For some people, a healthy diet and a healthy planet go hand-in-hand. The rest of us would just like to walk past a donut store without binging. Maybe these magazines will help.
VegNews is not likely to convert carnivores to veganism for Earth Day. But for those who believe eating meat hurts the Earth, there are some tips in its “Special Environment Issue.” Mostly this comes in the form of recommending like-minded non-profits, recipes and vegan-friendly vacation destinations, including Palm Springs, Calif. A Q&A with vegan NASCAR driver Leilani Munter makes the cause’s best case. “One acre of land can produce 165 pounds of beef or 20,000 pounds of potatoes. An inconvenient truth for meat-eaters, indeed!”
Mother Earth Living is clearly geared toward people who want to dedicate their lives to being earth-conscious. For example, it offers this trick for getting fleas out of a carpet: Simply sprinkle some diatomaceous earth on all the carpets; brush it in; leave it in for about four days; vacuum it out. Wow. So simple! Thank you Mother Earth Living. To be fair, the mag offers plenty of earth-friendly tips that will make readers’ lives easier. But enough of the tips were so complicated or heavy (think asbestos, radon and water-testing) that they made reading stressful. Hey, if you have the time, go for it. As for the rest of us, we’ll live with the chemicals.
Prevention is the Reader’s Digest of health magazines. It is in digest format, for starters, and it is a handy guide for health-conscious living. The articles come in small, digestible doses, and everything is broken into 7 Ways or 28 Days or 10 Solutions. While the advice, exercises, remedies and recipes seem sound, the magazine feels more like a brochure from your doctor. Still, we could see people thumbing through the pages and finding inspiration to start eating healthier or doing some of the exercise routines depicted in the photos. Prevention manages to surprise, leaving you nodding in approval after reading a new factoid and thinking, “That’s good to know the difference between actinic keratosis and melanoma.” You learn something new every day.
You need to know your dosha from your vata if you want to be on the granola wavelength that American Media Inc.’s Natural Health offers up. The editors do a good job of helping wash down the medicinal messages about eating right and meditating with some enticing subjects that play to New Yorkers’ egos: anti-aging diets, anti-aging creams, mobile meditating and getting to sleep drug-free. It is also packed with scare-the-pants-off-you stories about the dangers of high-glycemic foods and vitamin deficiencies. If you’re at the salon dropping big bucks on hair and nails this week, pick up the May/June combination issue to fix what’s wrong inside and keep your colon’s dosha and vata in balance.
The New Yorker covers the Boston bombings in its “Talk of the Town” section, and the results are rather undistinguished. “I often identify with the people of San Francisco or New York than with those of Boston. But when the Marathon bombers struck, I took it personally,” says “a man named Ian” in an email quoted by George Packer, as if this cocktail-party-blather-grade quote would be interesting even if it came from the lips of President Obama or Vladimir Putin. A second piece is penned by a guy who claims to be one of the “only members of the press in the area,” during the chase of the brothers after the MIT officer was shot, but he doesn’t seem to get much closer than “the area.”
In a brazen show of hysterical hypocrisy, New York’s Jonathan Chait bends over backwards to argue that The Post “seems determined to revive the old xenophobic paranoia” in its coverage of the Boston bombings. Chait bemoans our utterly factual report that a Saudi national was an early suspect, and ignores the fact that numerous other liberal news outlets confirmed it. Likewise, he breathlessly accuses us of racism for our “Bag Men” cover, which once again was entirely factual. Elsewhere, a priggish piece on the Met’s upcoming punk-rock exhibit quotes E.M. Forster and makes daft proclamations such as, “The best parts of punk music don’t sound negative; they sound like people thrilled to be able to make any noise they like.”
Time’s annual list of the 100 most influential people in the world includes NRA boss Wayne LaPierre, whom gun-nut rocker Ted Nugent dubs “a sledgehammer for truth, logic and freedom.” While Ted rails against “the embarrassing culture war of politically correct denial that runs amok today,” he doesn’t bother to address the actual fact of the Newtown massacre. Elsewhere, we were somewhat taken aback to see House Majority Leader Eric Cantor praise Joe Biden for his “ability to build bridges, bring people together and get things done.” And we really liked Timothy Cardinal Dolan’s piece on Pope Francis. Responding to a cardinal who remarked that Francis “talks like Jesus,” Dolan shot back: “I think that’s his job description.”