If you’ve had a chance to browse through MYMAG, then hopefully you’ll have picked up the concept. Olivia Munn and Steve Aoki’s magazines are filled with articles that are mostly of-the-moment — but there’s another aspect of MYMAG, which can be seen in Brett Ratner’s RATMAG. Most people are inclined to keep the books they buy. You paid too much for them just to throw them away, and they often seem timeless. Why shouldn’t magazines be the same? Something topical can still last forever. Maybe they’re even more precious because they can revive memories of a long forgotten past? 

In 1986, Kurt Andersen and Graydon Carter (now editor-in-chief of Vanity Fair) founded Spy magazine. It offered the purest form of satire, it enjoyed its heyday, was sold and eventually folded — a cycle most magazines seem to go through these days. (Though Spy has had much greater postmortem viability than most magazines; its most ardent fans, Brett certainly included, have kept its memory nearly as au courant as when it was actually still being published.) I hope anyone who sees the Spy articles in Brett’s MYMAG will, at the very least, be encouraged to discover a little about it.  And although you can no longer buy Spy — unless you trawl through eBay — a collection of its greatest hits is available as a book, Spy: The Funny Years. The younger you are, the more likely Spy is foreign to you. I urge you to change that. (more…)