The Quiet Heroism of the Printed Periodical

A Feels-Good+Feel-Good, Sanity Maker+Liberty-Saver in the Midst of Chaos

The first time I opened a London Review of Books, I felt a twinge of pure joy.

It’s a big old awkward thing, floppy and newspaper-y. To read it, you really need to fold it back and then in half again, as if you’re some 1950’s cartoon dad holding a ridiculously petite coffee with one hand and the Morning Tribune in the other.

I never identified with the women in those cartoons, what their little wasp waists and black, vacant eyes that always look like two holes chewed through a face by a cockroach. I know their type. They’re the sort who say they want to “read with you” then interrupt every three minutes to dump a dry-popping synapse out of their head like a piece of gravel in a shoe. Then they smile. As if you’d been gravely lonely during those ninety seconds of silence.

With your coffee.
And your newspaper.

I’m feminist enough to decry decades of demand that women bring men hot fried eggs and toast with jam every morning before work. We deserved better. But also, if June Cleaver shows up to chatty-chat with me first thing in the morning while I am holding my London Review of Books, I’m going to throw her through her gingham kitchen curtains into her well-manicured flower bed.

But I digress.

By now, we’ve all seen how carefully-cultivated social media platforms can be demolished overnight. A government can yank a hard-won audience away, or simply divert by algorithmic warfare to the same end. Even if we have the freedom to share our ideas openly, many of us have found reasons to stop feeding a monopoly.

That’s the thing about social media publishing, it’s bits and bytes, cast in electric light. The opportunities of the genre rose like a firework ascending and bursting. Then, a sky full of fireworks, mine, and yours, and the entire world’s touching fingers and finding that (wonder of wonders) we are quite the same in critical ways. We found friends and fans, but better still, we found our own voices. It’s been a dizzy delirious magic.

And now, it’s gone. Infection took over.

The bots, and the bad guys, and the charlatans, and the hypnotists, and the Russians, and the fascists, and all the other toxic “ists,” showed up and ruined things for everyone.

I’ve heard some say they regret ever being part of it. I don’t. Not even a little bit. I’m profoundly thankful that I got to be a part of a movement that was every bit as significant as the invention of the printing press.

Once upon a time, there were enchanted years when we could meet everyone in the whole world.

But it’s different now.

And so I am returning to periodicals.

Did you ever subscribe to National Geographic? I’m not sure what’s become of it lately, but when I was a kid, receiving a new issue was a huge deal. Getting a new magazine wasn’t like checking out a book at the library. Yes, library books were solid and printed, but they were also permanent to the point that I could take them for granted. (At least I thought so then.) I felt no urgency about reading a library book.

A magazine, however, had a date on the front—which meant another magazine with a new date would soon be arriving—which implied opportunity passing. There was a tiny window in which I could be reading these new ideas with others around the world. And these ideas arrived in a format that was flexible, portable, almost disposable, and profoundly intimate. I didn’t have to protect them, or open them a certain way, or risk cracking a spine.

To honor a book you treat it with great care. To honor a periodical, you ravage it.

Wag it around. Underline in it. Throw it in a bag, or toss it in the car, or set your dripping mug down on it. It’s okay. A new one is coming. A fresh start. Have your rough and rowdy will with July 1987.

August 1987 is nearly here. Fresh cover. Fresh pages. I don’t know of anything else so delightful to receive and then destroy with affection.

So here, at the end of the world, I’ve started back into periodicals. I’m not just buying one here and there to take on a plane before a flight. I’m not just downloading them on my iPad. I’m subscribed to the grand and glorious nostalgia of the regular slaughter of trees and the bleeding of chemical dyes into the planet.

But I almost never eat fast food, and I’m cutting down on single use plastics.

Besides, it’s the end of the world. Probably.

And perhaps it’s my sorrow, or angst, or loneliness speaking—but as I’ve been flipping real pages, I’ve been wondering if the printed periodical might be a sort of solution to some of this?

The rage is slower.
The claims are slower.
There’s cultural immediacy with a healthy dose of the inherent lag of the printed page.
There’s an enforced quiet.
There’s camaraderie of shared readership without the rabid fools comment section.

“Maybe we’ll publish your Letter to the Editor. Maybe we won’t.
And if we publish it, hardly anyone will read it.”

It’s harder for Grandma Propaganda to commandeer such discussions.

Curation is a sort of authoritarianism, I suppose. But it’s not wild-eyed and chaotic and eruptive.

And above all, periodicals allow for the decentralization of the maneuvering of the American mind. Especially in the age of print on demand.

If two hundred financiers of different viewpoints help two thousand different magazines reach 300 million people, exponential and disaffiliated levers would need to be pulled to change mass direction. (Or to drive mass hypnosis.)

We keep talking about wealth disparity, and yes, that’s a problem. But the bigger problem? Information disparity. Too few people control what too many people think.

We’ve all been sitting in the same room too long.

The air’s grown stale.


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(I’m on Substack now. If you want to connect with me there, click here.)