Wigwag: A Fresh Take on the ‘90s

For one of the most soft-spoken magazines to come around in decades, this one’s sure causing a clamor.

With a dollop of the New Yorker’s sophistication, a dash of Spy’s unpredictability and a spritz of water from Lake Wobegon, Wigwag wants to be, and may well be, the magazine that defines the 1990s.

But only if the ‘90s are the long-awaited era in which celebrity becomes declasse and glitz goes the way of Tony Orlando.

Burned Out on Coolness

A post-post modernist publication, Wigwag--the first issue of which hit news racks last week--is for folks who burned out on cool back when their college roommate bought his sixth pair of shades, but still try to stay awake for David Letterman. It’s for folks who sneer at folks who sneer at folks who don’t live and die to vogue, but listen to the Cowboy Junkies on the way to Neighborhood Watch meetings.

The idea for the magazine began percolating in the mind of 29-year-old editor Alexander Kaplen three years ago, while he was staring out the window during classes at Yale Law School. To escape the monotonous din of legalese, Kaplen would pick up a couple magazines each night at a newsstand.

“It struck me that general-interest publications fell into one of two categories,” he said. “One was high-pitched, cynical, star-struck . . . the other was very formidable, serious.”

He sensed a niche to be filled. Many people were growing weary of the irony and cynicism pervading the culture, he decided. Perhaps the time was ripe for a magazine that valued old fashioned storytelling, accepted that things could be appreciated directly and didn’t roll its editorial eyes at the notion of values “that really matter.”

Gathering some younger editors with whom he had worked at the New Yorker (“not senior people by any stretch of the imagination”), Kaplen went about concocting a magazine he hoped would be distinctive.

Judging from the first issue, he succeeded. The New Yorker influence on the pacing and design is obvious, but spread so evenly throughout the publication that the total impact is subtle. It’s also clear that the editors read Spy, but that magazine’s snide sensibility seems almost to have been sublimated. The magazine refrains from devastating irony but knows better than to slip into schmaltz or self righteousness. And rather than ridiculing the famous, it simply ignores them.

As Kaplen sees it, Wigwag, like Spy, has an edge. “But a lot less edge.” And Wigwag, he added, is also flavored with equal parts of “sweetness.”

The tone of the publication, he believes, will be determined by the stable of writers the editors are putting together. The voice will be “idiosyncratic, not a neutral beige voice.” But it will have a unifying quality.

“Wigwag,” the magazine’s premier editorial reports, is an American word meaning “to signal someone home.” As the magazine’s editorial statement explains: “Tired of the cynicism that has long dominated American life, our generation is once again thinking about home and community--that sense of place our parents and grandparents took for granted.”

“I was hoping that the magazine, as well as talking about home, would be home, a place to slow down in for a few minutes or hours each month,” Kaplen said.

So. Does it work?

Not entirely. Not yet.

But many readers will find it worth exploring, from the beautiful, quasi-nostalgic cover to the last page, if only for the light it sheds on the dreary sameness of most other publications. Even the ideas that fall short are neat ideas. There’s none of the same old stuff, which means none of the same old infatuation with what is new in the most shallow sense.

The design is engaging and the graphics are quirky and lively, with cartoonish splotches of art that keep jumping out and biting the reader on the nose.

The magazine’s most standard feature each month will simply be called “the feature.” In the initial effort, journalist Garry Wills interviews and profiles Dan and Marilyn Quayle’s odd preacher, Robert B. Thieme Jr.

This piece should receive mainstream play for the light it sheds on an influential theology. For instance: “The woman should wear on her head the sign of subjection to man’s authority . . . longer hair.” It may make some readers wish astrologers again were the main spiritual influence in the White House.

Here are a few of the other regular features and departments in the first issue:

“The History of the United States”: This item “tells the story of a particular place through the development of certain things in that place.” (In this case, the United States through men’s hats ties and shoes).

“A Letter From Springfield”: The magazine is sending black Angolan writer Sousa Jamba off to report on all the Springfields in America (there are 49 of them).

