Enough of polar this and polar that. It’s time to get away to warmer climes. Follow these magazines to an enchanted isle.
Travel + Leisure’s cover boasts “Dream Beaches,” coupled with a bikini-clad lady relaxing with an ocean view. But we’re stunned at the level of oversell. There’s just six pages of suggested destinations, and it’s mostly photographs: the accompanying information is decidedly bite-size. The mag aims at an amusing destination faceoff: Mykonos vs. St. Tropez and a New Post-style tan-o-meter of best places to get brown, with Scotland on one end and Ipanema, Brazil, on the other. We say leave the snark to New York’s favorite tabloid. Props to T+L for its fascinating feature on the transformation of ski destination, Tahoe, thanks to the Silicon Valley mini-moguls.
Pilar Guzman’s Condé Nast Traveler wins gold for the cover most likely to make us leave it on the newsstands. Rather than show a beach or a ski resort, Traveler gives us a corner of Castello di Casole, Tuscany, a top pick in its list of World’s Best Hotels. Inside lies a different story altogether. Take “Water Worlds,” a package of breathtaking locations that feature jaw-dropping bodies of water, including Canyon Point, Utah, where the hotel pool literally snakes around an ancient sandstone butte, and the Blue Lagoon in Iceland. We can’t help loving the spotlight on much-maligned English food that finally acknowledges the talent beyond pub grub.
Most tempting cover award goes to Islands magazine, which lures with teases such as Maldives, Bali and Tahiti. Inside, the editors smartly carve up destinations to suit every interest: the total escape to the best for families to the best views. The photography is top-notch, but the first-person travelogues come off as amateurish compared to more upscale titles. Islands doesn’t just do the obvious destinations; it does a good job of seeking out the unique. Take Atlantis Palm, Dubai, where you can sleep with the fishes — uh no, not what you think — rather there’s a fish tank at the foot of the bed.
The closest National Geographic Traveler gets to beaches is a first-person piece by Andrew McCarthy — yes, the actor-turned travel writer — on Honolulu. McCarthy walks us through the vegetation towards a Prada store and on to swimming in the Pacific. But not all of it is positive, as he reveals he’s overwhelmed with a desire to get the hell out of there. National Geographic Traveler differs from other travel magazines in that you’re more likely to hear about the goings-on at a local fish market than about the quality of sushi in a top-class restaurant. Only Traveler would recommend 2014 vacation hot spots in Iraq and Sarajevo. Basra this year, anyone?
Len Blavatnik — the Ukrainian-born billionaire owner of Warner Music who is famous for insisting that he isn’t a Russian oligarch but an “American businessman” — gets raked over the coals in an impressively scathing New Yorker profile. Dredging up dirty details on the aluminum bonanza bagged by Blavatnik in post-perestroika Russia, reporter Connie Bruck quotes one exec saying, “You don’t make billions of dollars in Russia from standing on the corner and handing out lollipops.” In addition to buying sexy companies like Warner Music, Blavatnik has sought prestige by funding Washington think tanks and universities, and founding Oxford’s Blavatnik School of Government, which “sounds rather like a henhouse sponsored by a fox,” according to an old nemesis.
New York’s cover story asserts that, “What adolescence does to adolescents is nowhere near as brutal as what it does to their parents.” This generalization, which, granted, may apply to a large swath of Park Slope, is presented with surprisingly scant irony as a bold new revelation for social science, supported by some guy who’s selling a new book. With in-depth accounts of Brooklyn baby boomers fretting over their children’s homework assignments and Internet-porn habits, we learn that it’s actually quite easy being a teenager by comparison. Of course, there’s no mention of the adolescents whose parents don’t give a damn about their kids’ homework or Internet-porn habits, or who prefer to hassle or ignore their children instead of chatting about it with friends over lunch. Admittedly, that’s less interesting.
Time interviews our newly minted Fed Chairman Janet Yellen for its cover story, and inside there’s a photo of her dining at the Federal Reserve cafeteria earlier this month. Her lunch? A Diet Coke and a slice of what appears to be broccoli pizza. Equally likeable are the stories of her 1950s childhood in Bay Ridge, where her dad was a family doctor treating dock workers and factory laborers, who were paying “$2 cash to be seen, or not paying, depending on how things were going.” The idea is that Yellen has the interests of the nation’s struggling underclass at heart, and we get the usual pitch that quantitative easing is propping up the job market for regular folks. As for the banking crisis and how to prevent another, we get scant insight, although Yellen hints that, “We may also need to take some further steps that have not been taken yet.”