The Eternal First Semester
Pick up a copy of NEON and within thirty seconds you’ve diagnosed exactly who it’s for: the eighteen-year-old who just moved into a shared apartment and wants to feel like an adult without doing the boring parts. Sex, friendship, love, more sex—all delivered in a register that’s too sharp for a teen magazine and too thin for anything more serious. It’s the bible of the first semester, and it knows it. What’s genuinely impressive is how long it has sustained that. Ten years of recycling the same handful of themes for each new incoming class, calibrated to a precision that amounts almost to craft. A little politics here, a little skin there, clever headlines throughout. You know exactly what you’re getting. For a first-year student, that’s actually reassuring.
The best piece I read was by Antonia Friemelt—an article called "Handgemacht" (handmade, the German pun doing its work) profiling three young men whose masturbation habits had begun to seriously compete with their actual relationships with actual women. I have no outsider perspective on this. My good friend James Franco understands. The annual No Fap September exists for exactly this reason. Whether it helps remains an open question.
Nothing is ever genuinely terrible in NEON. That’s the thing. The calibration holds. It’s not a magazine for discoveries—it’s a magazine for reassurance, and on that level it still delivers, endlessly, to whoever needs it next.
BEEF! is a different animal entirely—dedicated to large cuts of meat, calorie-dense burgers, and steaks that require their own paragraph. Flipping through it puts you one step closer to a cardiac event and three steps closer to something resembling happiness. I wanted to tear out every page, throw it in a pan, and eat it.
The highlight was a photo series by Raik Holst and Mike Hofstätter called "Junge Dinger"—Young Things—in which spring potato varieties named Leyla, Annabelle, and Cilena were photographed like models and paired with recipes: fried potatoes with squid, fries with anchovies, jacket potatoes with blood sausage. Whether you call this food writing or something more spiritual is a question I’m leaving open. It changed something in me.
Less impressive was the China feature—23 pages on eating culture there, executed entirely in tabloid style: boiled dogs, competitive drinkers, illicit spirits. There’s a serious piece buried in that material and BEEF! chose a boulevard layout over it. The subject is genuinely strange; it deserves the treatment.
ZEIT Campus is for whoever picked up NEON at eighteen and felt slightly used by the experience afterward—like after a party where someone kept trying to sell you something. The student supplement of Die Zeit feels more trustworthy, more measured, a little more earnest in the best sense. Oskar Piegsa and Leonie Seifert wrote a piece that asked, flatly: what can I actually do? In a world that insists everyone has a calling and a duty to chase it without blinking, that kind of question is its own quiet relief.
The worst piece was a report on a 23-year-old economics student named Laura Lehnen who spent €100 on a hypnotist to manage exam stress and concluded it didn’t work. I could have told her that before she wrote the cheque. Better alternatives, none requiring an appointment: vodka, sex, and Nutella—in exactly that order, not negotiable.