Confessions of a Magazine Junkie

Since I've been unemployed I've had a lot of free time on my hands, and I've been doing a lot of reading. Not only of books, but I've rediscovered a love of magazines like the New Yorker. I find a tangible pleasure in kicking back at night, maybe with some music on, and leafing through a good magazine, disappearing in the world that the periodical creates. This is probably a pleasure that is on borrowed time.

There's a lot of talk about the dying of the daily newspaper, but magazines are also on the critical list. Shrinking ad revenues and the usurping Internet are tolling the death knell for weeklies and monthlies. When I was employed, I spent a lot of time web surfing on my downtime, and it's easy to read magazines on the 'Net, but now, since I have dial-up, I don't go on online more than two or three times a day, and usually just check my main sites and then get off. How nice it is to actually look at a magazine in paper form!

I worked for years for magazines, most prominently Penthouse Variations, and while there I took great pride in being a magazine editor. Me and my boss used to look at other magazines and go over how successful or not they were. I've subscribed to dozens of different magazines over the years, sometimes just for the design--I actually subscribed to Elle for a while. When I'm at my mother's I like leafing through her issues of Country Living, not because I have a Jones for making a cozy rustic homestead, but because I think the magazine is successful in look and tone, and it takes me to a world apart from my own.

Sometimes I'll subscribe to a magazine and read it cover to cover for a while, but then burn out on it after a while, when some of the themes just get recycled. I found this with Vanity Fair and also a magazine called Wild West, which was a history magazine devoted to, well, you can guess. I've also subscribed to magazines that have either folded or have hit hard times, like Premiere, Movieline, Esquire and GQ. I also got the lad magazines like Maxim, Stuff and FHM (only Maxim still exists on paper).

Today, I stick with a few magazines that I've gotten for years, like Playboy, which I've gotten for thirty years (and I think it will be online only within five years or so--certainly after Hefner dies). I also enjoy Entertainment Weekly, though it's focus has skewed horribly toward teenyboppers lately--there have been four covers recently on the Twilight film--but it's the best consumer magazine on the film industry still being printed. For politics I get The Nation, which is a weekly on newsprint that has been published for over 150 years and is rabidly leftist. I also enjoy Conde Nast Travel, and a quarterly called Poets and Writers, which is handsomely put together and well written (as one would hope it would be).

Now that I'm back with The New Yorker again I went ahead and filled out the subscription card. When I do have a job, it will be harder to keep up with it, since it's a weekly. I also sent in a card for New York, which isn't as sophisticated, but has it's fun aspects. It's also a weekly, but a subscription can be had for a year at less than twenty dollars. That's too good a deal to resist.