Monumental traffic jam: This afternoon around 4 p.m., two colleagues and I exited a meeting a couple blocks away from the Washington Monument to discover it was pouring down rain and all the streets around us had been shut down due to a bomb scare. To make a short story long, the three of us got soaking wet before spending three hours in a cab getting to BWI (I remember now why I nearly always take the train from DC to BWI). Fortunately, our flight was not until eight and the cab-time flew as we were engaged in some rather sweeping yet entertaining (just ask the driver) conversations. More fotunately, there was no bomb.

Mr. Magazine’s meta list: In recognition of his 20 years of being the maven of magazine launches, Mr. Magazine, Samir Husni, was asked by MIN Online to give his list of the most “notable” (not, necessarily best, but “notable”) consumer magazine launches of the past two decades. They were announced Thursday in New York (not in Oxford, Miss., where Mr. Magazine is chairman of the Ole Miss Journalism Dept.)

Here’s his list:

Cooking Light
CosmoGirl!
Country

Country Weekly

Elle
ESPN The Magazine

Entertainment Weekly

InStyle

In Touch Weekly

Lucky
Martha Stewart Living
Maxim
Men’s Health
Midwest Living
More
O, The Oprah Magazine
Parenting
People En Español
Real Simple
Traditional Home
Wired
Wizard

I’ll take his word on Wizard. And while they are wildly successful, I question the “notable” rankings of the brand extentions and the derivative books (Midwest Living? Traditional Home? Knock-offs, not notable — but cash machines, no doubt.)

For the most part, the specific magazines on his list (and others like them) have thrived in the online era — and will continue to do so. Their readers are convinced the experience of curling up with one of these can’t be replicated by reading the same information on a computer screen.