Secrets of the City

Just as long as our beloved Utne has the same hard-hitting, pull-no-punches writing and editing as Steam Traction Magazine, I’m okay with that.

The Utne Reader? Is that still around? I didn’t renew my subscription after Eric left in the mid-90s. The tone seemed to change, and I couldn’t look at it the same way. It’s like watching the new half-hour NOW with David Brancaccio. With Bill Moyers’ departure, so went their set and half of the runtime.

I don’t want to join an anti-Utne piss contest, but I got a free subscription for a year and while I enjoyed the magazine and the interesting tidbits it combined together, I quickly grew tired of the optimistic granola hippie empowerment message. How many times a year to aging hippies need to be reassured that change starts from within, you can control your own destiny, etc, etc, etc,?

P.S.: I didn’t read the magazine in the old days when Eric Utne was running it but the truth must be told that he nearly ran the magazine into the ground.

I used to work for Ogden’s parent company, at the jewel of a crappy newspaper chain in West Virginia.

If anyone ever liked Utne, be sad. Be very, very sad. The best way to describe it is thus: Ogden and McClatchy run the Pittsburgh Pirates. If you follow baseball, you know what this means. And if you don’t, here’s some light reading on the subject.

Bummer. I love Utne (the world needs a dose of optimistic granola hippie empowerment messages, you know, to counter the consumption-overdrive, marketing driven messages of 99% of other magazines), but I wonder if this will really change things. I grew up reading Mother Earth News–damn hippie granola parents–so I doubt it’ll change much.

It’s the optimistic empowerment, month after month, that got to me. Do the Utne editors even live in this world? Or are they over-compensating?

I like my reading material realistic and, following from that, mostly depressing. I have fiction for escapism.

It’s easy to turn elsewhere for a healthy dose of dead-tree left wing thought.

I almost killed the Eric Utne’s cat… I still feel bad about it, well not too bad. See: http://www.tarded.net/boom/

Sadly, none of those are published in the twin cities. Our magazine quotient just dropped in half.