Even when magazines are fulfilling their journalistic responsibility to educate and inform, they can still leave readers smacking themselves upside the head, trying to figure out just what the heck is going on.

Take, for example, Brendan I. Koerner's indictment of the Federal Communications Commission in the September/October issue of Mother Jones. It stacks so many pieces of absurd reality upon one another that soon enough, you'll have a headache from all that smacking.

Since the FCC was created more than 65 years ago, its standard for action was protection of the public interest; it's the standard that justifies all of jurisprudence, and of government itself. We all got together and set up rules we thought were good ideas, and then chose from among our ranks to enforce them.

But President Bush's choice to lead the agency - Michael K. Powell, no less than the son of our paragon soldier and statesman, Colin L. Powell - considers the standard to be "about as empty a vessel as you can accord a regulatory agency."

It raises the question one might ask, say, of a jailer who doesn't think prisoners should be locked up: So why did you take the job?

Perhaps it was for the free travel, such as last November, when California Cable Television lobbyists whisked Powell out to Los Angeles for three days at a cost of $3,600. That was just for Powell, of course; Koerner reports that the total tab for the chairman and his dozen underlings was $25,000.

And that was just for that three-day jaunt. Altogether, Koerner says, industries with interests before the commission spent almost $300,000 over six recent months on travel for FCC staff, to such places as Palm Springs, Calif., and Ocho Rios, Jamaica.

It must be obvious, to the addled and extremely young, if not to Powell, that the only reason private interests make such investments is in expectation of return.

And it's not as though Powell is stupid: Although he has a problem understanding the concept of "public interest," he clearly has a handle on the opposing notion of private interests, both of the industries he's been appointed to oversee, and of his own.

Understandably confusing

Readers of the September Discover magazine may also be left scratching their heads, albeit over a matter much more comfortably unfathomable: quantum mechanics.

According to the writer Tom Folger, few physicists quarrel with quantum theory, which seeks to describe the behavior and properties of matter, at its fundamental level. But almost no one accepts its larger implications, which suggest that each of us exists in a nearly infinite number of parallel universes.

Folger journeyed to Oxford, England, to visit one who does. David Deutsch says, quite reasonably, that if laws are valid, then they are valid at every level. And quantum theory, Folger says, "is probably the most powerful, accurate, and predictive scientific theory ever developed." It is estimated to underlie 30 percent of the nation's economic output, and without it, there would be "no cell phones, no CD players, no portable computers."

Folger's task - indeed, the task of all science writers - is to explain the impenetrable, and on this score he does only fairly well. For instance, I accept what he says about cell phones, etc., but I don't get the link. It's entirely possible that explaining it would destroy the focus of his story, but still, I don't get it. And that's just the background!

Even so, the story is enriching. Not only does Folger convey an intriguing sense of who Deutsch is, but he enlightens readers merely by presenting the debate.

Uncertainty as a virtue

An article in the September Boston, meanwhile, thrives on uncertainty. Doug Most reports on Lewis Dickerson, who's serving a life sentence for a murder he committed in a liquor store robbery on Feb. 7, 1975. A couple of months ago, Dickerson appeared before the state Pardons Advisory Council, seeking his release on grounds of regret and rehabilitation, and a reasonable case is made on both counts.

But even if he does regret, and even if he is, as described now, a "gentle soul," is that cause for release? And can Dickerson be believed? In a 1990 hearing of the same sort, Dickerson claimed experience as a soldier in Vietnam, but he never got there. When called on it this time, will he tell the truth?

The overarching question, of course, is: Will Dickerson get out? The story has no answer for that one, at least not yet. The board has no deadline for deciding; it was almost three years before it acted after the 1990 hearing. Another time, the lack of a conclusion might have seemed like a flaw. This time, it just fits right in.