Business

Enchanted aisles

Whether for spring break or summer vacation, you probably want to get away for a while. Find your best guide in the magazine aisle.

We have no idea what kind of person reads Travel + Leisure, but we’re guessing they are either adventurous or pretentious. Asked what language they would most like to learn, 30 percent of readers answered Hindi and 29 percent Arabic. What’s wrong with the very useful Spanish, we wonder? Aside from that, T+L from American Express Publishing really hits the mark with its cover on Rome. It could be on Timothy Cardinal Dolan’s reading list this month, though he may already be familiar with the best places to scarf fresh mozzarella, salami and saltimbocca. For families looking for ideas for summer vacations, T+L has plenty. We like the idea of Yellowstone Park’s lodges but we’re not sure about this advice for queue-jumping at Disney: spend $175 an hour on a VIP tour, because if you’re in a party of 10 it’s just $17.50 per person.

Condé Nast Traveler is surely not targeting the Occupy Wall Street crowd in its latest issue. It offers a peek at how the one percenters relax. For a cool $165,000, uber-rich travelers can rent out their own private island off the coast off Grenada. And apparently the ranks of folks capable of footing the bill for such indulgences is growing: there were 185 more billionaires in 2012 than in the previous year. However, the abundance of those sorts of factoids, an unwilligness to identify some of these vacationers by name and a dearth of photos make what could be an interesting piece come off as dull. Elsewhere, the magazine ranks the 270 best spa resorts in the world (a list that was apparently 22 years in the making) but readers might find the accompanying photo of a naked woman, with an arrangement of sliced cucumbers encircling her head like flower petals, disturbing. We did.

Admit it. The main draw of National Geographic is the pictures. Fortunately, National Geographic Traveler doesn’t disappoint in this area either, although the photos appear less glossy than we remember them from the flagship magazine. Still, the stories are captivating enough to grab — and then keep — readers’ attention. In the April issue, we travel to the Rub’ al Khali, or the Sea of Sand, a desert where Bedouin still roam with camels. The opening photo shows a group of men lounging on what appears to be a Persian rug in the middle of the desert with oil rigs dotting the skyline and a truck zooming by. The clash of past and present is startling. The mag even makes traveling to San Francisco, which it touts as an oasis of technology and creativity, sound like an adventure.

Islands magazine offers its first issue since merging with Caribbean Travel + Life magazine. Editor Eddy Patricelli promises a thick issue resulting from the combination but what we find instead is one that’s much thinner than expected. Still, we find the magazine’s feature on all-inclusive Caribbean getaways a good one and potentially useful since it features jaunts accessible (at least from a New Yorker’s perspective) to its readership. Elsewhere, another piece focuses on a cruise around some of the islands off the coast of Italy. The photos of mouth-watering Mediterranean eats and sublime venues are enthralling and we also appreciate the commentary on some of the signature dishes the islands offer. One Italian chef, who once worked at Cipriani, leaves us with one thought for New York foodies: “Seventy percent of what is passed off as Italian is an amalgamation or an illusion.”

New Yorker’s cover story gives a riveting tale of intrigue in the Bolshoi Ballet. The company’s artistic director, who determines the fates of the dancers, comes home in his BMW at 11 p.m. He is met at his door by a man with a glass jar of sulfuric acid. Meanwhile, writer Jesse Eisenger goes for the easy laugh in a fictional therapist session with sportscaster Marv Albert. He shoots, he scores! Also, there’s a convincing take on why Yahoo! made the right decision in ending telecommuting.

Time has a definite pattern. Raise great topics and then do not answer the questions. The Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg cover story on how she is fighting for women’s rights is timely. With women being 49 percent of the workforce, why do men run the boardrooms 96 percent of the time? How about interviewing some male CEOs at S&P 500 companies to ask them why women are not rising? And why are significantly more women graduating from college than men? Fareed Zakaria gives a strong argument why environmentalists should care more about alternative energy than the Keystone pipeline. Kudos, too, for a clever pictorial on how difficult and expensive it might be to move all Army goods from Afghanistan back home in 22 months.