I Miss Magazines

They make GREAT gifts for elderly relatives. I’ve gotten my mom subscriptions to The Saturday Evening Post (yes, it’s still published), Readers Digest, and others.

Great time capsules as well. The attic of our summer cottage had decades old magazines of many genres. I spent many a rainy day in my teens going over old LIFE magazines.

It's so hard to do collages anymore.

OP, your magazine choices make you sound very heterosexual.

I finally gave up my Vanity Fair subscription when it went up to over $100 annually.

I just resubscribed to “The New Yorker” because I am a masochist. But I also love it. I love the covers, the games, Talk of the Town.

[quote] finally gave up my Vanity Fair subscription when it went up to over $100 annually.

I just checked magazines.com: $24 for 12 issues.

I used to grab the latest issue of Architectural Digest, and could escape from the world for a few hours. Now it's 1/3 the size and filled with advertisements. I bought an issue a couple years ago and I was done and over it in about thirty minutes.

I still got my local city magazine - forgot to cancel it last year. Kind of the same stuff every time - best doctors in.., best neighborhoods, best new restaurants, best shopping, best getaways... rinse, lather, repeat.

Join AARP and you get subs to a magazine AND a full color tabloid!

[quote]r5 = I finally gave up my Vanity Fair subscription when it went up to over $100 annually.

I gave mine up decades ago because the cologne samples gave me a headache.

I visit Barnes & Noble bookstores every month or two, and I usually pick up one or two magazines. Otherwise the only ones I ever see now are at the checkout area of my pharmacy.

One of the last movie magazines available.

[quote]OP, your magazine choices make you sound very heterosexual.

Yeah, on Planet Oldhomo.

R5 what r u smoking? The website says print + digital is $48 annually

The Atlantic is one of the best magazines out there, but I just can't read it anymore. It's all just too depressing. I'm slightly more engaged now. But I try to back off when it gets too hard. I'm still just too tired of it all.

I would buy Sight & Sound from time to time, but I found Empire from UK containing much more info on recent films.

Raid random doctors’ waiting rooms

[quote]what r u smoking? The website says print + digital is $48 annually

It can be had even more cheaply during regular sales at Discount Magazines. I’m in the third year of a three-year deal at $12/year.

Tv guide from 1976, damn it.

R13: I'm in Ireland and sometimes buy issues of "Sight & Sound" from a bookstore (yes, how quaint). I really miss Film at Lincoln Center's now-defunct monthly magazine "Film Comment," though. It folded during or right after Covid.

I get the New Yorker also, and National Geographic. They’re worth it.

We still have magazine subscriptions at work. Mostly henhouse magazines like US Weekly and People but also W and Rolling Stone. I have no idea who reads them at work.

I was addicted to magazines in the pre-internet era. I would read anything I could get my hands on. But I'm grateful not to have the clutter nowadays.

Magazines, sadly, begin with MAGA.

I once knew a guy on the spectrum who called them BABA YAGA ZINES

When we had periodicals instead of infinite scroll, we devoured new issues enthusiastically. But soon enough, we were bored with them. We limply flipped through the same pics and reread the articles now ho-hum until malaise took over and we forced ourselves outside or to tv reruns with the same effect.

Getting a letter to the editor took some effort, stationery, stamps, licking an unknown adhesive and finding a mailbox. Being selected was uncommon.

The public diarrhea of the mind we have today was impossible.

House Beautiful pages fit perfectly in the bottom of the parakeet cage.

You can still subscribe to print editions of Yummy, DNA, Attitude, Jack the Lad, Interview ....

My library has lots of them. I’m retired so I can go in there during the day.

I used to enjoy The Sporting News and ESPN.

Those were the days... Going to my P.O. box for issues of Mandate, First Hand, Advocate Men, Bear, Blueboy, Playguy, Spurt, Drummer... They had such interesting articles!

The only thing I shoplifted was FLEX magazine

When I subscribed to a few magazines in the 1990s when I was in college, I was shocked that most were more ads than stories. I finally decided to stop paying for commercials.

