J-14 Write Up in Slate

J-14 is exactly the kind of magazine I would have eschewed as a snobby teenager. I read The Nation, Rolling Stone, and the still-mourned Sassy, thankyouverymuch, and saw absolutely nothing strange or amusing in that juxtaposition of periodicals. Some as-yet unidentified thing happened in my college years to make me crave delicious, trashy celebrity gossip, though, and that something makes me a fan of tabloid-lite 'zines like J-14, profiled in this great Slate piece, which dissects the magazines many charms, not least of which, if you are gussying up a Teen Space in your library and have a tight budget, are the pull-out posters of today's young starlets & hunks. Laminate, tack to the walls, and let the drooling begin! Link via YALSA-BK.

Also very worth checking out: Slate's Number 1 archive. I wish they'd publish this column more frequently.