The challenge of every special-interest magazine is illustrated in the May/June Organic Style: How can it reach a broad audience while serving the readers it would expect to get?

It is full of consumer and how-to articles: how to grow roses naturally, how to eat organically while you're on the road, how to enjoy backyard living without chemicals. Good stuff, but what if you don't care about any of that?

Well, everyone drinks water, which is the subject of the magazine's off-lead: Is buying bottled water worth the cost and the effort of lugging it home? Writer Ramin Ganeshram's surprising conclusion: "If you think you're buying purity in a bottle, you may be disappointed."

Many popular brands, he suggests, would do better to replace the icons of snow-capped mountains on their labels with cute little municipal treatment plants, since the contents are nothing more than treated tap water from such cities as Fresno and Wichita.

Even though I've never joined the wave of consumers who've made bottled water the fastest-growing beverage category in the country, that's news I can use, if only to snicker when I head into the 7-11 to get my money's worth of aspartame, caramel color, and phosphoric acid.

Also worth reading is a few-page spread on New Hampshire's Gary Hirshberg and his burgeoning Stonyfield Farm yogurt empire. Joe Dolce's Q&A is informative and pointed, such as when he asks Hirshberg if his selling 40 percent of the company to a European concern is "a major sellout." (Hirshberg's not-quite-responsive answer: We'll see, but I got good terms.)

Stonyfield Farm's story is hard not to cheer: In 18 years, it has grown into an $85 million business sustained both on principle and savvy. Hirshberg illuminates what should be obvious when he says, "People don't realize that the supermarket is a voting booth, and that corporate America is spending billions to tally those votes. . . . General Mills doesn't really care why you came to organics; they care that you came to organics. And if they care, they're going to offer it."

Are consumers voting for the natural lifestyle? Since it represents that constituency, it would be hard to accept Organic Style's opinion on the matter, but how about Fast Company's?

In service of its niche, Linda Tischler's story in the May issue is really a study in how a couple of vast multinationals - DuPont and the aforementioned General Mills - have united in an effort to stay nimble and foster innovation. But the object of the experiment is soy milk, on which consumers spent $200 million in 2000.

The offspring of the union is 8th Continent; its wet nurse is Scott Lutz, the fast-rising General Mills executive dispatched to plunder the market. Lutz seems imbued both with acumen (8th Continent is already No. 2 in the field, and national rollout won't come before summer) and with a strain of the quixotic sentiment that guided Stonyfield Farms: "I want to make corporate America as cool as it can be - for those who want to make a difference."

Such conviction fits snugly into Fast Company's theme for the month, "Business at Its Best." So does a feature on Commerce Bank, which has three mascots, Sunday hours, and a guiding principle of "wow-ing" customers. But a counterpoint series of stories on bad business has worthwhile elements too, particularly about Enron's rank and file, a relatively forgotten group after the miscreants at the top and the victims at the bottom. "What if you'd worked at Enron?" the introduction asks, and short profiles give the answers.

Enron and Arthur Anderson also provide the topic for Alan Dershowitz's column in the April/

May JD Jungle, one of the first in a growing class of magazines that seek to attract young professionals with a combination of career and lifestyle coverage. The ubiquitous Harvardian's take: The term may be certified public accountant, but as long as they're being paid by private interests, "no one should ever count on the objectivity of a public accountant."

What's that got to do with the law? Dershowitz advises his young audience that it's the same with them. "The current mantra of legal reformists is that private lawyers must work in the `public interest.' . . . [But] a private lawyer should have only one client - the one who pays him."

Meanwhile, JD Jungle picks up a cousin, if not quite a competitor, with the debut of Legal Affairs. The May/June issue has a comment on the theme of law in rap music, a couch potato's report on TV law programming, and an excerpt from Christopher Buckley's new novel that features a Dersh-like character who would show up "if the Weather Channel invited him to go on to discuss the legal implications of a low-pressure system over Nebraska."

But the magazine's cover story is its best first step. Emily Bazelon relates the trials, and rulings, of Aharon Barak, president of Israel's Supreme Court. In some ways, Barak is not unlike John Marshall, whose opinion in Marbury v. Madison established the US court's right to declare "what the law is." The twist, Barak's critics proclaim, is that while Marshall had a constitution on which to fall back, Israel has no such document.

What lifts Bazelon's story above legal tome or even above mere personality profile is the context of Israel, which once again is the object of intense world attention. She brings in the five significant divisions in Israeli society and exposes the deep resentment of secular Israelis over the exemption of Orthodox yeshiva students from military service.

How justice works, and fails to, in Israel is of vital importance to anyone who would want to see peace come to that part of the world. For a new magazine from a little niche, that's pretty good territory to stake out.