What's Hot What's New

The good, the bad and the ugly. You'll find them all here. Each week you'll get my take on the intriguing, and sometimes peculiar, titles to recently hit the newsstand.

Culture & Travel; Cover Price: $5.99 www.cultureandtravelmag.com Culture & Travel magazine is not intended for the casual traveler. If you thought that Travel + Leisure or Departures were for high brow travelers, think again. Culture & Travel offers you a high dose of great destinations not based on location but rather on the culture surrounding them. Articles on China, Ireland and Rome offer the consumer an opportunity to see these destinations in a completely different way than what they have seen in any other magazine. Again, this magazine is not for the budget traveler. To truly enjoy this magazine your interest in culture must exceed your interest in travel. Culture & Travel could be the magazine that will bring back the arm chair travelers where they don't have to leave their home to enjoy travel.

Post USA Cover Price: $4.99 www.postmagusa.com After a year as a local magazine in Arizona, Post USA magazine goes national. With its hefty size and feel, Post USA is an impressive magazine at first glance. But beyond that Post USA falls flat on its mission to provide a glimpse into celebrity life. Once you get past the cover, the game is over (as the tag line says). In this day where laser targeting and marketing is king and queen, Post USA offers a hodge-podge of things that makes it so hard to determine its mission or what it's trying to accomplish. If its goal is to access celebrity life, they will need to take a number because there are hundreds of magazines out there trying the same thing. And those magazines do a far better job of delivering on that mission than Post USA. Maybe Post USA should take a halftime break and rethink its mission.

Salvo Cover Price: $6.99 www.salvomag.com First came Good magazine and now we have Salvo magazine to add to the list of socially conscious magazines. Salvo provides a glimpse of hope in a world surrounded by a combination of glitz and war. Salvo devotes itself to the culture wars taking place in this country. It provides a great debate vehicle for people who give a damn. Articles like "Left-wing dominance of Academia" and "The Reinvention of Assisted Suicide" are sure to spark conversations about which direction this country should take as it approaches the cultural fork in the road that will affect the very way we live our lives. Salvo is well designed and written, but my fear is that Salvo is the proverbial needle in the haystack. I just hope that people will be able to find it.