I wouldn't describe the site so harshly, but a little bit of the human touch would make a big improvement.

Right now you have 40 or so links on the home page, each one leading to a sub-site with 50 sections or so, totaling ~300 links that look awfully machine-generated (scraped from RSS feeds?).

When browsing a magazine rack each cover is a little work of (usually bad) art. The title tags in an RSS feed are nothing like that -- maybe RSS feeds should be more magazine cover-like?

What do you think would help it look more legitimate? It seems to me like it would be hard to make a site like this - a collection of links - look otherwise while still keeping the simple, spare look.

It looks really spammy, which is surprising because the site was designed by Electric Pulp, which was recommended on this forum ( http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=134715 ).

If I stumbled across it on the net I wouldn't assume it was made by a spammer. I think form follows function beautifully.