![]() ![]() I’ve browsed through almost all 28 issues on my phone and have to admit that The Nation is a little too hard on it. The design is rather handsome, the cartoons are amusing and the stories have a magnetic pull, if only as a teaser (“Putin on the Ritz”-good one). Despite certain reservations (why so many Hermes ads?), there is some je ne sais quoi about Air Mail. Nonetheless, Carter is no slouch and his publishing instincts are sound indeed. Bob Mankoff, former New Yorker cartoon editor, has the same duties here. Carter, who long held the reins of power at the magazine, has brought with him various former Vanity Fair contributors and ex– New York Times persons. Its slogan is “For the world traveler,” and its header advertises “best of the news from abroad,” delivered every Saturday at 6 am. Carter has described the publication as “the weekend edition of a nonexistent international daily,” a sort of floating style section covering subjects like château renovation, vacation destinations, and accessory recommendations, with enough foreign reporting, true crime, and literary criticism to give it heft. ![]() Air Mail’s first issue landed in inboxes July 20, its branding a stately all-caps sans serif, its logo a heraldic vintage airliner midflight, and its colors a Vanity Fair–esque red against a paper stock manila background. So deep is the newsletter’s nostalgia for an earlier golden age of print that you’d expect subscription cards to fall out of it. … Air Mail, which is like a glossy print magazine from the ’90s uploaded to the Internet, down to its profusion of rubrics in varying typefaces and its relentlessly chirpy copy. I’ve given it a few months to settle, and I somewhat, though not entirely, agree with the evaluation by The Nation‘s Kyle Chyaka in his critique “ Graydon Carter’s E-Mail Newsletter for the Rich and Boring” (which suggests a certain displeasure): On first and second sight it appears to look and read like a cross between Vanity Fair and The New Yorker, but without the compelling grit and wit of either. In July 2019, Graydon Carter, former longtime editor of Vanity Fair, premiered a new venture called Air Mail (with a nostalgic DC-3 airplane as its logo) that is mailed to subscribers as a weekly eblast. Now everything the USPS sends goes via air mail (and judging by the extreme lag time for letters I’ve sent from downtown Manhattan to Brooklyn, literally everything goes in the air mail bag, circles the globe and comes back again!). In the past, you had to write “Air Mail” on any letter going overseas if you wanted it to get there in the same year it was mailed. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |