Pickings

The newest Utne Reader arrived yesterday. I can't understand why magazines feel compelled to revise their perfectly adequate typography every few years - in this case it was to a ghastly razor-thin font with almost double spacing, and fancy but distracting graphical motifs that left the impression that the whole magazine was one of the advertising inserts that the tourism ministries of small tropical countries like to commission. Still, they summarized a few good articles: National Street Playing Day is slowing down cars in the Netherlands, and a Vancouver couple found that subsisting on food from within a 100-mile radius was an effective weight-loss method in some seasons.