Originally Posted By: Hydra
Browse the dictionary with a pencil.

Ha, good one. I need context, preferably in a paragraph — and in a format that isn't unwieldy so I can carry it around and study on the subway without looking silly.

Originally Posted By: tsuwm
If political slant is not a concern, how about National Review or The New Republic?
Or, politics aside(?), The New York Review of Books.

National Review was actually second on my list. I found The New Republic and Mother Jones average for vocabulary. Thanks for the suggestion on The New York Review of Books; it seems a good option and comparable to National Review.
I also discovered a magazine that beats them all — The New Criterion, some of whose writers employ ample vocabulary. Here's a sample:

http://newcriterion.com:81/archives/26/12/laphams-latest-folly/
The notebooks of the English aesthete...are a trove of amusing aperçus, anecdotes, and apothegms.
This 7,500-word philippic appeared in...Harper’s...with a brief hiatus...
...not the heat of its invective...but its mendacity.
Mr. Lapham intoned...
...neglected to take the elementary precaution of publishing his piece
Confronted with his dereliction, Mr. Lapham waxed petulant
Mr. Lapham’s cavalier disregard for historical fact...
...it is ironical (not to say contemptibly risible)
...magazine ostensibly dedicated to history...requires a disinterested respect for the truth
It is lavishly produced
...consists mostly of promiscuous gleanings from the past
The sophomoric identifications provide a good index
The pretentiousness adumbrated in that list emerges with febrile ostentation
His command of inconsequentiality has elicited comment
Along with his patrician drawing-room leftism
Mr. Lapham’s logic is errant
Mr. Lapham’s incontinent logic is disorienting
...it stymies forthright discussion
...addiction...to the ephemeral, bequeaths us an intellectual poverty
But by swaddling that important commonplace with his baroque, politically tendentious verbiage
...disaster of historical nescience
...a symptom of the cultural cataclysm it pretends to diagnose

Last edited by jotham; 12/10/07 06:22 PM.