The only thing I like about digital magazines is that the photos are easy to save.

Picking up Detour magazine at the mall Walden Books was one of my intros into gay lifestyle. The spreads by David LaChapelle were mind blowing and I still think of some of those images. I still get the New Yorker and try to read it weekly. I freelanced for EW until they folded and had a subscription. It switched to People Magazine which I actually enjoyed, great for drawing reference and reading by the pool. But I haven’t resubscirbed.

I used to buy various magazines regularly and pass them off to two of my friends. One moved away and the other died, so instead of throwing them in the recycling bin, I would take them to my office and leave them on a corner shelf in the office pantry. I'm at a new job now where they don't have space for it, so I now leave them in my neighborhood free mini-library.

I hate to say this, but I prefer books and magazines on my iPad now. It's just a better experience.

I can't even imagine the amount of paper we used to go through in the world before the internet. Tons of tons of stuff gets read once and then sitting here until it disintegrates.

At least paper disintegrates. Discarded computers, tablets and smartphones do not.

Utne Reader was a perfect rabbit hole for new magazine articles. I was reading up on women’s studies at the time and that magazine introduced me to a lot of good information that has held up.

You could tell magazine print was in trouble when the gloss on the magazines went away, Details developed ADHD, Vogue put Paris on the cover, and Maggie Gylilenhaal modeled Prada.

The Atlantic is the only magazine I subscribe to now, although I read it mostly online. It's got the best writing and the best political coverage. The New Yorker is a travesty of what it once was; now it's just long form writing for the sake of long form. Boring as hell. NatGeo is fun to look at but too expensive to subscribe to. Anything else you'll find online in those rare instances when one of them has a good article -- it'll go viral or, yes, appear on Datalounge.

R6 Although it's described as a behavior of the old and technophobic, the delight in the physical presence of texts and images, holding them in your hands, not having the screen radiating light at you, the screen that conditions you like red mean did Pavlov's dogs, the screen that defines the limits of your attention span that encourages to click away to monetize your behavior for someone else's profits....

I've read the New Yorker for many decades... always (my kink) starting from the back... cinema review, paging through book and culture reviews, then the fiction (and stopping for poetry if I'm in the mood and the form of the poem attracts me) then feature articles, then memoir pieces, then stopping, slightly nauseated and complete sated, before the short local color/puff piece articles. It's a ritual than simply cannot be achieved by scrolling on a screen.

For these reasons, I also subscribe to hard copies of London Review of Books, NYRB, Harper's and The Atlantic. Oddly, only the Atlantic seems better to read in the screens... the others invite me to luxuriate and let my eyes wander across the pages.

Something is lost in our surrender to the death of 3-D space, object, and tactile pleasures.

As a wee gayling, I treated the bi-monthly arrival of Soap Opera Digest like letters from the font. I lived for People’s tentpole issues (Most Beautiful, 25 Most Intriguing People) and Vanity Fair’s Hollywood Issue. They were events to me. And I still have it all in storage. Mary!

I do miss paper magazines on a nostalgic level. But it’s hard to beat Apple News+ which gives me The New Yorker, New York, Vanity Fair, The Atlantic, LA Times, WSJ… etc. I saved quite a bit of money once I simply committed over to Apple.

I miss coming out of the subway in Philly and stopping at the newsstand to by the newest TV Guide and SOD (Soap Opera Digest!

I've had a subscription to The New Yorker, my last remaining magazine subscription, since 1976. I used to get Vanity Fair, Premiere, Esquire, TV Guide, and Time (or Newsweek; I'd alternate every couple of years).

A friend of mine still gets US but it's really just the same photos I could see for free online.

I get the New Yorker, Texas Monthly and the New York Review of Books. I love sitting in my yard, drinking cocktails, and reading magazines. When I'm done with them, I give them to my nerdy students.

I subscribed to Vanity Fair for years. It was half the price it sold for in stores.

I was getting my cellphone fixed and they had no magazines. What a missed opportunity