Come on now, people. What about, “It pays to enrich your word power” ? That is the one challengeing component to the “zine”. I can remember taking the quiz many times and saying to myself, ala the Fonz, “I knew that, I knew that” !
Isn’t this one of the signs of the End Times?
Arjuna34
PS - Here’s the Onion article in question: Harry Potter Books Spark Rise In Satanism Among Childern
Arjuna34
My parents provided my wife and I with a gift subscription to Readers Digest from the time we got married until they got too old to do things like that anymore.
The magazine is as bland plain instant mashed potatos. It is good for reading whilst sitting on the throne or lolling in a tub of hot water. The humor can be entertaing and once in a while really good. It fills a niche the same as some nameless radio station playing on the radio fills a niche while you are driving.
My grandfather managed to get a bunch of old classic books from RD-that were reprinted in their entirety (I think, anyways) and leather bound and illustrated. I stole Doctor Zhivago from his collection, since he never reads them, he just keeps them.
Jesus, lissener, chill dude. It’s just a magazine. Have some fun! 
I read a New York Times Magazine article about a baby pigeon that hatched on some writer’s ledge. I read the reprint of the same story a few weeks later in RD. It was almost exactly the same except for a few minor alterations. The original story refered to pigeons as rats with wings, while the RD version did not. The original article alluded to the fact the pigeons were horrible parents and very stupid, the RD article did not.
It was a change of a few words. Really just about two or three sentences worth of words removed, but it changed the whole feeling of the story.
This has absolutely nothing to do with people stupid enough to think that The Onion is a legitimate news source. Unless that person happens to be a pigeon.
It definately has a right-wing bent to it (I remember them going out of their way to bash Clinton’s health care proposals, for example). I particularly remember one article they ran that allegedly told the “true” story of a 16 year old girl whose life was just absolutely destroyed by pot. One minute she’s a perfect little princess, the next she’s smoking up with skinheads in a graveyard. A paraphrase:
“But soon, Christie had to smoke more and more to get the same ‘high’ that she at first expereinced so easily. ‘Look how much I can smoke without getting stoned!’ she would tell her friends.”
Crap like this throughout. Sorry, but marijuana doesn’t lead to this kind of physical dependance / resistance, you lying fucks.
By the way, here’s the article about homosexual recruitment that was referenced earlier:
http://www.theonion.com/onion3326/homosexualrecruit.html
I’m kinda embarassed to admit that I have read and enjoyed Reader’s Digest many times - usually when visiting my maternal grandparents, they have a lot of them. When we visited my paternal grandmother, I ended up reading National Geographic - the one thing she had over my other grandmother was the reading material she had available, though I doubt she ever read them.
I know pot doesn’t lead to physical dependency, but it sure as hell can lead to a high resistance. I go through cycles with my pot usage, I’ll have to do more and more to get high and when I reach the point where I am smoking more than a half ounce in a week, I quit for a few weeks. Then, when I start up again, I can get high real easy (though not as easily as when I started).
If you read the RD for the Word Power, good for you. If you read it for the Humor in Uniform, good for you. If you read it for some basically uplifting, if preachy, stories, good for you. If you read it so you can yell “LOOK AT WHAT THOSE GODDAMN RIGHT-WING, PSUEDO RELIGIOUS LYING BASTARDS ARE SAYING NOW!!!” Good for you. If you just want to use it to wipe your ass, there are cheaper alternatives, but good for you.
Virtually all magazines have some sort of agenda. What is so new about this?
There is one stunning similarity between RD and National Geographic:
People who subscribe to these mags hoard the old copies like they are gold.
Why? Is my mother ever going to refer back to that old RD from 1986? What am I going to do with the thirty years of National Geographic when she passes? She has actually moved stacks of Reader’s Digest when changing homes.
Please, Mom, recycle them now so I don’t swamp the recycling center when I bring the whole lot in at once.
And what the HELL is up with the damn Reader’s Digest Condensed Books! Oh, they’ve changed the name now, but it is still the same concept.
(emphasis added)
So you want to read real books but those pesky multi-syllable words get in the way? Well, never fear, our skillful editors know how to reduce even the most difficult works of literature to pablum so that even you can understand it. [sub]Ok, we have to edit out the really tough concepts and nuance that might tax your brain or stimulate thought[/sub] Now, you, too, can tell your literate friends and relatives that you have finally read a whole book.
[sub]Sort of, anyway[/sub]
*
The “skillfully edited” line just grates my nerves. You mean all those books at the library haven’t been edited before published? What gall…
I don’t know about the rest of you, but I LOVE reading back issues of magazines. We save a lot of old, interesting National Geographics, which come in handy during school projects, and also as interesting stories.
