There Are Many Ways to Express Passion and Curiosity About the World — Magazines Are Still One of Them

These are this year's most admired independent magazines. We hope they give you some ideas about life.

2016 is nearly over. For print, it has been another year of worrying about survival. But Stack — the site devoted to recommending good independent magazines, which we wrote about in last year's year-end piece on the subject — has run smoothly for another year. Every magazine it picks has built an online platform, yet all of them still use paper as the medium for their content and their personality.

Clear positioning, a strong visual identity, enough money to operate on, good sales channels, and sometimes high-quality paper: these were the reasons we gave last year for why independent magazines keep going, and this year's Stack selections bear them out again.

Unlike last year, Stack added four categories to its year-end independent magazine awards — "Art Director of the Year," "Editor of the Year," "Student Magazine of the Year" and "Readers' Choice" — and named 11 magazines worth watching in all. What makes each of them special, and why they can still win subscribers in an age when print is fading, is worth a closer look.

MacGuffin: Design That Looks Hard at Ordinary Things

MacGuffin is a Danish magazine that has put out only three issues so far. It does as it pleases: not only is its publication schedule irregular, the subjects it covers run against the current as well.

By content, it counts as a design magazine. But while nearly every design publication chases the newest, most advanced design products, MacGuffin looks instead at the things so common in people's lives that nobody notices them — a bed, a window, a rope.

Each issue takes one object and spends the whole magazine on the history, culture and politics behind it, and on the connections it forms with people.

The first issue, for instance, took the bed as its subject. To the editors, Kirsten Algera and Ernst van der Hoeven, a person's relationship with a bed is fascinating: every day begins the moment you open your eyes lying in one, and it ends when you lie back down and switch into sleep mode.

So they gathered all kinds of beds — an Airbnb rental bed, a handmade bed, a deflated air mattress — and brought in writers, designers, craftspeople and photographers to dig out the stories between people and their beds.

The second issue, on the window, and the latest, on the rope, do much the same thing. To the editors, these unremarkable objects that have changed how people live are worth digging into far more than many fashionable subjects.

The magazine was named "Magazine of the Year" this year, and the content is not all that stands out. Since all the words and pictures arrive on paper, the editors wanted a magazine people would want to read and also to touch and keep. So they chose Arcoprint Milk, a milk-white, soft cotton paper "you want to touch every day." They also set up an offline club, the MacGuffin Field Club, which organizes outings from time to time — in cafés, out in the field, at exhibitions — where people gather to talk about design and craft.

Real Review: Good Content Fed by Good Resources

Real Review is a British bimonthly. In the words of its two founders, Jack Self and Shumi Bose, what they want to explore is "the meaning of life." For a subject that broad, and by now close to talked out, they chose architecture as the way in. They will take on anything to do with the design of space: the housing shortage, the design of the places we now live and work in, what future buildings might look like.

Through commentary by people inside and outside the architecture business, the magazine asks how the spaces we live in — and the designers who shape them — mold our behavior and our cultural values.

Its design is unusual too: more like a small handbook you can pull out of a bag and read wherever you are.

This magazine was named "New Magazine of the Year." What won it the award is really the first-rate resources behind the good content. Both founders graduated from the Architectural Association (AA), the well-known British architecture school. Jack Self is an architectural designer and writer; after graduating, Shumi Bose spent six years as a teaching assistant at the AA.

The AA's resources run deep. Its alumni are spread across more than 50 countries, architects as celebrated as Rem Koolhaas and Toyo Ito are members, and many architecture school deans graduated from it. That made starting a magazine a good deal easier for the two founders.

For the first issue, for example, they brought in writers such as Edwin Heathcote, the Financial Times's architecture critic; the architectural designer Sam Jacob; and Pier Vittorio Aureli, who teaches at the AA. Archdaily, an outlet devoted to architecture and design, helped promote them, and OK-RM, a well-known British design studio, handled the magazine's design.

