self-driving cars use half the gas of normal cars, and would greatly reduce the country’s 10 million annual accidents. There’s a great Talk of the Town item on how a stranger spots actress Brooke Shields and shows her a picture she took a week earlier of a car for sale that the owner claimed used to be hers. It was. Shields then secretly bought back what was her first car (with a bumper sticker she put on as a teenager intact).
New York flexes its local muscles with an intriguing feature on the “annoying” Cahn twins of Stuyvesant High School. The 17-year-old seniors have been busy criticizing the school and running for student political offices, getting under the skin of teachers and classmates alike. They also stand out for being two of the only kids wearing yarmulkes at the now largely Asian Stuyvesant. New York also focuses on Taylor Swift for its cover. We know she’s big, but hasn’t the “Who’s Taylor Swift?” story been written before? Editor-in-Chief Adam Moss also weighs in on the 50th anniversary of the Kennedy assassination, in a story largely about political conspiracy theories like the Illuminati and alien cover-up by the government. Not a bad idea, but perhaps a little too tongue-in-cheek.
Time also covers the Kennedy assassination in a cover story that mostly reflects on how it spawned a Kennedy conspiracy industry. Unfortunately, it sets up that premise by saying 60 percent of Americans feel there is a conspiracy without digging into the truth behind Kennedy’s murder. Meanwhile, Time tries to debunk the theory that global warming had much to do with the horrific Philippines typhoon, saying, “The typhoon would have been devastating regardless of climate change.” The story might have been more convincing, and interesting, if Time did more to back up that claim, which contradicts what Philippine leaders are saying. Better is an interview with reclusive “Hunger Games” author Suzanne Collins.