Don't you just love the Times Magazine?

I have subscriptions to about six different magazines and I can't even bring myself to flip through them most months. (A friend picked a copy of Vanity Fair off the coffee table last week and sniffed all the perfume ads. That's the most anyone has gotten out of it in awhile.)

But the Times--as dry as I find the newspaper (with brilliant exceptions here and there), that magazine has some incredible writing week in, week out.

And interesting stories. Yesterday afternoon and this morning, I lolled my way through the wonderful Chasing Ground, and just got started on just got started on Meet the Life Hackers, which may end up being even more relevant to my life.

Rather than try to resummarize, I'll just give you the teasers directly from the (online) magazine:

Chasing Ground:

Whether or not there's a real-estate bubble hardly matters for a large company like Toll Brothers. The mega-developer is hungrily buying up land for its market-tested luxury homes and transforming the landscape of America's haves.

Meet the Life Hackers:

Can anyone find a way to make your constantly beeping and dinging computer leave you alone and let you work? Inside the nascent field of interruption science.

Those Desperate Housewives were still dull this weekend, though maybe starting to gell a bit. Maybe. Nothing like the joy of last season, though.

Meanwhile, Rome was a fun guilty pleasure for the first month, but has grown kind of tiresome to sit through. The more they focus on the lives "two ordinary soldiers'" the harder it is to watch. Bad, bad idea.

This is going to sound harsh, but . . . That's a technique for really talented people.

Ouch. I even winced at that. But as I watch week after week, it's the thought I keep returning to. In really gifted hands, it could have been brilliant: two storylines running side by side, one of sweeping historical scope, the other forgotten but powerfully intimate.

Ahhhh, how that might have shaken us and moved and provoked unforeseen reflections as we sat there captivated week after week.

But you need a really great story for that. Great acting, great diologue, great directing, great everything. This is a hack soap job. Great sets and costumes--or at least expensive ones--and a single great story, the one cribbed out of the history books.

Much of the acting is passable, sometimes even good, but the more important of the ordinary soldiers is made entirely of wood. And his storyline. Ugh. Nothing.

It's important to grasp what it is you're doing, I think. Cheesy melodrama can be fun. But if you're making cheesy melodrama, stick to the elments that make enjoyable cheese.

Who in this production decided they were making Lawrence of Arabia?

Which by the way, stuck to an important historical story. The of watching this series in the early weeks came from watching history unfold. Really good soapy history. Too bad they didn't stick to that.