Parterre de Rois: Made for People Who Read Pictures

This twice-yearly Italian magazine covers pop culture, the thing everyone is already talking about. But it goes about it differently: pictures do nearly all the work, with very little text.

The two founders, Molly Molloy and Gianni Tozzi, describe their magazine this way: it is more like a dinner party made of pictures, and the menu has one word on it. That word is printed on the cover, and it is the theme of the issue. So the moment you pick the magazine up you know what it is about, and all that is left is to open it and read the pictures. For modern readers that way of reading feels both familiar and new.

The latest issue, which won "Cover of the Year," is themed "Happiness." Its cover is an abstract smiling face, and inside, the invited "contributors" present the theme visually — offhand pen drawings, colorful collages, installation art, plain photographs.

Their first issue was more fun still, built on a word with real shock value: "flesh." The people invited to interpret it were an odd assortment too — besides photographers, musicians, illustrators, directors and calligraphers, a neuroscientist, a tattoo artist and a butcher all took part.

Only four issues have appeared so far. A theme cut down to one blunt word, the range of people invited and the force of the images together make reading it a run of surprises.

Ladybeard: They Say What Others Want to Say and Dare Not

This magazine has six founders, all women. They call it a "new feminist magazine." It is British and independent, and it picks its themes in a way that is both interesting and ambitious: subjects the mainstream press often gets wrong or explains too thinly. Take "sex," the theme of their first issue.

"Men and women are born different." "Birth decides gender." "Sex exists only between people of opposite sexes." These ideas, they believe, need to be brought out into the open and examined seriously. For the first issue they brought in some friends to make a team of 14, invited dozens of contributors, and went carefully into the questions about gender and identity that many people are curious about but afraid to raise.

Their second and latest issue took the mind as its theme. What is madness, exactly, and what is reason? Where is the line between normal and abnormal? They want the magazine to make every reader see that they are not some strange exception.

Stack named this latest issue "Best Illustration": the cover art and the illustrations inside both use a range of bright colors to carry a complicated subject.

Gather Journal: Original Recipes Matter More Than Pretty Pictures

This New York food magazine comes out twice a year and has published nine issues. Next to the other independent magazines here it has already had some success: its content won it a James Beard Award, often called the Oscars of the food world.

In this year's awards it took "Best Photography." Being a food magazine, its pictures are naturally tempting. But what sets it apart from other food magazines — call it conscience, or call it its core advantage — is that it runs original recipes. The dishes in the photographs are therefore not as far out of reach as they look: a reader can take a recipe to the supermarket, buy the ingredients and follow the steps.

In the previous issue, for instance, they developed a blue-green cocktail. Mix rum, lime juice, Chartreuse, syrup and champagne in the proportions given, and it works.

The magazine has also launched a paid app. For many readers that is a convenience: they can carry their phone to the supermarket and buy ingredients with the recipe on the screen.

QDaily once visited Gather Journal, and what its creators said was interesting: we don't look for professionals from the food world, we look for people who have a connection to food, and we dig out their passions and their stories. Someone who remembers a grandmother making apple pie in childhood, say, and has tried to bring that flavor back. That person is in fact a lawyer.

Voortuin: Breaking the Usual Definition of a Magazine

This Dutch bimonthly does not look like a magazine at all: the pages sit staggered messily against one another, like a stack of posters flung onto a table. But that is exactly the effect its three founders — Tom Jassen, Sim Kaart and Nanda Meijer — wanted.

They want to look at everyday life, which might mean "unemployment, pop culture, alcoholism," or might mean "your sister's academic performance" or "the dirty joke written on the bathroom door." Accepting this year's "Art Director of the Year" award, they said that when they started out they thought nobody would understand them at all — and the magazine survived anyway.

That small crack they thought "nobody would understand" — the mental health questions they raise, and the things people in their twenties do and do not agonize over — turns out to be exactly why the magazine has survived.

