With 02138, he'll have elite coverage

By Alex Beam, Globe Columnist  |  December 13, 2005

Even as he is dismantling one magazine in Boston -- The Atlantic -- publisher David Bradley is building another publication in its place: the glossy Harvard fanzine 02138. A handful of 02138 staffers have established a beachhead at The Atlantic's offices on North Washington Street, where the 30 or so employees who will not be following the venerable monthly to Bradley's hometown of Washington, D.C., are packing their bags.

It's an odd play for Bradley, a management consultant who took over the well-regarded National Journal Group in 1997 and then The Atlantic in 1999. Bradley is something of a high-end education groupie, having attended the Sidwell Friends School, Swarthmore, Georgetown Law School, and the Harvard Business School. He is also involved in creating a new, Episcopal high school in Washington.

In an e-mail Bradley wrote that ''80% of my interest in this investment is my impression of [02138 founder] Bom Kim as extreme talent in the extreme. I think I might invest with him if he were starting a trade magazine on the cauliflower industry. Even so, this is a much more engaging terrain."

In a separate interview, Atlantic Media president John Galloway noted that 02138, which seeks to set itself up as a Vanity Fair-like alumni magazine for Harvard graduates, ''is a different kind of media play. We agree with the founders that Harvard people form a like-minded community, and that may be an interesting publishing model."

Originally slated to debut this year, the magazine may publish its first issue within the next six months. It's certainly an original gambit, to market a subscription-based magazine to a group that outsiders can't join. Alumni magazines typically lose plenty of money, and it's hard to see who would want to read this one, apart from the not-inconsiderable universe of narcissistic Harvard graduates.

I do have an idea for a slogan that might broaden 02138's appeal: ''The magazine about the people you hated in high school." It's theirs, for free.

Coincidence . . . or something less? Vermont businessman Richard Tarrant, who is challenging loony left grumpus Bernard Sanders for the Senate seat being vacated by James Jeffords, just sold three office buildings to Boston University for about $20 million. One is tempted to speculate that Tarrant needs the money to finance what is shaping up to be one of the most expensive political races in Vermont history -- but the pesky facts indicate otherwise.

One pesky fact is that Tarrant is already rich, so wealthy that he has been dubbed ''Richie Rich" by the Vermont press. When he sold his medical software company to General Electric this year, he came out of the deal with more than $100 million, and he wasn't exactly poor before that. Another pesky fact is that BU had been leasing the buildings with an option to buy, and the option was due to expire. ''The timing was completely driven by their option to buy," explains Tarrant's spokesman, Tim Lennon.

Tarrant, a St. Michael's College basketball star who came close to playing for the Boston Celtics, may well be a decent guy. (I know one of his brothers, who is a decent guy.) But he'll need more than loot to defeat Sanders, who has cannily straddled Second Amendment issues in gun-crazed Vermont, and who was an early champion of preserving employees' pension benefits -- a hot-button 2006 issue if there ever was one.

In an interview with the literary magazine Post Road, author Jonathan Ames, who must be incredibly famous because I've never heard of him, proclaims his fan-hood for novelist Charles Portis, adding: ''I think Charles Portis is still alive. . . . But maybe he's not alive." He is.

The same issue has a nice, brief essay by novelist Ann Hood (she can't be that famous; I know her name) on the virtues of first novels, in this case Carolyn Parkhurst's ''The Dogs of Babel": ''It's daring. . . . it has logic problems inherent in the premise, it takes enormous risks, and it positively soars."

Alex Beam is a Globe columnist. His e-dress is beam@globe.com.