Business

Halloween and vine

Like Linus in the patch, we look forward to Halloween. These magazines will tell you whether you’ve got a great pumpkin or just a good one.

Better Homes and Gardens understands its seasonal duty like no other. This month’s edition makes you want to dive into a pile of leaves with a knit sweater on. Of course, the pumpkin is central to the theme. If something isn’t fall-y enough, add a squash. BH&G has the answer with fall recipes, fall centerpieces and fall gardens. It hits all the right notes from candied apples to bouquets of brilliant colored leaves to ceramic pumpkin displays to last all year.

Family Circle’s already shilling Black Friday shopping advice for the eager post-Thanksgiving bargain hunting set. Too bad the shopping tips the homemaking glossy serves up amount to tired old tricks that most savvy shoppers are already hip to, including the sage guidance: “For one of the most popular shopping days of the year you need a plan of attack or you’re bound to miss out on the top deals.” Duh! Elsewhere, the publication delivers a four-step illustrated turkey carving guide that’s just simply not as easy to follow as Family Circle intended.

When we’re in the country, fall is a time of celebration. Forgive us if we missed that with the October edition of Country Living. Sure the editors pulled together the requisite ideas for decorating pumpkins (decals) and candy apple toppings, but there was no sense of excitement whatsoever. We like its focus on American-made products and the couple who came up with new ideas for popcorn flavors, but overall it feels like the editors were phoning it in from their cabins.

You can’t go wrong with picking up the 75th anniversary edition of Woman’s Day. Not that it’s bursting with original Halloween ideas, it isn’t, but there’s a guide to making donuts, a first person piece on what scares Katie Couric and, of course, pumpkin carving ideas. This issue has page after page of eye-catching features, including new twists on Women’s Day recipes down the decades and family scrapbooks of Michelle Obama and Ann Romney.

This week’s New Yorker’s cover illustration is a classic. It shows Mitt Romney debating an empty chair and comes from Barry Blitt, the controversial illustrator who dreamed up the 2008 cover of Obama as a Muslim, fist-bumping a gun-toting Michelle. A six-page piece by Joan Acocella noodles on how women managed to overcome persistent male objections to their desire to read and write. Talk of the Town usually delivers a new take on a maturing news topic, but The presidential debate has been chewed over so thoroughly that its comment piece was a stick of flavorless gum.

Reading New York either makes you feel like a total loser, lost in its hyper-cool take on fashion to architecture or you know everyone in its Intelligencer party collages and you just feel like you reinvigorated your hipster quotient one hundred-fold by imbibing its weekly style wisdom. This week’s edition’s inhales the world of global urban design and exhales it as real estate porn: Japanese wall-less homes! The highrise apartments of Lima where balconies are swimming pools! Skip the thumbsucker on Yahoo! CEO Marissa Mayer. We’ve had enough after Fortune, Forbes and Vanity Fair coverage to name a few.

Time’s timely cover “The Fact Wars,” aims to decode why lies and mischaracterizations have dominated this election season. The sad conclusion: candidates have little to lose since the fact-checkers are too few, and the news cycle moves too quickly and beyond that we are simply a nation that prefers a red or blue version of its news. “We don’t collect news to inform us. We collect news to affirm us,” offers GOP pollster Frank Luntz. “It used to be that we disagreed on the solution but agreed on the problem. Now we don’t even agree on the problem.” Two pages are dedicated to striping down the campaign inaccuracies, but in many instances statements from the candidates are labeled “misleading” rather than true or false.

Newsweek Editrix Tina Brown goes back to the archives this week, digging out a perennial debate: Does heaven exist? The piece is by a neurosurgeon who was in a coma and remembers a flight with a woman on the back of a butterfly. Some excerpts from Dr. Eben Alexander’s new book are undoubtedly hokey, other parts extremely enlightening. Either way it’ll be a talker in the doctor’s waiting room. There’s also a scary piece on how far behind the FCC is in regulating the Internet when it comes to children’s surfing habits. We’re wondering if Web mogul and Newsweek backer Barry Diller would agree.