“Foreign Desk”: John Lahr writes an engagingly cheeky piece about Arthur Miller’s efforts to fortify American Studies programs--his own in particular--in Great Britain, where they have suffered under the Thatcher regime.

“Social Studies”: Suzanne Ruta writes one of the most successful pieces in the magazine, a look at how her daughter, born in 1971, became a political activist, and her own shifting views of that as they both attend a demonstration against AIDS.

“Original Species”: The magazine’s environmental column. Not standard issue environmentalism by any means, it will present each month a threatened animal with the genetically engineered features it would require to survive in the modern world.

This time, Dougal Dixon describes the “betterotterotter,” a sea otter with a long snoot for breathing through oil spills. (“In these days of the Muppets, E.T. , and Alf, no species will be seen by the public as worth protecting unless it has some anthropomorphic feature, or is cuddlesome. . . . Public relations will be an important selective pressure in survival and evolution from now on.”)

“Letters From Home”: This is, really, the core of the magazine, the section that will link in print the global village that Marshall McLuhan thought would be linked by video. It’s Talk of the Town with edge.

“The Monthly Bedtime Story”: What better way to make certain a magazine nestles itself into the family than to include each month an original children’s story? The first effort, “When Sophie Stayed for Dinner,” is a simple blend of slightly oddball humor and unsanctimonious values. In a test read to a 5-year-old and a 2 1/2-year-old, it came away with rave reviews. When little Sophie, visiting her friend for dinner, dips spaghetti into her milk and shouts, ‘Worms in my mulk! worms in my mulk!’ ” the children yelped and sputtered with laughter, even after repeated command performance re-readings.

Finally, readers will appreciate the Saab ad on the last page, which, like most of the ads here, is geared to the Y-audience segment of the New Yorker. And thank goodness for New Yorker style ads for booze, computers, Adirondack chairs, Swedish clogs, and $185 children’s wagons. They may keep the magazine alive long enough to reach its potential.

After Rice

Subscribers to the now defunct Rice magazine, a publication for the Asian American community, have received in the mail a copy of Asian Week, a weekly San Francisco-based tabloid that has been reporting on the Asian American community for 10 years. Through a deal struck with Rice management, former subscribers to that publication will receive Asian Week for the duration of their subscription to Rice, said Patrick Andersen, Asian Week’s managing editor.

Gilding Diplomas

Come on down, to education town! Have we got a college degree for you! For only $18,000 a year, you get shiny glass student union buildings! You get superstar professors! You get flashy Ivy League diplomas! And much, much more!

What many colleges don’t have to offer is a an education commensurate with the cost of tuition, according to an intriguing article in the Autumn, 1989, issue of The American Scholar, the Washington-based Phi Beta Kappa Society’s periodical.

With college tuition increasing at more than twice the rate of inflation, with the 10 most expensive schools in the country all costing more than $18,000 a year, with higher education a $124-billion-a-year industry in 1987-88, studies show that “half of the college graduates aged 21 to 25 performed below acceptable standards on literacy scales.”

According to a National Assessment of Educational Progress report, half of college graduates don’t have the skills to calculate a tip in a restaurant.

A big part of the problem, as author Jay Amberg sees it, is that colleges have become, to use the words of another educational analyst: “Club Med With Books.”

Amberg argues that schools spend too much on student recruitment and enrollment (as much as $2,500 per entering freshman at one school; $1,500 at Pomona’s Harvey Mudd, Amberg reports), too much on nonacademic buildings, too much on sappy fringe classes. And far too little on improving the quality of instruction. Amberg also argues that many professors are underworked and overpaid, and spend less and less time actually teaching.

But these problems aren’t readily apparent, because “colleges and universities spend a great deal of time and money measuring students’ learning before their arrival on campus but do almost nothing to measure whether they learn anything more before they graduate.”

He concludes that “many American colleges are becoming little more than posh credentialing agencies” and that students are paying “14-carat prices for what is too often a gilded education.”