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In my office I have a pile of magazines. Real paper pick em up and read em magazines. The stack is in FIFO order, and depending on how busy or bored I am, it gets deeper or shallower.
Regulars include the Economist - still enjoy it, although the increasingly left bent is tiresome - Fortune, Caltech, Traveler (always fun and getting better), Wired (kind of a legacy, rapidly fading into irrelevance), and of course The New Yorker - I parted from them politically long ago, but enjoy the feature writing and above all the cartoons.
One might ask why I read these as paper, and I'm not sure; I read most books on Kindle, and I have experimented with electronic versions of magazines, but somehow it just doesn't "work". I think paper is more skimmable; I certainly don't ready any mag cover to cover, but rather just pick and chose and read and skip. The heads and subheads are good guides, the callouts helpful, pictures and diagrams are interesting (and cartoons!), and even cool ads might get my attention.
Anyway.
To the top of the stack recently rose the Aug 12 issue of New Yorker, with the title Comedy, an archival issue. They have been doing this a bit; cutting back on staff, they can run an issue with almost entirely recycled content, and readers like me find it interesting. In fact, honestly, it was way more interesting than the "regular" issue from Aug 12. Okay the focus was comedy, but also, there was a characteristic spirit of inquiry has been sadly lacking of late.
The New Yorker's general stance is that it is a giant world out there (including, albeit begrudgingly, the world outside of New York city) filled with people and stories, and it wants to tell you about them. Lately it seems to have morphed into telling you how to think about them, and that doesn't go over as well nor foster that positive spirit.
And so in this issue there is a lot of awesomeness: Notes about Robin Williams and Joan Rivers, rabbi jokes, Girl Scouts, and Buster Keaton, and articles about laughter, Richard Pryor, and the birth of Saturday Night Live, among others. The reviews were cherry picked as well, including Chelsea Handler on late night TV and Barbra Streisand in Funny Girl. I almost did read it cover to cover, and might yet go back.
I guess it's inevitable that an old guy would look back and think "that was a better time", but ... it was :)
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