If your only getaway is sipping a drink on your back porch, this group of magazines can give you a taste of the Hamptons. And there’s no traffic. Just don’t forget the sunscreen.
The standout is Hamptons. Montauk resident Rufus Wainwright graces the cover of the 426-page July edition and participates in a cozy Q&A with actress Naomi Watts. Other summertime locals get a star turn, too, including Soludos founder Nick Brown, second-generation photographer Sophie Elgort and hotelier-of-the-moment Sean Macpherson.
Editor-in-Chief Samantha Yanks clearly knows the East End. Her assignments not only take us to places we’ve long considered trying — the dock-and-dine and family-friendly Navy Beach restaurant, for one — but capture rivalries only a Hamptonite on vacation might contemplate. (Yes, the fish taco really is giving the lobster roll a run for king of coastal cuisine!) Even the obligatory fashion pages have a local feel. Kudos to parent company Niche Media, whose regional and resort titles range from “Aspen Peak” to “Vegas,” for not airlifting content into its Hamptons pages in the interest of cutting costs.
Next up is The Daily Summer, which introduces Christie Brinkley offspring Sailor Brinkley Cook on its July cover. (Thought that smile looked familiar.) For vacationers whose ADD is exacerbated by summer glare and heat, this glossy may be the perfect read. Editor-in-Chief Brandusa Niro takes the magazine’s tone from her sacrilegious fashionista bible, The Daily, and puts it to good use in snappy briefs assembled under such headlines as “Buzz Fix,” “Food Fix” and “Shop Fix.”
A lengthy special photo section titled “The Next Gen” — featuring youngsters with last names like Lepore, Schrager and Elgort (again), you get the idea — reinforces The Daily Summer’s emphasis on youth. The New Yorker it’s not, but where else can you learn a “Hilaria beach towel” can be yours for $69?
For those seeking more heft in their summer reads, try Avenue on the Beach. This Manhattan Media magazine, which counts weekly Hamptons freebie Dan’s Papers as a sister publication, is as close to The New Yorker as a serious vacationer should get.
Editor Daisy Prince goes deep with a Janet Allon-penned piece on cover boy Andrew Lauren (eldest son of Ralph), whom she designates “America’s Most Eligible Bachelor.” Who knew the dour public face of Ralph Lauren Purple Label had such a winning personality? Or that his accomplishments as a movie producer include “The Squid and the Whale” and “The Spectacular Now”?
It’s all there and then some — a little too much, perhaps — in the 12-page spread. The issue also reprises Montauk lore about the Rolling Stones’ 1975 stay. Readers of a certain age may recall those five weeks when, to prepare for its “Tour of America,” the band took over the seaside estate then owned by Andy Warhol and Paul Morrissey. A song even came out of it. “Memory Motel” features a rundown Montauk lodge and a woman named Hannah — described, lyrically, as “a peachy kind of girl.”
Beach remains admirably local. Editor Cristina Cuomo plays it smart by pairing Aerin Lauder, granddaughter of Estée, with Calvin-ex Kelly Klein in a Q&A that fashion obsessives won’t want to miss. And wouldn’t you know a one-pager by cat-lover Beth Ostrosky Stern has a cute-as-can-be photo of her taken by her husband, Howard Stern? Readers, in fact, are invited to “adopt one of Beth and Howard’s foster kittens.” We thought about it but then feared it’d be just our luck that the kitty would catch a tick or get swarmed by mosquitoes or …
The New Yorker delves into Atlanta’s public schools, a tragic example of the nation’s unchecked mania for standardized testing gone wrong. Years of systematic cheating — not by students but by administrators and teachers — began in 2006 in what became a “well-oiled machine” that corrected students’ wrong answers in order to qualify for federal handouts through a “culture of fear, intimidation and retaliation,” according to a Georgia investigation. The takeaway: The state is now getting even more aggressive on standardized tests as it competes for a $400 million grant from President Obama’s Race to the Top program.
New York delivers a fluffy profile of tech journalist Kara Swisher, making much of her “deep sourcing” and “combination of access and toughness,” with anecdotes about her cornering this or that exec at tech conferences. All of this is puffery that glosses over the real story here, which is that Swisher has been forced to recuse herself from coverage of Google because she’s married to (albeit separated from) an exec there. This is too bad, as the public is in dire need of stronger coverage of Google, whose search engines, operating systems and gadgets are circumscribing our world in ways that are scarcely written about by Silicon Valley’s cheerleader press corps.
Time’s cleverly titled cover story “World War Zero,” which chronicles the growing hacker war that is raging between the world’s governments and corporations, doesn’t yield much inside dirt on the rampant criminality that is threatening the security and economic stability of the globe. Nevertheless, it gives an excellent sense of the scope of the problem: China’s ongoing theft of US intellectual property is “the greatest transfer of wealth in history,” according to retired Army general Keith Alexander, who formerly headed the NSA and US Cyber Command.