Newsweek Goes Digital

When I was a kid, there were always magazines around the house

When I was a kid, my mother Mur subscribed to Time, Newsweek, The New Yorker, and Scientific American.  Suffice to say there were always magazines around the house.  No hoarder, Mur, we got rid of old issues as new ones arrived, but she read them pretty much cover to cover.  I don't know how she did it.  I read a lot of them too, since they were there and what the heck.

Mur claimed Newsweek was more liberal, and Time more conservative, but actually they seemed to me to be the same magazine with different covers.  For the most part, I only read the cartoons in The New Yorker, and the little snippets they'd insert at the ends of articles: misprints culled from other publications with sardonic editorial comments. I did love Scientific American, though, especially their annual April Fool's issue.  Oh, those merry pranksters!  They once had a joke article claiming the three-color map theory was no longer valid.  I still get the giggles recalling it.

I look around my house and see a positive dearth of magazines.  For a while, Nancy and I subscribed to The New Yorker, but I just couldn't keep up.  Every week a new issue.  Jeez.  I'm supposed to read all this?  I got a life, folks.  The next season of Downton Abbey is coming up.

Now Tina Brown has announced she's suspending the print version of Newsweek, and going strictly digital.  It was bound to happen, I suppose.  And after all, is it even a bad thing?  As someone says, any technology that begins by going into a forest and cutting down a tree is probably not the most efficient way to go about things.

But still.

I remember magazines around the house.  I miss them.  There's something about the physical presence of printed matter, even as I come to prefer reading on an electronic screen.  The warmth of paper.  The slick coat of glossy magazines.  Those wonderful cartoons by George Booth and Charles Addams stained by coffee rings.  Like the Sunday paper, which Nancy I and also do not receive, a banquet of things to look at and read.

And, oh, April Fool's from Scientific American.  Those kooks!  Imagine disputing the three-color map theory!

I guess you had to be there.