Intelligent Life no more

I am known to have advocated for Intelligent Life to become a regular periodical. That's why I have taken out a subscription when it did without double checking. Now that the first regular issue has been sitting around for some weeks (it's a quarterly magazine), I'm afraid I'll have to give it a serious thumbs down, especially in comparison with what it is deemed to be its direct competition, i.e. Monocle.

Whence the bad marks, you wonder? First, the layout is not particularly user-friendly. The following is probably not objectively true if you run the numbers, but the editorial content is somehow subjugated by advertisements. Then the typeface is overly artistic, with some of the titles written in a compressed font that is plain ugly. I think that even I could do better than that, and that's saying a lot! But what's worst is that the imaginative, novel content that I've been so fond of in the first two issues is simply no more. What happened to that, Mr Editor in Chief?? Admittedly, there's some good stuff, too. I was rather surprised at not having heard before of the great classical paino swindle perpetrated by the late Joyce Hatto in complicity with her husband William Barrington-Coupe. I could easily imagine this material to be turned into an entertaining feature film from the well written article alone. Also well done is the article about experimental cuisine I referred to earlier, even though you only realise what it's really about when you're already well into it - which is quite unfortunate when you're used to browsing. 

So, what to do? I'll give it a second chance, if only for the motto hedonism with its head on.