The Believer

I'm not a huge magazine person. I read Newsweek because it fills me in on the news I can't watch on TV or glean from various internet news sites. I peruse Newsweek while I'm waiting for or on the train, since it has relatively short articles and it's not that embarassing. I also have a few guilty pleasures, namely mental_floss and Geek Monthly. Both of those magazines are pretty entertaining and quasi-informative, and any given "article" is so short that I can usually read it while I'm eating a bowl of cereal in the morning. These are magazines I enjoy, but I wouldn't necessarily recommend them to everyone.

The magazine that I'm actually touting here is The Believer. Brought to you by the good people at McSweeney's, The Believer has a little bit of everything for people who enjoy The Arts (literature, music, film), politics, philosophy, science, or what have you. The last complete issue I read included: an essay on the subject of ceremony, based around the music of New Order and the funeral of Gerald R. Ford; a look at the influence of Arch Oboler's '40s radio dramas on the ultra-violent horror films currently enjoying a resurgence in popularity; an interview with the primatologist Frans de Waal discussing what we can learn about human behavior by studying bonobos and chimps; an interview with the Mike Scott, leader of the band The Waterboys, by Colin Meloy; and the regular column "Stuff I've Been Reading", by Nick Hornby. And that's not even half the magazine.

Yes, sometimes the essays and interviews can get a tad pretentious, and the magazine is undeniably left-leaning. But the bottom line is, whenever I finish an issue, I feel smarter. I've been reading The Believer for a few years now and I've lost count of the number of authors and musicians I've been introduced to through it. The magazine regularly thrusts things into my mind that I've never thought about before. Like the article I read last year, which was an account of two lesbian artists from the Bay area who attended a taxidermy convention in one of the Dakotas. It was amazing. The author obviously learned a lot about a part of American she had never encountered, and she related the experience while remaining respectful towards a very right-leaning group of people who could have been easily skewered by someone going for a quick laugh instead of insight.

So if you get the chance, try to pick up a copy and your local wherever-you-buy-magazines, or look up some of the recent issues online. It'll make you feel, like, wicked smaht.