Alessandra Montalto/The New York Times Buying a gift subscription to a magazine like Lucky Peach can be done online, with the recipient notified before Christmas.
Andy Anderson Garden & Gun magazine, another possible gift from the world of media.Not that long ago, someone h ere, we won't say who, came up with the bright idea of doing a media-centric gift guide. There was a fair amount of skepticism, but when the list was produced, it settled everything. Some of the best editorial minds in the hemisphere - well, actually, the dark overlords of the media kingdom at The New York Times - judged it to be ill-considered, dumb, awkwardly executed and full of log-rolling.
Other than that, they loved it.
So, Plan B. We're going to run a couple of suggestions that arrived in response to an e-mail query and hope that you, the group that the journalism professor Jay Rosen at New York University describes as the People Formerly Known as the Audience, will kick in with ideas in comments. There is actual value in the exercise. Media gifts convey intellectual heft and suggest that the both the recipient and the giver are living the life of the mind. And more important, whether said media is in digital or physical form, it can usually be ordered wit h a click of the finger and the gift can be conveyed via e-mail. That way, you can be thought of as thoughtful even though you aren't getting around to shopping until now.
There will be other suggestions today and tomorrow, but we thought we'd start with Clay Shirky, digital storyteller, New York University professor and sensei. Mr. Shirky suggests giving the gift of something that is ephemeral but precious: time.
Set up a Twitter account for someone who has a few subjects they follow passionately - biotech, cricket, fashion, whatever - then follow the people who tweet interesting things about the subject, and then subscribe your friend to the News.me feed of same. They'll end up with the best daily, curated e-mail on the subject anyone can deliver, without having the jump through the hoops you just did.
Great idea, with points for personalization.
Here at Decoder, we're also still interested in things that go plop on the nightstand or coffee table, specifically magazines of oddball beauty and splendor. There are those moments when we want our media to just sit still, quietly, in our lap, and not bark or bleep at us. To that end, you might think about giving Esopus. One guy, Tod Lippy, creates a printed artifact of hand-cut brilliance, a twice-a-year magazine full of mysteries found and conjured, with a CD full of music in each issue and visual features that can't really be explained but only stared at.
You might also want to think about Lucky Peach, a food magazine that treats eating as less of a sacrament than a full contact sport. It's full of brawny chef humor, food thrown against the wall to see what sticks, and a graphic approach that looks forged in some steampunk typography studio. The same goes for Garden & Gun, the so- called Soul of the South whose weaponized name and regional ambitions always seem to scale into something far more universal when it arrives every other month. And did you know that The Baffler is back from the dead? A quarterly journal edited by John Summers, and most notably with help from Thomas Frank and Chris Lehmann, it is a compendium of literary curveballs.
There, see how easy that is? Do the same in comments. Points for creativity, and points off, natch, for self-promotion. The business of media may be in a gulch, but there have never been more splendors - digital, printed, and apped - to pick from. Take a minute to share in comments what you will be looking to give or receive.
To post a suggestion click here.
