Ghosts, Money, Stories
I still read magazines on paper. There’s a ritual to it—the kiosk, the flip through, the decision. You hold something in your hands, smell the pages, feel the weight. It’s not romantic. Print just dies slowly, and what survives says something about what actually matters.
NEON is what BRAVO becomes when the readers don’t drop out after high school. Still about sex and celebrities and looks, but the writers assume you’re smarter than you were. Helene Hegemann: Four Years of Reading Nietzsche Stoned
instead of What Boys Really Think of Your Jeans.
The basic themes repeat every couple years—love, friendship, money—but there’s an intelligence in how the magazine keeps finding new angles. They did a frankly shot photo essay about masturbation once, no soft focus, no pretense. Just people doing what everyone does and being weird about it. The weak part is the electoral voting essay that keeps getting recycled, the argument that voting is pointless that somehow every magazine believes it has to run. I skip that every time.
VICE used to be genuinely strange. Now you can feel the money. There’s still good documentary work—a long piece about ghost rapes in a Bolivian village, the kind of writing that actually justifies the magazine’s existence. But the headlines are all designed to sound incredible, and then the subjects turn out to be novelty instead of knowledge. Cambodia’s Child Spider Hunters.
Sweden’s Shit-Sludge Debate.
I’m too lazy to open half of them, and I don’t know if that’s me or the magazine itself. The stories feel so far from anything in my life that reading them doesn’t change anything. You close the page the same as you opened it.
Kinfolk costs about twenty-five euros and is almost impossible to find. Volume Eight was about Japan without clichés—no Harajuku, no kawaii, just the country treated as something worth real attention. Black sesame cherry blossom macarons. Japanese proverbs for living better. The wasabi harvest. Four hundred pages of design and photography and thinking that makes you realize you’re rushing through everything. I wish I could absorb it, become the person who reads this and actually changes. It’s quiet. It’s an island in a world that’s basically screaming bright nonsense for money.