In the summer of 1959, Ernest Hemingway lit out for Spain on assignment. He was to write a long article about a series of bullfights between the country’s finest matadors, Antonio Ordóñez and Louis Miguel Dominguin.1 But on the northern side of the Mediterranean Sea, a single commission from Life swelled into a three-part series, during a long summer that would prove to be his last hurrah.

Hemingway formed his own cuadrilla in Málaga, and invited 19-year-old Valerie Danby-Smith to join.2 Val, as he called her, had been sent to interview him for the Irish Times. He rarely entertained requests from journalists at that point, but she had charmed him, [...]

Last week, David Grann and I met in his office at The New Yorker, in midtown Manhattan. It is a glorious fire hazard because he doesn't throw anything away. Grann has been a staff writer at the magazine since 2003 and published two books, the enthralling The Lost City of Z, and The Devil and Sherlock Holmes, a collection of his reportage. Stacks of papers related to finished stories ("That's Z, that's Cuba, that's Willingham…") line the walls, while the floor is devoted to a book-in-progress, as yet untitled, on the Osage Indian murders and the birth of the Federal Bureau of Investigation.

For fans, a new [...]

• "She holds out her right arm to show me her tattoo of Marilyn Monroe. All that remains of Marilyn is a few drops of black against skin that is the color the moon possesses in the thin air of northern winters."—Stephen Marche on Megan Fox, Esquire, February 2013.

• "Her skin is lined and slightly worn and depends on light from other sources—from her eyes, from her smile, even from the hounding incandescence of television."—Tom Junod on Hillary Clinton, Esquire, February 2008.

• "I can't help but notice her skin. It's the smoothest skin I've seen outside of a Clinique ad."—A.J. Jaocbs on Rosario Dawson, Esquire, [...]

So the n+1 editors know about Sandra Tsing Loh, right?

Would you like to know what was voted to be the VERY BEST AMERICAN MAGAZINE COVER of the year 2011, by the editors of magazines near you? The answer may surprise you. (Or cause any other number of negative emotions, at least in part because it's, you know, fake?)

“We’re not just running creative teams,” said Hearst’s men’s group editorial director and Popular Mechanics editor Jim Meigs. “We’re running new business incubators. We’re constantly thinking about where can we take our content and roll it into new platforms and in ways that are going to make money.”

—A MUST READ on the bigwig magazine editor as brand manager.

"I rarely interacted with Mr. Scott at The Source until November 2004, when I wrote a cover story on his friend, the rapper Ja Rule. I thought I’d written a fair piece, despite the fact that Ja Rule, like The Source, was feuding with 50 Cent. I was wrong. On the Monday morning after publication, Ms. Osorio told me that Mr. Scott was furious about the story and I was going be fired. Mr. Mays and Mr. Scott met with the editorial staff that afternoon in Mr. Mays’s office. The meeting quickly turned into an inquisition on the cover story, and Mr. Scott asked if I was a fan [...]

The North American Review began publication in 1815, long before The Atlantic, which was founded in 1857. It is not our oldest continuously operating publication because it ceased publication in 1940, after having fallen on some very hard times. But it almost did not fall on hard times! A savior had swooped in to save the magazine in 1938. That savior, Joseph Hilton Smyth, was in the business of snapping up a number of small struggling publications, including the Saturday Review of Literature and Living Age, and he bought a piece of Current History as well. Unfortunately he didn't have any money of his own and was apparently spending money [...]

"Employment of full-time professional editorial staff peaked at 56,900 in 1989. By the end of 2011, the last year for which data are available, employment had fallen by 24%, according to the American Society of News Editors. When figures for 2012 are compiled, newsroom workforce will likely be below 40,000." —Of the many bits in this survey of the current American news business—the cable news audience is stalled forever at 1.9 million people! TIME's newsstand sales dropped 27% in a year!—the 24% drop in newspaper editorial employees is the most instructive for those of you young people thinking about a major. (Journalism is always a terrible major.)

[...]

It sounds preposterous, and it is. But the story of Esquire's grand plan to shoot a bevy of distinguished men and women in the altogether is, so far as I know, true. Here's the first paragraph of the unbylined, unheadlined story from the February 1970 edition of The Los Angeles Advocate:

Amazing! But how is it possible there is no record of these scandalous plans, save for a microfilm'd squib in a West Coast gay rag? (Go ahead and look. You will find nothing.) Before consigning this to the realm of the urban legend—albeit a legend that no one seems to know—I ran it by Gerald Clarke, Capote's [...]

Once upon a time there was a magazine. It was called Talk, and Tina Brown made it with her friend Harvey Weinstein. Now Tina Brown has a magazine called Newsweek and she makes it with her friend Barry Diller. Let's look back, and also look forward.

