Experts on stress say you can create a vacation just by closing your eyes and imagining a scenic view. If you’ve tried that and need more, keep reading.
Travel + Leisure
The July issue of Travel + Leisure skimps on the beach despite its promise for “great seaside getaways” plastered across the cover alongside a picture of boats floating in a sea of blue. Still, the mag is worth picking up if only for Gary Shteyngart’s humorous piece on Beijing. Rather than drone on about the history of the Great Wall, which is oh so Google-able, Shteyngart writes about amusing oddities such as “Chocolate,” a seedy nightclub in Beijing’s Russian district, and “Racist Park.” Yes, that’s its poorly translated English name.
Beaches, Resorts & Parks
The awkwardness of Beaches, Resorts & Parks magazine doesn’t end with its name. The spring-summer 2014 cover seeks to entice with a picture of handsome country music singer Luke Bryan on white sand. But Bryan’s link to the ocean — and album titled “Spring Break With All My Friends” — isn’t made clear until halfway through the story. And even then it’s a stretch. BR&P only recommends beach destinations on the Gulf of Mexico. Perhaps that’s its mandate, but it should make this clear by giving itself the even more awkward name of Beaches, Resorts & Parks In and Around the Gulf of Mexico. Instead, it promises “America’s Most Beautiful Beaches” on its cover.
National Geographic Traveler
National Geographic Traveler promises “7 Great American Beach Towns” on the cover of its June/July issue. It delivers — to a point. The piece by Bruce Schoenfeld starts off brilliantly by perfectly describing what makes a desirable beach destination. “The town must have a prettiness about it that makes even a stroll to the grocery an occasion for delight,” Schoenfeld writes. (Sorry Seaside Heights, NJ, but loud, angry video-game halls didn’t make the cut.) Nat Geo also properly delves into its chosen towns (Orleans, Mass., Manzanita, Ore., Boca Grande, Fla.) — until No. 4, when it breaks into a short, pithy list. What is this? The BuzzFeed of travel magazines?
Sunset Summer Trips
Sunset Summer Trips’ latest issue is also limited in its destinations, focusing solely on the Western half of the US, including California and Oregon. New Yorkers seeking to avoid TSA agents this summer should therefore also avoid this magazine. Otherwise, it’s well laid-out and informative. Like a travel book, SST provides helpful tips about what to do in its select destinations, including costs, websites and addresses. When looking at the gorgeous coast of Manzanita, for example, SST doesn’t just suggest readers go kayaking. It also tells them where to go and how much it will cost ($22 an hour).
If the endless palaver about business “disruption” and “innovation” has tripped off your BS detector, the New Yorker’s Jill Lepore is here to confirm that your old radar is reliable. In a withering takedown, Lepore notes that business expert Clayton Christensen, the prophet of “disruptive innovation,” has a pretty poor track record when it comes to predicting the future, having warned that the iPhone would be a flop, for example.
Meanwhile, we get good old-fashioned journalism about private contractors to the government who are extracting big fees for handling criminal probation cases, and running halfway houses and treatment centers.
New York declares on its cover that Terry Richardson’s pervy fashion photos are now seen as ‘incriminatory evidence” of sexual exploitation of young models. Yet through this entire article, whose point supposedly is that big fashion mags and retailers are finally pushing back, nowhere is a substantive interview to be found with any of these supposedly disgusted editors or execs, much less any of the agents pushing these girls into Richardson’s studio. Instead, we get a prurient spread of his gross photos with models in a slew of graphic and compromising positions, and a gauzy portrait of Richardson.
If you haven’t read a thing about nutrition in the past couple of years, Time’s cover story may be news to you. Specifically, we’re told to “Eat Butter” because fat has for years been improperly branded as the enemy, when the real problem was carbs. While this story falls well short of news for most of us, it nevertheless has some interesting and scary stats, including the fact that use of high-fructose corn syrup is up 8,853 percent since 1970, courtesy of corn subsidies that have made it cheap. Elsewhere, there’s a smart story on how NASA is poised for a resurgence as tensions between the US and Russia escalate.