Literary magazines and I have not had good relations. We’ve tried short and passionate, slow and sustained. We’re just too different. I prefer book-length fiction from authors I already know. Picking up a journal for the sake of “discovery” leaves me feeling over-exerted, as if I’ve bought a hen to make an omelette. Breaking new talent and welcoming home the underappreciated author is why most literary magazines exist. Our purposes then crossed somewhere east of the shower in my master bathroom, where a stack of unread, unloved journals serves as a pedestal for the toilet plunger.

Why then did I leap to attention when Mr. Powazek asked for my thoughts on The Virginia Quarterly Review? I had read and loved their blog.

You heard me right. VQR has a blog which is updated with vigor by editor-in-chief Ted Genoways and his staff. While most journals warm to technology about as eagerly as Quakers warm to firearms (emperor of the genre The Paris Review didn’t feel it necessary to have a website until 2000), VQR seems to think there’s more than one way to interact with their publication. And more than one kind of reader in mind when a new issue goes to print.

It was in that spirit of openness that I eagerly thumbed through VQR’s Winter 2008 issue, cover illustration and reimagined masthead by graphic novelist Chris Ware. Coming in at 290 pages, many in full color and with binding slick as a turtle shell, it could, despite its earned claim of being “a National Journal of Literature and Discussion” have passed as a commercial Southern Lifestyle magazine or its parent university’s annual report.

Inside those adornments stepped aside. Deep white pages and tight print held photojournalism from Iraq and Afghanistan, a symposium on Polish intellectual Ryszard Kapuściński (featuring the star wattage of Salman Rushdie and Werner Herzog) an assessment of novelist Dennis Johnson and a dozen poems. Thematically, the issue centers the theme of torture as a method of exploring our civic and human obligations in the face of institutionalized evil. Poet Jane Hirshfield, in an essay around the volume’s midpoint, calls the hopeful result of this process “the heart shattered, from stone-adamance to open.”

There is more, much more and I’ll confess I didn’t read it all or this report would have arrived courtesy of the year 2016. But what I did was first rate: erudite yet plain-spoken, aggressively diverse and lined with the quiet confidence of masters at home in their craft. That the pieces keep to the theme yet live independently of it adds two benefits: The issue possesses a unity many magazines strive for yet refuse to admit matters only to them (most magazines aren’t read front to back or even completed) and that same unity makes the VQR feel like its supposed to be sat around in conversation, like a table, instead of read through alone, like a parchment scroll.

The Virginia Quarterly Review was founded in 1925 at the request of then University of Virginia President E. A. Alderman. Its early days were in large part devoted to showcasing southern literature (often overlooked by the New York publishing establishment) and adapting liberal policy positions on racial issues. Since 2003, it’s been edited by 35-year-old Ted Genoways, a Walt Whitman scholar largely credited with heaving the magazine over the wall of the 20th century into the courtyard of the 21st. The investigative reporting, comics and photo spreads may have been his idea but the VQR and its readers are the better for it. Far too many of this magazine’s compatriots see virtue in bargain basement design, default typesetting and cover illustrations that can best be described as from the High Graduate Intern Period. There isn’t any and VQR knows better. Its foresight has earned it two National Magazine Awards and ten nominations in the past 5 years.

I speak of my past failed relationships with literary magazines not as a spurned artist (I’ve never submitted anything to the Paris Review, Tin House, or their lesser known cousins) but a dejected consumer. Literary magazines are looking for readers who aren’t hungry agents or English graduates in the midst of a job search. I went looking for the refracted glory that comes from being a subscriber to both Entertainment Weekly and something with a name like Leafpile Review or Black Rock Wainscotting. I had my best face on when I attended the 2006 Associated Writing Programs conference (The Detroit Auto Show of university writing departments and the journals they produce) and swept a mass of potential mates into a free tote bag. Worried about the heavy flight home, I asked one booth minder, all of 22, if the journal she represented had any sample stories on their website I could try out before committing. “We don’t believe that’s necessary” she snapped back as if I’d asked for her opinion on waterboarding.

The Virginia Quarterly Review offers selections from every issue on their website for free. Subscribers get keys to the whole thing.

This is more than a crush. This could be love.

Recently I read a New Yorker profile of Kim Hastreiter, the founder and editor of Paper and decided, after just three paragraphs, that she’s led the world’s most charmed life. A downtown boho in the 1970s who now carefully tends her pop culture periodical as carefully as a master arbourist would an orchard, Hastreiter and Paper seem the living incarnation of how I imagine the Paris Review under George Plimpton – a rowdy blurring of work and play, of high-minded cultural curation and shuffling into work at noon. Editors like Graydon Carter and Tina Brown seem to be working hard to pull the fabulous into their orbit. New Yorker author Dana Goodyear called the staff and friends of Paper “a freewheeling, kitschy, Munsters-like family, but a happy and highly functional one” made of writers, designers musicians and artists, many of whom call Hastreiter “aunty.” It makes her and her magazine seem both unattainably hip and nice at the same time.

I wanted Paper to be my best friend, and I’d never read a single issue. So when I emailed their New York office asking for a sample issue and Associate editor Alexis Swerdloff wrote back with “how many do you need?”, my expectations were high. Now they are highly satisfied.

Paper traffics in cultural fabulousness. The magazine profiles and reviews the artists, filmmakers, musicians, authors, and celebrities that you should know more about. Best I can tell, their taste leans forward yet accessible. They’re not trying to impress you with obscurity and, while there were at least a half-dozen new-to-me’s in the three issues I read, a more-obsessive friend might find their choices a bit safe. Whatever. I don’t complain when a magazine needs to put Andy Samberg on the cover to draw advertisers and newsstand sales. I can find the table of contents and jet off from there.

Paper’s simple taxonomy can be summarized as What to Look Out for (Paperview: One page profiles of lesser-known creatives), What You Probably Already Know About (longer articles and photo spreads of designers and the bit-more-famous) and What We Think About What’s Already Out There (Paper of the Month: Reviews of new movies, music and books that they cleverly outsource to other fabulous people). There’s a smattering of columns on politics, movies and (in keeping with a rather dated view of pop culture geography) Los Angeles, as well as a throwaway spread of nightlife and party photos. Those feel obligatory. I concluded subscribers really signed up for a primer on what to read, listen to, and watch next.

Paper’s design feels almost 60s minimalist, bare white backgrounds, blocky text, a single photo predominates. With the exception of a name columnist like Cintra Wilson (whose take-downs of fame read like boa-clad performance art), the writing is understated, purposeful. Paper seems less a talent show for journalists or a boast about access to famous people and more like an act of curation. Paper is your outsource buddy (what I call a friend with excellent taste whom you rely on for some area of your cultural consumption) in print form. And although I didn’t spend a lot of time on their rather dense web presence (blogs, shopping, Paper TV, the works), what I saw felt like leftovers from traditional celebrity journalism. It’s telling that Paper only does online what US Weekly considers its reason for existence.

Paper has been around since 1984 and some say it invented the pop culture periodical. I’m not sure what it says that it now appears to stand alone. Pop journalism today is either fawning (Entertainment Weekly), snarky (Radar), a stand-in for fashion (Interview, Black Book) or politely condescending (The New Yorker). We can’t talk about movies, music, television and books without immediately passing judgement on pop itself. Paper, like any good friend, doesn’t demand tat you be impressed by it or dare you to disagree, but rather the rarest of qualities in a magazine: to sit with it and listen.