The Glory of Magazines

I was recently in New York with my children. At one point they asked to go a newsstand to see if they had a copy of the Taylor Swift cover of Time magazine (my daughters are dedicated Swifties.) It struck me in that moment that magazines occupied a very different place in their life than mine, more collectors' items than an essential part of life. 

I owe a lot of who I am to magazines. For years people would compliment me on my the breadth of my knowledge and my ability to recall random facts. I am less impressed by this than others, but I learned a lot of this stuff from being an avid magazine reader in my youth. In junior high I would walk to the public library every day after school and just raid the magazine section, which was the part of the library where I would wait to get picked up. I was not too discriminating. I read Time the most since it was the consensus news magazine at the time, but dipped a toe in Newsweek and US News. I would get intrigued by both The New Republic and The National Review, unaware of their rival ideological perspectives. In a lighter mood, I would peruse People and Life.

At home I had a prized subscription to Sports Illustrated. It gave me a far deeper understanding of the sporting world than I was getting from my daily doses of Sportscenter. I got it every Thursday, the same day my sisters and I went to piano lessons. I always finished first, then would sit on my teacher's basement floor and read the magazine. It was always such a welcome moment of solitude and discovery. At the public library I would branch out and read the now defunct Sport and Inside Sports (for some reason there was no Sporting News.) I also had a subscription to MAD magazine, a publication that greatly attuned my young bullshit detector and allowed me to look at my surroundings with a clearer eye. 

Magazines served me well later in life, too. In high school I would scour the reviews in the back of Spin magazine and use them as a guide to find the kind of indie rock albums they did not play on the radio in my neck of the woods. As a college student I did competitive debate, and to prepared by reading as much of The Economist as I could. In my off hours between classes I would go to the campus library and pick up and read magazines, recreating those middle school moments. Afterwards I had low wage jobs as a gas station and library clerk, and in both cases reading magazines at the counter helped me pass the time in that pre-cell phone world. Once I had my first real job and could afford creature comforts I immediately subscribed to the New York Review of Books and the New Yorker. As often as I could, I would pick up issues of Mojo and Uncut at the bookstore. Some of them were so dense with insights that I've held on to them through multiple decades and moves. 

Magazines have alas fallen on hard times. There's talk that Sports Illustrated will soon be dead after years on life support. Newsweek's new ownership has ties to a cult. It's also been interesting to see that we just can't give them up. When Time announced Taylor Swift as their Person of the Year it dominated public discourse for days after. Evidently the editorial decisions made by magazines still matter to people, even if they were not as seismic as Time's "Is God Dead?" cover from the 60s (or Demi Moore's nude pregnant cover photo on Vanity Fair from the 90s, for that matter.)

Being the Luddite sentimentalist that I am, I have responded to this state of affairs by subscribing to magazines. I had let my New Yorker subscription lapse years ago, but immediately resubscribed the day pandemic lockdown began. Since then a friend gifted my a Texas Monthly subscription, which I enjoyed. I have subscribed to the Atlantic and Vanity Fair (it came free with my New Yorker sub and I've enjoyed it) since then. When I went to the newsstand with my daughters I picked up the most recent New Republic and was so impressed by it that I may indeed add another subscription. Who knows, maybe I will bite the bullet and get the meaty New York Review of Books back in my life (sorry Harper's, you've gone hack.) 

Not all of these publications are paywalled, but even then, it's worth it. The experience of reading a magazine online is so erratic and fractured. When I use my New Yorker app they keep pushing little web articles responding to current events to the top of the feed. I don't subscribe to the New Yorker for that, but for the voluminous studies of subjects that I didn't know I was interested in until I picked up the magazine. Just picking up the magazine is a great experience. It is not an agglomeration of links but a carefully considered product from front to back, the result of great effort and human creativity. (The French Dispatch is one of my favorite Wes Anderson films because it understands the aesthetics of magazines, which are not replicated anywhere else.) 