My campus library has a lot of old periodicals bound into hard back books. I love sitting in the library reading issues of Newsweek from 1943. I believe the National Geographics go back to 1910, or earlier. I like looking for articles about the royalty that I’m interested in. In fact, I’d give anything to get my hands on a copy of Time from 1929, that I saw on ebay. (I don’t bid on ebay, too expensive). It had King Aleksandar of Yugoslavia on the cover. I’m hoping I can at least look at a copy somewhere-maybe the Carnegie has it.
So don’t knock people who save old magazines. They’re very interesting to look at-ever read editorials from 1912?
It’s interesting to see what people thought of current events back then.
I think the best part about this pit thread is that we’re all talking about something different! 
We hate RD
We love RD
We hate people who collect magazines
We love people who collect magazines
We think its funny that someone thought the onion was real
We don’t like people to read condensed books
This is like a little psychological Serlin experiment isn’t it? [leaning back to take notes] What do YOU find in the OP? [tapping pen on clipboard] I…SEE.
And by the by, I myself, frequently chuckle at “Life in these United States” while I read it at my Grandmother’s house, floating in her pool after three Corona’s.
jarbaby
At Grandma’s house we apostrophize plural words!
jarbaby
Badtz,
Hmm, really? Learn something new every day, I tell ya. I’ve never expereinced anything like that, but then I’ve never had a habit approaching half an ounce a week, either. I’ve a friend or two who, as far as I can tell, smoke more than that. Perhaps I’ll ask them about it.
I still have most issues of most magazines I’ve ever owned, including three years’ worth of National Geographic World (I was a charter subscriber). I’ve even bought the binders for my old Skeptical Inquirers and put them in my bookcase, right next to my dictionaries and my TIME/Life “Seafarers” series.
Y’all want to make something of it?
Along the lines of the right wing/shoddy reporting complaints.
If my memory correctly serves me, in the book * Manufacturing Consent* by Edward Herman and Noam Chomsky, it is mentioned that Readers Digest is almost entirely responsible for spreading the idea that the Pol Pot regime killed 2 million people in Cambodia.
It’s almost accepted as fact now, even though no rigorous study has ever backed up those numbers (even the government admitted much lower numbers). So basically they took a preposterous idea and turned it into fact just by having it repeated often enough. I think crap reporting is extremely dangerous when it’s being read by millions of the least-questioning in our society.
(Not trying to hijack this into a Cambodia debate.)
I know Reader’s Digest doesn’t lead to physical dependency, but it sure as hell can lead to a high resistance. I go through cycles with my Reader’s Digest usage, I’ll have to read and when I reach the point where I am reading more than a half year in a week, I quit for a few weeks. Then, when I start up again, I can get back in real easy (though not as easily as when I started).
-The Man Who
Reader’s Digest is a lot less blatent than it used to be. In a recent issue there was a story by a woman with mixed-race children and talked about how the daily chore of moisturizing and styling her daughter’s hair for school was great “quality time.” Now, yes, this is sappy, and may be interpreted as “pro-life” propaganda by one camp as well as “Pro-racial-mixing” by the other side (no doubt they took some heat for it from the goofy, too-dim-to-realize-“The Onion”-is-fake crowd) but it’s a FAR FAR cry from their articles in the 1940’s and 50’s with topics such as how the darkies/chinamen/Jews were going to drive down your property value.
Yeah, sometimes it’s preachy, but so are several other magazines such as Family Circle/Women’s Day who sneak in feel-good affirmation-type crap in between gross-sounding recipes and horrible fashion spreads. It’s not a big deal; I have enough wits about myself to roll my eyes and flip the page. I’ve yet to be “tricked” by their (not-so) clever subterfuge.
Some of the old issues of stuff like Better Homes and Gardens are quite the hoot to look at. All those 1950’s housewives in their dresses and aprons, estatic over the miracle of Pyrex bakeware, serving hubby a bottle of Lowenbrau on a tray with a pilsner glass, etc. Don’t get me started on some of the 1970’s decorating mags, lol. I was so glad when someone from this board linked to the Lilek’s site with the 70’s decorating, that really took me back, ROFL!
I like Reader’s Digest, too. It’s great reading for the toilet, because the articles are fairly short. I like happy-crappy feel-good stories. They make me feel good, damn it! I’m not an airhead who believes everything she reads, but there are some pretty good articles in there. And I am an expert every month at Wordpower! Woo-hoo!
As to the “preachiness”, I guess I like that a little, too. I’m not very religious - meaning I don’t go to church, but I believe in God and Jesus. I try to live up to what I think the “Christian ethic” is. The moral tone, while a bit heavy-handed at times, helps me remember to be nice to others, and not get so down on life. I have many burdens in my life right now, and RD can sometimes take my mind off them, if only by reminding me that we’re all in the same boat.
[stepping down off soapbox, let the flames commence]