The best offline reads to subscribe to.

Dopamine-spiking imagery and 10-second clips of dogs. Our brains are becoming worryingly reliant on quick hits of information designed to instantly satisfy rather than nourish. So, anything that takes our reading offline for a while, and does so in an unpredictable and engaging manner, should be celebrated. Which brings us happily to Stack, a magazine service that MR PORTER has long admired. The concept is simple. You sign up and pay a subscription, then you get an independent magazine, chosen by Stack founder Mr Steven Watson, delivered to your door every month. A real one. That you can hold, flick through and smell. Quite the novelty.

Mr Watson has been sending out magazines on a wide array of topics since December 2008. In the interests of brevity, we asked him to whittle them down to five he would especially recommend. See what he has to say on his selections, below, and subscribe to Stack for more publications, here.

For design

“This magazine has been at the top of its game for the past couple of years, publishing a totally original form of design criticism. Each issue focuses on an item of design that’s generally overlooked, for example the sink or the window, and explores it in fanatical detail, uncovering fascinating insights on both the object itself and the ways in which we live with the things around us. MacGuffin won Magazine of the Year at the Stack Awards in 2016 and Editor of the Year and Art Director of the Year in 2017, and you’d have to bet on them showing strongly again this year.”

For food

“I love it when magazines can play with and subvert a familiar form, and that’s exactly what Mold does. It’s a food magazine that’s interested in the things we eat and why we eat them, asking how our customs and tastes might need to change in the future as we respond to pressures such as climate change and the need to feed a growing global population. Food magazines tend to revolve around seduction and aspiration. Mold doesn’t want to sell you a lifestyle. It wants to challenge some of the things you hold dear and show some alternatives, so it’s not so much about making you hungry, as making you curious.”

For innovative thinking

“Independent magazines are notorious for adding in fancy bits of production including foils, die cuts and gatefolds, but Real Review is the only one I’ve ever seen that works with an extra vertical fold. It’s an ingeniously simple innovation. By taking the machine that normally folds newspapers horizontally and turning it 90 degrees, they give themselves a whole new structure for the magazine, which can go from being tall and thin when closed, to extra wide when fully opened, with four panels instead of two per double-page spread. Real Review is published by architecture firm Real Foundation, and I think it’s fitting that this new magazine structure has come from people who spend their time thinking about the physical construction of things. It should be said that Real Review is not an architecture magazine. It does include some architectural content, but it looks at the world much more broadly, as the strapline suggests, ‘What it means to live today’.”

For debate

“I discovered this one thanks to Marc Robbemond at Athenaeum Nieuwscentrum in Amsterdam. It has a fantastic selection of magazines over there from all over the world, but they’re particularly good at providing a platform for the city’s independent publishing scene. NXS (it’s pronounced ‘nexus’) is made by Goys & Birls, a design and research studio based in Amsterdam, and Karolien Buurman. It wants to be a meeting place for people and ideas, so it’s constructed in an exquisite-corpse format. Each issue is themed, and they begin with a starting text, which another contributor responds to, then somebody else responds to that, etc, until you end up with a whole magazine of people responding to each other with their own very particular perspectives. The design of the magazine changes each time, with different fonts, logo and graphic treatment, so that each issue stands distinct, reflecting the mood of that particular community.”

For protest

“I came across Good Trouble while judging last year’s Stack Awards. I’d never seen it before, but I was immediately impressed by this large-format newspaper with such striking graphic design and playful tone. It’s published in New York and it wants to encourage protest and resistance, inspired by civil-rights campaigner and congressman John Lewis’s call for “good trouble, necessary trouble”. It’s edited by one-time Dazed & Confused editor Roderick Stanley, and designed by superstar art director Richard Turley. Together, they have made a really powerful and exceptionally readable magazine that taps into the current feeling that things are not as they should be in many parts of society.”