For some people, do-it-yourself barely applies to making coffee, much less home repair. If you’re a bit more ambitious around the house than that, try these fix-it magazines.
This Old House magazine offers a host of suggestions on how to revamp your first, or (should you be so lucky) second home’s “curb appeal.” Readers may want to skip magazine editor Scott Omelianuk’s grousing, in his monthly editorial, about becoming his in-laws’ indentured home repair handyman after they’ve purchased a new country abode. Elsewhere, the publication — a supplement to the popular PBS TV show of the same name — offers up eight houses in various stages of exterior disrepair and shows before-and-after photos.
Better Homes and Gardens is more about home-making than home repairs, so best pick it up when you need a break from all that spackling. The March issue focuses on prepping the home and body for spring with tips on choosing the right plants for the garden, decorating your sun room and cooking freshly picked asparagus. Yum. We especially like the recipe for asparagus fritters, which are basically just deep-fried veggies. The mag will jump genres and turn from gardening and decorating to tips on dressing and putting on makeup. Somehow it works.
If you’re the kind of person who enjoys reading reviews about paint thinner, Fine Homebuilding is for you. The title is as dry as drywall for most of us, but for the home repair enthusiast it will come in handy. The mag is genuinely enthusiastic about Lowe’s entry into the drill market, with its new Kobalt brand, and the editors give it a rigorous going over. Overall the tone is serious and, like the contractor you dream of , the mag doesn’t cut any corners.
The Family Handyman is for the home-owning family that might want to learn how to build a waterfall (seems doable) or treehouse (a bit intimidating). Articles are written by handymen like you and me who tried these methods and are not necessarily professionals. What needs some fixin’ are the first 20 pages, where readers, who seem like advertisers, explain why they loved certain tools.
After cataloguing the 2012 ills of the Republican Party, which include Mitt Romney’s “unreliable conservatism” and rich benefactors who fund Super PACs that can keep candidates alive, the New Yorker concocts a corny cure: “maybe a deliberative convention, where all factions of the GOP have a voice.” It might be refreshing if this mag — not to mention its liberal establishment counterpart, the New York Times — dared to be honest and a little less hypocritical without, for example, feeling compelled to proffer folk remedies for ailing enemies.
In its annual “Best of New York” guide, New York appears to have been so overwhelmed by all the sushi bars, SoHo boutiques and beauty spas it was reviewing that it fell behind on everything else. That’s why a feature on 80-year-old Mike Nichols directing “Death of a Salesman” feels like the most current story in the issue. Elsewhere, we get a rehash of John Liu’s campaign-finance scandal, and what must be the 108th magazine feature this year about law school grads who are suing their alma maters over poor job prospects.
Time has a cover story on “10 Ideas That Are Changing Your Life,” and not all of them sound particularly good. Take “Your Head Is in the Cloud,” by which we no longer bother to remember facts because we can Google them. So “the experience of losing our Internet connection becomes more and more like losing a friend.” The bright side? Younger folks have grown accustomed to be on call 24/7 from the start, making it “less stressful, less disruptive and less problematic,” a sociologist says.
Newsweek editor Tina Brown hires Amy Chua, the Yale law professor and “Tiger Mom” who has been slamming US mothers for being too lax, to write a cover story on “The Rise of China’s Billionaire Tiger Women.” The feature reads like an infomercial, with its breathless prose and fixation on money. But elsewhere, this female-focused issue is energized by profiles of women ranging from Burmese political activist Aung San Suu Kyi to Asma Al-Assad, the once-fashionable wife of Syria’s brutal dictator.
Nypost.com
No comments:
Post a Comment