Their latest issue is unusual: it tells the story of Melinda Ströder, 28. But the story does not follow the usual line. Like a doctor writing up a case, it throws everything about this person together in a jumble, as if into a case folder. So they warn readers, in all seriousness, to "please read it all the way through, don't just look at the pictures." By the time you finish, you find that the scattered fragments of one young life have pieced together the stories happening to countless people in their twenties.

"How can you define whether a person is normal?" That is the question the three founders wanted to ask, in this unconventional way, through a magazine.

Compared with other magazines, paper matters especially here. A messy assembly you can hold in your hands hits with a force an online magazine cannot manage.

The Happy Reader: About Bookworms and Books

This is a quarterly published jointly by the men's fashion magazine Fantastic Man and Penguin Books. Books are the theme of every issue. Each issue splits in two: the first half is a long interview with a well-known bookworm, the second picks one good book and discusses it in depth. Covering people and books combines the strengths of Fantastic Man and Penguin.

Eight issues so far — a textbook case of a magazine that wins on content alone.

One issue, for instance, talks with Hans-Ulrich Obrist, a curator said to be tireless and to need no sleep.

In it he describes how a medieval library in Switzerland lit his imagination when he was young, and how what he took from that library shaped the work he does now. The literary work chosen for the same issue was Mrs Dalloway, the 1925 stream-of-consciousness novel by the renowned American writer Virginia Woolf.

To talk about books closely and at length is to talk about everything else under the sun just as closely and at length. So the magazine's range is wide and its readership relatively broad; next to other independent magazines it is a fairly mainstream presence.

The Outpost: Chronicler of the Arab World

This magazine was named this year's "Best Non-Fiction." Its founder, Ibrahim Nehme, wants to use it to record how Arab society and culture are changing, and to show people inside and outside that world the lives of the many different individuals who live there.

The magazine is documentary in spirit and takes a different topic each issue. Seven have appeared so far, the latest being "The Possibility of Finding Home." It took about a year to make and brought in nearly 200 writers, artists and thinkers to discuss where young Arabs belong.

"Possibility" is the subject Ibrahim Nehme wants the magazine to open up. For a region so contested and so constantly changing, using personal stories to show as much of the society as possible may do more to break down the stereotypes people hold about it.

The White Review: Imagination Has No Borders

This London quarterly on literature and visual art has been well received ever since its first issue came out in February 2011, so this year's "Best Fiction" award is deserved.

Its founders, Benjamin Eastham and Jacques Testard, set out to build a platform where a younger generation could say all kinds of things without restraint. So new ways of making work, along with imaginative, expressive fiction, poetry, photography and other art, can all appear in it.

Every issue also carries a long interview with a writer or an artist. The latest interviewed the American novelist Dodie Bellamy and had her talk about how she wrote E.T.

How good their non-fiction is cannot be summed up in a few words. If you are interested, you can preview their content on their website.

King's Review: Academic Research Can Be Beautiful Too

This magazine is published by King's College in Britain and won this year's new award, "Best Student Magazine of the Year." It is mostly about how to make academic research easier to pursue and more appealing. Many of its pieces take the form of interviews. Contributors are not limited to people at the college. All the content goes online, and a print issue comes out only once a year. They have three issues so far.

Like Real Review above, its good content rests mainly on the rich resources of a university and the academic world around it. Its editorial team is formidable: current Cambridge students alongside contributors from the Financial Times, Time and the Guardian.

Drift: Coffee and the City

This year's new "Readers' Choice" award went to this New York magazine. Its editor-in-chief, Adam Goldberg, explains: "This is a magazine about coffee, the people who drink it, and the cities they live in."

It is called Drift because every issue sends its photographers and writers to a different city, where they sink into the place and dig out stories tied to coffee. Five issues so far, with New York, Tokyo, Havana, Stockholm and Melbourne as the destinations.

Coffee and the city are two characters naturally linked, and between them stand countless people connected to both. Besides interviewing café owners and baristas, people who know a city well, the magazine's writers wander the city along the map of its coffee shops, run into countless people holding a cup, and use their stories to dig out the story of the city and its coffee.

Cover image: static