Editor's Letter
About Top Picks Report
Last updated April 30, 2026 · Margot Ainsworth-Rée, Editor-in-Chief
Top Picks Report is a small magazine that publishes a single, curated five-pick list at a time, defended in writing, with no affiliate funding and no sponsored placements.
What we are
Top Picks Report is a periodical in the older sense of the word. We publish issues; the issues are sequentially numbered and dated; each issue contains one editorial argument — a single five-pick list, ranked, with reasons. The form is not original. The discipline of confining a single issue to a single argument is older than any of us, and has, at the magazines that practiced it best, produced editorial work that survived the cycles of its time.
We cover five categories: apps and software, kitchen and coffee, books and culture, travel and carry, home office. Each category is the responsibility of a senior editor whose credentials and conflicts are documented on the masthead page. The editor-in-chief reads every piece before publication.
Founding
Top Picks Report was founded on September 1, 2025. The motivating frustration, in short, was that the magazines I had spent my career writing for — Cool Hunting, Kinfolk, T Magazine in occasional capacities — had drifted toward an affiliate-driven roundup format that I had been hired, originally, to write against. The trade-off in the form is real: an affiliate-funded recommendation publication can underwrite more content per editor than a non-affiliate one can, and the dominant form has won the dominant share of the market. We have made the opposite choice deliberately, and the consequences (a smaller magazine, a slower cadence, a more careful editorial line) are the consequences we wanted.
In the eight months since launch we have published twenty-five issues, ten lexicon entries, and the methodological scaffolding (the Why Five, the editorial policy, the no-affiliate disclosure) that the work depends on. The five-person editorial team is small by intention; growth, if it happens, will happen slowly.
The team
The five editors who run the magazine are:
- Margot Ainsworth-Rée — Editor-in-Chief. BA Bryn Mawr; MFA Iowa Writers' Workshop. Twelve years at Cool Hunting, Kinfolk, T Magazine.
- Harun Demir — Senior Editor, Apps & Software. BA Computer Science, Boğaziçi University. Seven years at MacStories and The Sweet Setup.
- Penelope Voorhees-Larkin — Books & Culture Editor. PhD Comparative Literature, NYU. Ex-The Paris Review and Lit Hub.
- Tomás Saavedra-Lin — Kitchen & Coffee Editor. CIA, James Beard Foundation Fellow. Ex-Eleven Madison Park.
- Diane Olawumi-Becker — Travel & Home Office Editor. BS Industrial Design, Pratt. Ex-Herman Miller.
What we do not do
We do not maintain affiliate accounts with any product or company we cover. We do not accept sponsored placements, paid product reviews, or advertorial relationships. We do not let writers cover products in which they hold equity or for which they receive any form of compensation. We do not publish anonymous content; every piece is signed by a named editor with a documented credential record. We do not retroactively re-date older issues to look fresher; the publication date of an issue, once set, is part of the historical record.
Editorial line
The editorial line at Top Picks Report is straightforward: we are trying to publish a magazine whose recommendations a reader can trust on the strength of the editorial work itself, with no commercial arrangement underneath that requires the reader to take the trust on faith. The arrangement is the absence of certain pressures rather than the presence of any particular policy, but it produces, we believe, editorial work of a different texture than the affiliate-funded alternative.
A reader who likes the magazine generally likes the editorial line. A reader who does not will find the magazine consistent in the work they will not enjoy. Both responses are honest.
Contact
Editorial inquiries: editor@toppicks.report. Corrections: corrections@toppicks.report. The full contact page has the rest.