It’s a rough world out there, and people are turning away from traditional media, and in some ways, the internet. War, famine, corruption and more. You’ll occasionally find some good news along the way, but you have to ask yourself if it’s real or something crafted up by artificial intelligence.

The bleakness of the world often has you wondering if there’s an escape hatch, a way to escape reality. Now, being an author, people would expect me to say books, and I wholeheartedly agree.

That’s not what I’m talking about today, though. Often, when I want a break from reality, I turn to magazines.

Obviously, you have Newsweek and Time, which peddle the same news that newspapers and television networks do, but I usually gravitate toward magazines that tell the warm stories, the stories that I enjoy telling myself as a newspaper editor. It’s a portal away from reality, and while it doesn’t last as long as locking the door to your bedroom and reading a book, I certainly feel better about myself once I’ve reached the back page of a magazine.

One magazine I enjoy reading locally is Our Wisconsin, which markets itself as telling the fun stories of the people. There are dozens of stories in there that tell fun things about the state. For example, the most recent issue tells about a woman in Minocqua who was an accountant for much of her life, but now that she’s retired, she taught herself to bake and has developed a tasty side hustle.

There are two main things I fixate on when I get a copy of Our Wisconsin, knowing that they will always be there. The first thing is an Amish diary. There are a lot of things we don’t know about the Amish, and this feature always tells a week in the life of Owen Yoder and his family. While mostly cheerful stories, I admit I teared up when Owen lost his wife a couple of years ago. However, the family journeys on.

The other feature is one I’m sure many elderly people can recall enjoying. There’s an illustrator that does two identical drawings, but they have 10 differences, whether it’s a different shirt collar, a hand moved or something else. I always enjoy the challenge of finding the changed things. A lot of the time, I find all 10, but there are times where one or two things elude my gaze, and when I check the answers, I can’t believe I missed them.

In the last couple of years, I re-subscribed to Arizona Highways. Growing up, my family didn’t do a lot of traveling, but in lieu of that, I was able to read some amazing stories about life in the Grand Canyon State. Photo spreads of certain places, feature stories written by magazine staff or freelancers, and even poetry and fictional stories have made Arizona Highways a must-read for those who want to learn more about Arizona.

Before some recent changes, one of the things I looked forward to were stories about Prescott being Arizona’s official Christmas City. I always loved seeing the photos of the courthouse lighting, the gingerbread village at Prescott Resort and the annual parades—both during the day and at night. Arizona Highways doesn’t give things an annual look-over, which is disappointing, but there’s plenty more to discover.

Over 20 years ago, I got a job as a journalist on the Arizona-Utah border, and it took some adjustment being further away from family. What made the initial loneliness more bearable was that the company where I got my first full-time newspaper job had started publishing a magazine called Yavapai, which featured the people and places that made where I grew up feel so wonderful.

I immediately subscribed, and for a couple of years, Yavapai gave me wonderful things to read by people I had previously worked with. In a time when the Internet was still finding its legs, the magazine drew more of my attention than the computer screen did. Unfortunately, the company stopped doing the magazine after about three or four years, but by that time, I had integrated into the community, so the homesickness had been cured.

In a time when a lot of the news out there is bad, it’s good to get lost in friendlier stories. When you have a day or even just an afternoon to kill, books are the way to go (hint, hint). However, when you only have an hour or so, magazines will get it done.