SHELTER FROM THE DELUGE (2024)

On big stories like this one, the staffs of the major magazines earn their keep, publishing special "packages" of news, analysis and photos, usually with stunning speed and professionalism. Yet these Monday-after pieces, like newspaper coverage of the same events, inevitably do little to enrich our understanding.

We don't need a magazine to tell us, in deadline-glib prose, what it all means. Six months from now, when the judicial process and journalistic digging have revealed more about what really happened, a few thoughtful writers will actually help us put it all together and think about its deeper significance. But the stories you'll see on the newsstand this week, to lift a phrase from business-speak, simply don't "add value."

Where do leading magazines add value these days? I wondered this weekend as I sought shelter from the O.J. deluge.

At the top of my pile was Harper's, with a July cover story that looked curiously fluffy for this ultra-sophisticated monthly. "TICKET TO THE FAIR," reads the headline beneath a shot of a dazzling carnival midway, "Wherein our reporter gorges himself on corn dogs, gapes at terrifying rides, savors the odor of pigs, exchanges unpleasantries with tattooed carnies, and admires the loveliness of cows."

"Reporter" David Foster Wallace -- whose main profession is writing novels and short stories -- actually does all the things mentioned on the cover. But he does something else too: He emits ungodly good prose, full of precise description and laced with self-mockery. So good that at the end you feel you've been to the Illinois State Fair with Wallace, and that he was smart and dryly funny the whole time, not to mention a bit alienated from all the small-town earnestness of the event.

His alienation is more interesting, and valid, than that of some East Coast interloper, because he grew up near where the fair is held, and is none too thrilled to be back. When he observes at the Golden Gloves boxing tourney that one fighter "looks like every kid who ever beat me up in high school, right down to the wispy mustache and upper lip's cruel twist," and that the "girls in cutoff overalls and complex systems of barrettes" are "the reincarnation of every high-school cheerleader I ever pined for," you begin to see that in visiting this fair he is confronting not just a kitschy piece of summer in America, but himself.

What drives you through these pages is simply his prowess as a builder of sentences and stories. "It is well up in the nineties and the sky is the color of old jeans," he writes early on. And two pages later, he delivers this scene from one of the "livestock venues": "The horses stand in hay. Billy Ray Cyrus plays loudly on some stableboy's boombox. The horses have tight hides and apple-sized eyes that are set on the side of their heads, like fish. I've rarely been this close to fine livestock. The horses' faces are long and somehow suggestive of coffins. The racers are lanky, velvet over bone. The draft and slow horses are mammoth and spotlessly groomed, and more or less odorless: the acrid smell in here is just the horses' pee. All their muscles are beautiful; the hides enhance them."

Wallace also recounts sundry human interactions he has at the fair, but the point is that this is a value-added piece, and Wallace is a writer worth following. As it happens, you don't have to look far to follow him. This week's New Yorker, which is entirely devoted to fiction and pieces about the fiction business, brings a short story by Wallace. It's a feverish, not entirely satisfying portrait of a 21st-century transvestite heroin addict hitting bottom. If you pick up this issue, do not miss Nicholson Baker's "Subsoil," a little diamond of a tale in a style I can only describe as nerd gothic. You have to read it to understand.

Literary pieces, of course, are not the whole story. We look to magazines for clarifying syntheses of all kinds of subjects too complex for most of us to follow on our own. Take the Internet, for instance. You hear a lot about it, probably even throw it into conversation now and then, but odds are you really don't know much about how it works.

Then see the July issue of Technology Review, which offers a cover story about "chaos and community on-line." In addition to explaining in simple terms such central concepts as Usenet newsgroups, Internet Relay Chat and Multi-User Dimensions, Stephen Steinberg attempts to refute some spreading myths. Such as Vice President Gore's message that the information highway is mainly about access to huge databases. Gore "speaks of schoolchildren looking up information in electronic libraries. This is like promoting the telephone as an emergency tool for the elderly -- it focuses on a marginal, albeit important, application while ignoring the medium's main use." That main use, Steinberg contends, is quite simple: meeting people.

Technology Review is published eight times a year by the Association of Alumni and Alumnae of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. A one-year subscription costs $10. Write to Technology Review, P.O. Box 489, Mount Morris, Ill. 61054-8019.

The Plan

Maybe you know Microsoft is the software powerhouse of our age, but do you have any idea what the company plans for the coming decades?

In another fine synthesis, this week's issue of Business Week pulls it all together, with a typically meaty story on the diverse directions in which Microsoft's Bill Gates is moving the company. What, if anything, do his plans mean for you and me? Amid all the extensive reporting, Business Week sketches an answer:

"If Gates's plan succeeds, you won't be able to escape Microsoft's software. It will accompany you on vacation, sitting in a pocket device that pays your bar tab. It will ride in your car, mapping out the best route to your destination. It will control your appliances and feed programs and information to an entire city's television sets. It will let you browse through a world of merchandise and services from your home and business, with a royalty going to Microsoft each time you do so."

Sound like something you ought to know about, perhaps? So set aside all those O.J. stories and get to it.