Word: how-to
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Compost Heap. Since then the magazine has served up a steady fare of amiably instructive articles on such topics as how to raise pigs, make maple syrup, build a compost heap and install a lightning rod. "How-to articles are our bread and butter," says Editor Ketchum. Interleaved between the how-tos are thoughtful pieces on such issues as energy policy, the morality of hunting and the future of farming. For all its bucolic content, the magazine is dressed up in striking contemporary design that earned it last week's award...
Local coverage is worse. Stories tend to deal with economic distress largely in terms of symptoms, local color and superficial how-to guides. The Detroit Free Press, to its credit, recently supplemented coverage of auto industry layoffs with a useful story on how to navigate the maze of local bureaucracies disbursing unemployment benefits. But many papers flop even in such routine backyard reporting. During the fall, for example, the Atlanta Constitution did several stories on layoffs in auto plants elsewhere, but delayed in mentioning whether factories in its own circulation area would be hit (they soon were). Its sister paper...
There being no hope, apparently, of intelligent drama within the confines of this suddenly popular form, one would settle for a good how-to movie. The actors might as well be giving us some odd or useful information instead of straight-face lines like "Did you leave a cigarette burning?" as clouds of smoke roll into a room. It would be interesting to know, for instance, why the fire develops in such an erratic manner, hitting some floors brutally, then skipping ten or 20 before breaking out again. One would like to learn, as well, the larger strategic considerations that...
Before purchasing anything, however, you should obtain Stereo Review's annual Directory and Buying Guide, which contains summaries of features and specifications for all products, accompanied by helpful "how-to" articles. Then visit your local hi-fi dealers to listen to his equipment. Don't let your dealer demonstrate an inexpensive turntable by playing it through a $1000 Marantz amplifier and Bose speakers--insist he hook it up to other equipment in your price range...
...book about a mugger. The subject brings various expectations. A certain horror-fascination at getting in on the other side of urban America's living fear; the noncerebral prospect of a bloody how-to guide; perhaps a fast freak-show visit into the mind of an animal. The one thing a reader does not ex, pect is a troubling, memorable encounter with a human being. Yet that is precisely what James Willwerth produces. To enter this mugger's world means that inexorably, as one of the mugger's friends put it, "you don't think about laws...