Something is missing from this weekend's "Living Spring" edition of the New York Times' Sunday fashion magazine T. On the cover, you can see a lady with her mouth open, about to chomp on some sort of sandwich with her painted lips/teeth. There is a food theme if you look close: on one page, there's a piece on sausages, elsewhere there's one on ice creams and one on Japanese mochi. Also a thing on ice buckets in Tokyo bars. Whatever! The whole thing is quaint enough, but aggressively, nauseatingly girly through and through.

Over at the Times' wholly owned Magazine subsidiary, T expansionism continues unabated this weekend with an issue entirely dedicated to...food. Or is it? To wit, Alexandra Jacobs has a column regarding the difficulties of going Dutch at birthday parties, but a little induction reveals the article as less about the epicurean lifestyle, than, say, winning a Fields Medal. It's called "You Do the Math." Don't mind if we do.

And so the erotic sphere has been colonized once and for all. In perhaps the most profoundly unsexy thing ever to appear in the New York Times magazine — and we're talking here about a publication that employs William Safire and Deborah Solomon — Jon Mooallem today profiles Peter Acworth, a former Wall Street analyst now responsible for "arguably the country's most successful fetish porn company, Kink.com — a fast-growing suite of 10 S-and-M and bondage-themed Web sites." Big revelation? The 70-odd jobs there are pretty much as banal as yours:

Hello. I am here to tell you about the article entitled "The Power of Green" (AKA "The Greening of Geopolitics") in this week's New York Times magazine by my American friend Mr. Thomas L. Friedman. Allow me to introduce myself. I am called Pookunhi Takahiro Pierre Velazquez y Al-Sadr. By birth, I am of the Oulad Bou Sbaa ("Father of the Lion") tribe; it is a noble tribe. Because of the globalization, however, in the mid-1990s, I became a cab driver in Abu Dhabi, and it was on the corner of Liwa and Sheik Hamdam Bin Mohammed, peace be to Zarathustra, that I first met my American friend Mr. Thomas L. Freidman, who was flapping his arms like that traditional bird I know about, which I still take seriously as a beautiful metaphor even as I face down modernity. Anyway, he came into my taxi and asked to learn my name, and also my existence.

There are times when a magazine is more than just a magazine. Times like springtime! The season when ideas become conversations and bylines jump to life; when the caterpillar sheds its larval newsprint and blossoms, at last, into a butterfly in flight about the z calo. By next month, it'll be happening in twos, as the New Yorker and the New York Times Magazine both put on their nice clothes and venture into the world of the living with a pair of star-studded public conferences. Each will deliver its parent publication's noted intellects in a neat, bow-topped basket of brains, all spit-shined and freshly painted. But which to choose if you've got only one weekend and, say, no more than a month's rent or so to devote to the zeitgeist hunt?