Can't beat a 2 year subscription to Maxim for the price on less than 2 magazines that I would've bought off a newstand!

I'll keep it short:

Not the hugest music fan. Never really pay attention to music as it happens, I tend to enjoy it more passively.

That being said, I took the offer for a 6 dollar one year subscription thinking I would see how the mag was.

Turns out my first issue was the one in which Gen. McCrystal basically did some Obama bashing. This article made international headlines
and cost McCrystal his job. YES ROLLING STONE!

Since then I have been absolutely, positively, blown away by their stories. They have covered the gulf spill wonderfully calling out all
the right major players.

I am really enjoying the articles this mag puts out.

On a second note, I am now more into musicians and bands and their stories, than I am the music. The writing is that engaging!

I wait every week to get this magazine in the mail. I absolutely love to see who's wearing what and who's squabbling with who this week! Definitely an awesome magazine!

The New Yorker is not your typical fluff magazine with celebrity covers, beauty tips or other nonsense. It's full of thoughtful and provocative writing which will inform you and captivate you. If you're curious about the world and want to be on the cutting edge when it comes to current events, arts and others you'll be pleased with The New Yorker. It also has great sports articles, the kind of writing you tend to miss if you were a Sports Illustrated reader 30 years ago.

I ordered this magazine in May and got my first issue in July. I had never even heard of this magazine but decided to try it out because it had such great reviews. It's probably one of the best magazines I've ever subscribed to. There are hardly any ads and all the articles are interesting! It's not a magazine filled with garbage about the latest celebrity news or stuff that is making you stupider for having read it. It is a magazine filled with interesting and fun information. From one page to the next, you don't really know what topic is coming up next. It's a great magazine and I HIGHLY RECOMMEND IT!!!

This starting coming a few weeks after ordering, and comes every week. This is the way to order magazines.

Take a high profile controversial celebrity (e.g. Angelina Jolie) and offer to interview them about their latest book, movie, or charitable deed. Dig up all the dirt on them that you can. Take a high profile, controversial, end-stage terminally ill celebrity (e.g. Dennis Hopper) and do the same, getting their exclusive(!) last interview, and publish it immediately after they die. Spend a token two or three paragraphs or so talking about the book, movie, or charitable deed that was the pretext of the interview, and spend more time raking up all the muck you can of affairs, legal/health/financial troubles--anything juicy. Take a high-profile controversial celebrity alive (Tiger Woods) or alive + dead combo (Elizabeth Taylor) and just rake up everything you can of the above. Or take a high-profile, perfect-appearing dead celebrity (e.g. Grace Kelly) and dig up her secret hidden past of celebrity affairs and teenage virginity loss. Hence, the type of journalism of "Vanity Fair" starts with an F and rhymes with "muckraking."

The ____-raking articles are extremely well-written, engaging, and contain plenty of photos exposing the subject matter. For example, the Tiger Woods piece contained not just (mostly unflattering) photos of Tiger Woods, but extremely revealing full-page (and in 1 case, 100% revealing and 2 pages) photos of his mistresses, helpfully numbered with golf flags.

But ____-raking articles alone cannot make up a magazine. Hence we need filler articles on fashion, media or trouble at the expensive Getty Center art museum in Los Angeles, which are difficult to find amongst all the advertising of fancy cars, expensive watches, perfume, designer sunglasses, and spread-lipped/spread-legged young models who happen to be wearing designer jeans. To find the filler articles, it's best to start from the back of the magazine, as the table of contents is after many pages of nothing but advertising usually somewhere between pages 35 and 50. If you manage to find page 1 of the TOC, good luck finding page 2, as it is "continued on page X"--after a dozen or so more pages of nothing but advertising.

If you're not into celebrities and fashion or disclosing every detail of the Tiger Woods or David Letter scandals is there any reason to read the magazine? Yes, if you want a detailed understanding of financial scandals and the people behind them. I found the article dissecting the Bernie (and social-climbing, materialistic wife Ruth) Madoff Ponzi scheme extremely enlightening as well as the excerpt of Michael Lewis' book "The Big Short" offering a detailed explanation of the banking melt down.

I'm giving Vanity Fair 4 stars, because whether or not one agrees with what they do, they are excellent at what they do. I subtracted a star because their volume of advertising is excessive, even by magazine standards.

After one year of subscribing, I recommend Harper's and recently re-upped for two years. I would agree with some reviews that say the writing is uneven, maybe not in quality always - the nature of the magazine is a variety of articles covering a broad range of topics, some of which I don't always read. At the same time, this is what I enjoy about the magazine: it's an interesting mix of articles and ideas that I haven't found anywhere else. I read magazines to get away from the computer and Harper's presents a broad range of ideas to keep me interested. The fiction and poetry is excellent. Artwork is scattered in the magazine that is also interesting. Others have mentioned the 'Harper's Index' and 'Findings' sections which are collections of statistics and recent research findings that are particularly entertaining for quick perusal. I also read the New Yorker, Atlantic, and Mother Jones and find Harper's fits nicely with these as it comprises many ideas to think upon (as a Swedish friend phrases it).

I ordered this magazine for my daughter. She loves it because she can see outfits as well as lower cost alternatives and where to buy them.

Good magazine, but I don't like auto-renewal. I guess I wasn't paying attention, or i wouldn't have bought it with auto-renew...