Tina's Philosophy

"A year ago I introduced the magazine by saying that I wanted to bring intimacy to the American conversation, to marry emotion to ideas. In a deeply political season, I'm happy to reiterate that desire." —Tina Brown's Notebook, September, 2000.

Actual things people said in the September, 2000, issue of Talk

"He's really cute and normal. He's really nice and [...]

The brand new Graze magazine, based out of Chicago and so far entirely supported by food events, has just published issue number one. You'll never take my subscription to Gastronomica but you definitely had me at "In search of Cambodia’s ancient stinky cheese"! Only $10 for the first issue!

Since its founding, The New Republic has been issuing opinions about when and where the United States should go to war. What follows is a survey of some of the positions taken by the magazine's editors and columnists on a number of military interventions, stretching from World War I through this week's Leon Wieseltier piece on Syria. (Note: This history is admittedly incomplete, with gaps where archives weren't available online.)

WORLD WAR I Herbert Croly and Walter Lippmann, founding editors, initially maintained an isolationist stance. But things got a bit wobbly after the 1915 sinking of the Lusitania, which occurred six months after the publication of the magazine’s [...]

I do not have the rights to reproduce this stunning, amazing photo of one Katie Price (formerly known as "Jordan," she is a model, novelist, UK reality star and, uh, "footballer enthusiast") wearing a swimsuit emblazoned with the cover of her own magazine about herself whilst holding that magazine in one hand whilst standing before a backdrop splattered in covers of that same magazine. My point is: ANDY WARHOL WOULD DIE. If he hadn't, you know, unfairly beaten us all to the grave. The reviews of the magazine are in from The Sun: "It's glossy and full of shite." (It also contains recipes however: "Cauliflower cheese: I buy [...]

This is the New Republic's ad strategy from 1940. I wonder which Supreme Court justices were readers! I hope it was that dreamy and probably gay Frank Murphy, then just-confirmed!

Adjusted for inflation, by the way, $5 a year is $82.92 in 2013 money. Not terrible news: then it really was a weekly, and now it's 20 issues a year, for a subscription price of $34.97.

40 East 49th Street is 425 Madison Avenue, built in 1927. It has a lot of doctors and dentists, and it's where I get my eye exams. Also there's a Starbucks, go figure.

In May of 1981, a draft-dodging ex-pat American published his first story in Omni magazine. The event went largely unremarked. After all, Ronald Reagan was just a few months in office then, and that was either awesome or terrible, depending on your viewpoint, plus that was the same month the Pope got shot! Which is why we now have a Popemobile! But there at your local newsstand, or, if you were lucky (or your parents were generous), there in your mailbox in the plain brown wrapper, William Gibson's "Johnny Mnemonic" saw print.

And as you may have heard, the Internet Archive has done the world a service by maintaining an [...]

According to the latest scientific proof in the form of a magazine list feature, San Francisco is the nation's healthiest city. Women's Health surveyed a hundred American cities and ranked them according to life expectancy, obesity, access to health care, incidence of cancer, nutrition, and probably how much money everybody has. How did a wealthy and beautiful city with its own universal health care plan and a population of attractive people who walk everywhere end up at the top of the list? (SELF magazine put out a similar list last month, with San Jose at No. 1 and San Francisco in third place.)

Also, why did [...]

"Using a smartphone app, [Atlantic] print readers will be able to scan select pages of the magazine, giving them access to video interviews and other multimedia content typically only available to website and tablet readers…. Readers must either interact with or skip a quiz-based ad from Prudential every single time they scan a page." — *Gets out print magazine, gets out iPhone, downloads app, holds app over magazine, watches ad* Um… no offense, and thank you very kindly, but I will PASS on this exciting opportunity.

Last week, the American Society of Magazine Editors released its list of nominees for the 2012 National Magazine Award. In the so-called "brass ring" long-form categories—reporting, feature writing, profile writing, essays and criticism and columns and commentary—all 25 of the writers nominated were men.

For an organization that usually gets talked about exactly twice a year—once when it announces the nominations, and again when it declares the winners—suddenly people had a lot to say about ASME.

"Women can’t write, says ASME," went the Daily News headline. David Carr called it a "sausage-fest." Disdain for the organization manifested in the Twitter hashtag #ASSME.

It's easy to imagine the [...]

Here you go: 84 issues of Time magazine for $20. That's ¢23 an issue. That's the "special offer" that arrived in yesterday's mail. Oh right: plus a "weather station clock." I'm sad to report that I actually am the kind of crank who sort of craves having one of those clocks. I like to know when the barometric pressure changes!

But wait, there's more wonderful bargains in magazine world!