From the Stacks: August 10, 2007

By Staff Utne.Com
Published on August 1, 2007

Utne Reader‘s library is abuzz with a steady flow of 1,500
magazines, newsletters, journals, weeklies, zines, and other lively
dispatches from the cultural front that are rarely found at big-box
bookstores, newsstands, or even online. So we share the highlights
(and occasional lowlights) of what’s landing in our library each
week in ‘From the Stacks.’ Check in every Friday for the latest
edition.

In her admirably nonjudgmental zine,
Who What When Where Why (I Think I Love
You)
, Lex McQuilkin shares her favorite
desperate-yet-entertaining ‘Missed Connections’ ads culled from two
months of surfing the Bay Area’s Craigslist site. Each post’s
unique grammatical style is preserved (‘Your older, balding and
sexy!!’), and McQuilkin’s illustrations dream up visages of the
would-be lovers in question. Some ads seem particularly ripe for
romance, like ‘Love on the Muni,’ in which a San Francisco bus
driver seeks ‘Oh baby blue babe with your baby blue rain boots and
baby blue bike… Next time I see you I am going to swerve that
damn bus into the median and confess my loveee.’ Other, less suave
writers aren’t quite as endearing: ‘I am looking for the drunk
chick that was at the Dragon Lounge last Wednesday night. I really
felt a connection while you were rolling around on the pool table
naked.’ — Danielle Maestretti

The Seattle-based arts
magazine Resonance is the journalistic equivalent
of that kid on the playground who always had the coolest new toys.
The August issue sports a sleek new logo and a tasteful cocktail of
the latest visual art, music, and writing, including reviews of the
new Drinky Crow toy and some haunting Icelandic
street art. Also in the issue, books editor Nick Goman writes about
his awkward internet-based interview with renowned conceptual
artist Miranda
July
, and managing editor Kris Kendall profiles Marine combat
artists — military-commissioned artists whose drawings and
paintings depict the intensity and monotony that haunt war’s
frontlines. — Brendan Mackie

Yogi Times Business targets the growing
number of entrepreneurs who are quitting their day jobs to start
yoga businesses.?’Now,’ writes editor in chief Sophie Parienti
in the August issue, ‘they’re conducting their meetings on
meditation pillows and their pinstriped suits have been replaced
by T-shirts and stretchy pants.’ Yogi Times Business? a
Yogi
Times
spin-off, doles out indispensable advice for
budding yoga practitioners, such as the ‘Top 10 Things To
Consider When Starting A Yoga Studio’ and pointers on how yoga
teachers should market themselves. The magazine also has plenty
of inspirational stories about people who’ve quit the rat race
to join the search for enlightenment and stretchiness. —
Brendan Mackie

The July/August issue of the
Chicago Reporter rolls out a series of
investigative articles that resonate beyond the borders of the
Windy City. Jeff Kelly Lowenstein’s cover story, ‘Broken Workers,
Broken Promises,’ looks at the challenges undocumented Latino
immigrants face when injured on the job. ‘It’s like chasing a
ghost,’ says one lawyer trying to secure workers’ compensation
benefits for his injured client. Others note that injuries often go
unreported because workers fear retaliation from their employers.
Elsewhere in the issue, Stacie Williams looks at how mall
conditions and shopping options differ in African American and
white neighborhoods. — Eric Kelsey

In
Humanist Perspectives‘ summer issue
on ‘Minding the Media,’ the Canadian quarterly takes an
in-depth, and somewhat academic, look at film censorship,
propaganda, subversive documentary filmmaking, and the state
of the media today. In a feature on American Idol and
other audition-based reality TV shows, Canadian playwright
John Lazarus argues that ‘the primary appeal of these shows is
in [their] narratives of destiny,’ which do little to mimic
real-world success.? Psychologist Robert G. Weyant’s
‘Propaganda, Language, and the Media’ offers a thorough manual
to help readers distinguish the ‘horse manure’ from ‘chocolate
pudding’ when in comes to truth and propaganda in the media.
Also in the issue, film critic Jim Skinner gives a history of
Hollywood censorship and its ties to a Catholic group, and the
magazine sits down with noted atheist and Saturday Night
Live
alumna Julia Sweeney to talk about her monologue,
‘Letting Go of God.’ — Eric Kelsey

With an X-rayed AK-47 stalking the cover of its
first-anniversary issue, GOOD asks the question: ‘Is there design
this good that doesn’t kill people?’ The magazine provides plenty
of answers with profiles of successful innovations, such as
energy-saving CFL light bulbs, as well as less popular designs,
like the stackable square Heineken World Bottles that were designed
to be used as building blocks (they never quite caught on). In
‘Education by Design,’ Eva Steele-Saccio writes that the burgeoning
green movement in school design has revolutionary potential. Though
green-friendly schools cost about 2 percent more to build than less
ecofriendly ones, their sustainable systems and lower energy costs
could end up saving the schools more than $100,000 each year. —
Julie Dolan

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