I had exactly the opposite experience with Mine. The articles I was given in my first issue were not from the publications I was interested in, so the whole second half of the magazine was about sports and golf, which I have no desire to read about. It was disappointing - if they had gotten the selections right, I might have really enjoyed the magazine.

Choirgirl, just wondering: did you have to answer the pizza/sushi question?? Because when Manjoo mentions that in the article, I immediately pondered the fact that the honest answer would be pizza, but I feel like I SHOULD say sushi, just to be pretentious...but then, I don't want a custom magazine full of NYT Magazine articles about finding a surrogate for my designer babies, or the yuppie hell that is LA without custom cocktails when you're on a budget, either (gag).

This is perhaps why I buy New Yorker magazine before I get on a plane and then skim the whole thing. Maybe my real taste is US Weekly. Hmm. I might have issues (pun intended).

I do remember that question - I just don't remember what I answered. I actually really like both! Sports, on the other hand, I just don't like...

I just signed up, and had to answer the following questions:

Which do you crave more? sushi/pizza
Do you like to sing in the car?
Which would you rather learn? juggling/celebrity impersonations
Who would you rather have dinner with? Leonardo da Vinci/Socrates

Then you pick 5 magazines from the following list, which are the source of all the articles you will see in 'your' magazine:

Time
Sports Illustrated
Golf
Money
InStyle
Real Simple
Food & Wine
Travel & Leisure

I'm going to go out on a big limb and bet that most females will skip Golf and SI, leaving them with one other mag to eliminate from the list. So it's probably not as customizable as some might think.

those are some odd questions. if it were a list of 100 question or so, it may make sense b/c you could build a real profile of a person and make some assumptions about the types of things they like to read. you'd be wrong sometimes, but would probably get a lot right. but with only 5 it seems like a lot of room for error in your profile.

here's guessing that the 5 magazines you pick entirely determines your articles. the other questions are likely used for some type of market research for the types of ads to run. I can't believe that your preference for those 5 questions would be very useful in article selection.

whoops, i meant 4 questions. and now that i think of it, do you mean those were the only 4 questions, or that those were the oddest of the bunch and the questionairre was much longer? in either case I'm still guessing the first set of questions are more towards the ads to use, and the magazine selection almost entirely determines your content.

Those were the only questions. They don't even ask your gender, but your date of birth is required and address is required. The application is here: https://www.timecmg.com/mine/

It appears that your articles come from the magazines you select, but I'm not sure, since I just signed up.

I'm not discounting Farhad's experience, but it doesn't seem to me there's much about the questions that could help Mine figure out whether you'd like to read about patio furniture, for example. I can't say for certain, but I'd guess all the articles anyone gets have fairly broad appeal, regardless of whether you favor the renaissance over classic Greece.