Running with Fast Company has always seemed a younger person's game. Its design, typography, and even its ads ooze hiptitude.

So it comes as a surprise that two of the better offerings in another fulfilling issue spring from senior citizens. It's not that the magazine is slowing down, it's that these folks aren't either.

Jodie Bernstein, for example, is 74, and age isn't the only way in which she goes against form. The movie version of life would never cast a short, gray-haired grandmotherly type as the nation's top cyber cop, but as chief of the bureau of consumer protection in the Federal Trade Commission, that's what she does.

And, according to the well-paced story by Daniel H. Pink, she does it well. In her tenure, he writes, she has brought more than 100 federal cases of Internet fraud, and recouped $80 million for duped consumers.

Bernstein isn't particularly Net-enamored herself. She rarely uses e-mail, and has only purchased pantyhose online, she tells Pink. But during a tour of FTC field offices upon her taking the job in 1995, she asked where the new scams were, and everyone said "the Internet." She didn't need to be a Netizen to know she'd found a new arena in which to fight fraud.

The Internet has not only given hucksters a new place for old tricks, such as pyramid schemes and lying ads. It has also opened clever new vistas, such as the Moldovan modem jacker, which lured surfers with naked women, then underhandedly switched the teleconnection to an incredibly expensive server in Eastern Europe.

Pink points out that Bernstein's visage makes for great visuals when she goes on television to publicize the scams the bureau has uncovered: "As a public official," Pink writes, "she is a TV producer's dream: John Wayne's persona stuffed into Jessica Tandy's person."

More in character is Bragi Arnason, who could easily pass for what he is: a 65-year-old Icelandic chemistry professor. For more than 20 years, he has been touting hydrogen as the new energy source, and now some very large entities have begun to listen. His techniques allow hydroelectric and geothermal energy, both plentiful in his homeland, to be used to make hydrogen for eco-friendly fuel cells. Ian Wylie's story is a quick hit, but enticing and informative nevertheless.

Such brevity is a blessing, actually, in this heavy-magazine season. Newsstands are groaning right now under the weight of 2-plus- pounders for which heft seems to be the height of success: Vogue, In Style, Modern Bride, Harper's Bazaar, Martha Stewart Living; one bloated book after another. Even last week's New York Times Magazine was so big it had to be bound.

It's particularly evident that size matters at GQ, where the first headline word is "biggest." Sometimes big is good, but in the new GQ, it's not. For people who want to read instead of just looking at the pictures, all that real estate is annoying; one has to slog through 139 pages before finding the first real editorial content.

And there's a concomitant problem as well: With so many pages to fill, there's no urgency to edit, and many of these stories are just too long. A prime example is columnist Terrance Rafferty's opus on crime novelists, triggered by the titanic publicity machine behind Elmore Leonard's new book. I adore the great Leonard, but even I gave up before reaching the end. It doesn't look that long, but it reads that way.

The other Leonard piece in the issue - how's that for effective publicity? - is more to my liking. It not only holds to one page, but it's written by Leonard himself, on the topic "How I write." (Leonard also grabs some space in the Sept. 22 Entertainment Weekly, in a glowing review of "Pagan Babies," the new book, and oh, he's in town tonight, reading and signing books in Brookline.)

An alien in Cuba

The October Men's Journal delivers a tasty mixture of advice and entertainment, but there's one story above all that lured me in: Bill Lee goes to Cuba. What a great idea, a road trip with the Spaceman, and to Cuba, no less, where Lee's unalloyed love for the game fits in better than it ever could in the States.

Randy Wayne White writes that Lee has never quit playing the game; they met in the Senior Professional Baseball League. The stated purpose for the trip is to equip youngsters to play on a team founded by Ernest Hemingway in the '50s; the team fell dormant after Hemingway died.

But of course, with the former Red Sox star, motives run deeper. Here's some vintage Lee, as told to White upon being invited: "We're not just discussing a destination. I think we're tapping into a very powerful karmic dynamic: literature, baseball, communism - plus I hear the island distillers make excellent rum."

Plenty at 20

Discover magazine for October celebrates its 20th anniversary, and 20s are wild: 20 ways the world could end suddenly, 20 species we may lose in the next 20 years, 20 things that will be obsolete in 20 years.

The best parts are illuminating, as they should be: The doomsday stuff is well thought out, and I had missed more than a few of the "20 of the greatest blunders in science in the last 20 years." Only the "what you'll need to know in 20 years that you don't know now" is a clunker; it's embarrassingly boil erplate, and uncomfortably stuffed into the 20s format.

Finally, the "20 scientists to watch in the next 20 years" delivered some deflating news for Hub chauvinists: only one at Harvard (physics professor Juan Maldacena, 32), and only one at MIT (chemistry professor Christopher C. "Kit" Cummins, 34). Forty percent of the list cogitates in California, including Jereon Tromp, 34, who traded Harvard for Caltech a few months ago. But at least it's easy to see why: He's a theoretical seismologist, and he went where the temblors are.