I am not sure how long paper copies of all the magazines I subscribe to will even be around, so I am trying to cherish them while I can. I also think there's just a chance that they will make a comeback. My daughters have long been intrigued by my copies of the New Yorker and like to formulate their own answers to the cartoon caption contest. They have a couple of subscriptions themselves, a love that I hope will blossom. At a time when the internet has increasingly become a cesspool of AI goop interspersed with popup ads and clickbait links, a well-composed magazine is a necessary antidote. Go read them while you can and maybe we can keep them around longer. 

A Tribute to Our Embattled Magazines

The e-revolution has threatened the printed word like nothing else.  Book publishing is in a tailspin, newspapers are slashing their operations, and now many venerable magazines are either hemorrhaging money or going bust.  I've been quite alarmed at how people who see themselves as electronic sophisticates are taking such a dismissive stance at this change, gloating as if they have somehow "won" by being a part of the cyberworld.  (The way that the Dailykos site has long crowed about the decline of newspapers, which do actual hard reporting, rather than mere news aggregation and opinion flogging, has long irritated me.  Are any "Kossacks" going to report on world events from Greece or Syria?)

Thinking about the decline of traditional magazines, as inevitable as that might be, fills me with sadness, for magazines played an important role in my education.  Growing up in an isolated small town on the Great Plains, magazines were one of the few quality conduits I had to the outside world.  The local newspapers were painfully parochial, local radio middle of the road, TV as vapid as ever, and the internet but a dream.

So much of my cultural development came with the help of the glossy pages of magazine.  Quite often I walked down to the local Walgreens to pick up a copy of Spin and Rolling Stone, and read about music that I had no chance of hearing where I lived.  During school band or debate trips to bigger cities like Lincoln or Omaha, I would break away from the main group during our meal times so I could go to the record store and buy up albums that got good reviews.  (Either the music journalist seal of approval or hearing underground songs via 120 Minutes on MTV determined much of my music purchasing.)  I bought Pavement's epochal Slanted and Enchanted purely because Spin had named it album of the year for 1992.  Until I popped the cassette into the tape deck of my Mazda, I hadn't heard a note of Pavement's music.

Despite the help they gave me in developing music taste in a cultural wasteland during my high school days, magazines actually did the most good for me when I was a pimple-faced middle schooler.  Back in those days I would take a short walk to the public library after school, and wait for my parents to get off of work and pick me up.  I spent that time in the library sitting on the couches in the magazine section, reading practically anything I could get my hands on.  The issues were all ensconced in little plastic binders, like semi-sacred objects.  Each week I read the big three news mags (Time, Newsweek, and US News and World Report), Sport magazine (I had a subscription to Sports Illustrated, so I read that at home), Rolling Stone, and whatever political magazine caught my eye, usually either The National Review or The New Republic.  (My politics weren't fully formed yet.)  All of this magazine reading gave me a tremendous amount of background knowledge about the world, and certainly sparked my interest in all kinds of topics in the years to come.  I kept up my habit of reading the news magazines in high school, and added The Economist to the rotation when I hit college, along with forays into The Nation, The Utne Reader, and The New Yorker.  As a college student, I rewarded myself after studying in the library with some magazine time.  When I spent my year abroad in Germany, my girlfriend at the time sent me her back issues of The Nation, which I cherished.

Those adolescent afternoon hours spent reading magazines in the public library after school may have done more to hone my mind and engender my intellectual curiosity than anything else in my life.  These days I have a New Yorker subscription, and whenever I get the chance, I like to go to the bookstore and buy a couple of magazines.  What many of these publications do, like the Oxford American or Weird N.J., can't really be replicated on the computer screen, their combinations of text and visuals only work when you hold them in your hand.  And, truth be told, because magazines are edited, the writing is of better quality than most of the stuff put out on the web, including this blog, which would not exist had I not spent those two years immersed in magazines.

Footnote: I idolized Nirvana as a teenager, and when they finally landed on the cover of the Rolling Stone, I cut the cover out and taped it to the closet door in my room.  That image (pasted above) gave me the strength to be a weird, passionate person in a school full of conformists.