I’ve subscribed to the magazine most of my life, but only lately have I realized
How expensive it is. $9.99 the cover price on the latest issue. I’ve got a continuing subscription, letting them bill my credit card, but ten bucks per issue is crazy.
Considering how little of it I actually read. I used to like the fiction and the poetry, but now I realize that J.D. Salinger is dead, and has been for quite some time, as have the Johns Updike, Cheever, Hersey, and O’Hara and poets like Mary Oliver as well. I skip the fiction after the opening paragraph lately, and the verse after the opening line. Can’t remember the last of either genre I’ve read through to the end.
I used to like the critics, but alas Pauline Kael and Anthony Lane no longer are employed there.
My last resource, the cartoons, are lately something I don’t even understand half the time any more, and when I do, they’re not very amusing to me.
I could go on, but you get the point. Adding to this complaint is the fact that I no longer live in, or even near, the city, so any pointers (restaurants, art galleries, quirks of the landscape, etc.) no longer apply to me either.
Is there another magazine you could recommend? Well-written, intelligent, a healthy (left-wing) bent on politics and culture?
Or are magazines dead in this age of MAGA? I like having something in my mailbox and in my greasy little hands that occupy a half-hour or more of my week but maybe that’s no longer something I can look forward to.
The TLS (Times Literary Supplement) and the London Review of Books (both from the UK) are well worth reading.
But if it must be in dead-tree form, you won’t find a worthy alternative to the New Yorker that you can subscribe to for much cheaper than the New Yorker. Why not go to the library and borrow recent issues?
My stepfather gets me a subscription to the New Yorker every year for Christmas, and every single week when it arrives I think of this scene from The Good Place. It’s been at least a year since I’ve cracked the cover of an issue (my wife occasionally reads something, but less than an article per issue on average). I keep trying to figure out a kind way to say FOR THE LOVE OF GOD STOP GETTING ME SUBSCRIPTIONS, but haven’t found it yet.
In theory, because I enjoy having multiple issues around to re-read at my leisure, often years after I forget the content I’d read before. (I have a pile stacked up in my living room, almost as tall as I am, for this purpose. Perhaps this is a viable solution: just start re-reading the old ones, and cancel my subscription to the current issues.)
It depends on what you’re looking for, but I subscribe to the New York Review of Books (which isn’t associated with the NYT or New Yorker), which is all long-form essays in the form of book reviews, politics, and culture (with a heavy weight toward book reviews, more often than not multiple books, either by the same author, or by two publications on the same topic). I’ll emphasize long-form, as the essays can be three or four pages. It’s also incredibly cheap, you can always get a deal, either at first sign up, or when you “cancel”…if you think you might be interested, you might go for that first inexpensive sign-up and see how it goes [currently: $10 for 10 issues].
I also subscribe to the London Book Review, but I’m going to drop it, it’s also long-form, but just too dense for me.
The New Yorker currently is offering unlimited digital access for $1/week (which lasts a year, then the price goes up to $2.50 a week).
Not that expensive I suppose, but more New Yorker than I’m interested in. The individual magazine cover price is a no-go.
And yes, cartoon quality has declined markedly from the days of their classic cartoonists like Addams, Arno, Koren etc. Much of the current stuff involves boring Gen X memes which are hardly worth a faint smile.
Was at Barnes & Noble a few weeks ago and picked up two history magazines, one for my kid. The total came to $60 and I declined. They were end-of-the-year slightly thicker magazines so a bit of a boost in cost was expected but I did not expect Sticker Shock from a magazine.
I miss magazines, but not that bad. Even attempting to sell a disposable trifle like a magazine for that cost is absurd.
It’s a comfortable habit that’s hard to break but trends have a habit of breaking them for us. I kept reading physical comic books long after they became available on digital platforms. Now I have thousands of the damn things I can’t even give away because digital comics make a lot more sense. I suspect it was podcasts that taught me that I can get the same thrill of anticipation without the expense and clutter of physical media. I can set alerts for those arrivals and except for the danger of dropping my iPad in the bath, I get the same sense of a comfortable routine I used to get from reading ink on dead trees.
I subscribed to The New Yorker for years. Then, out of the blue, I got an email from their subscription department. It said that the USPS told them that the address they have on file cannot accept deliveries, so they are stopping sending me issues. This is the same address they had on file which had worked fine for years. The same address that everyone else used, with no problems. The same address I still have today, with no problems. I really don’t know what that was about.
The only thing I can think of is that for a few days they were doing construction in our complex and our mailbox was blocked.
I’ve discovered I can live just fine without the paper copies.
It seems strange to request something that’s pointedly of a particular political bent, at the same time that you complain about a group who span off into an ever crazier row of nutbaggery as a result of forming a tighter and more dedicated commitment to living in an echo chamber.
Why not just look for good and interesting things, end of sentence? I think we can trust that this strategy won’t land you in MAGA Town.
I’ve subscribed since 1980 when I got a job and could afford it. When I was in grad school I read it in the library. The only hiatus was when that woman was editor.
In the good old days the magazine was hundreds of pages in size, with many long, long articles. Clearly not the value any more. Some issues I just read the cartoons and reviews, some I read most of the articles. I look at a lot on line also.
I have so much to read and do online that having a paper copy which I can read in bed is much better. I try to avoid screens before bed time.
Kind of like my paper NY Times subscription, I consider it as much charity for a good news source as a deal.
I subscribe and do read most of the every issue. I find the OP’s complaints odd, since the subscription price is only a small fraction of the cover price.
I subscribe to a bunch of print magazines just to put in my two cents to keep them going as long as possible. I’m so accustomed to print magazines that I cannot bring the same enjoyment to reading articles online. (Perhaps hypocritically, since I regularly write 5000 word articles to put online. At least I spice them with a dozen images.)
I’ve never subscribed to The New Yorker, though. I would occasionally hear of some fantastic article that showed how important the magazine was, and then go to the library and look through the back issues finding only subjects that were too arcane and abstruse to bear a moment’s attention.
If you’re looking for an exact match, you’re out of luck. I wouldn’t doubt that a few hipster Brooklynites have a tiny magazine with 3000 readers that carry the same mix of articles and fiction and criticism but you won’t find them out a three-mile radius of Bushwick. Or try McSweeney’s or its subsidiary The Believer, which are the west coast versions and are seemingly priced at San Francisco condominium levels. (McSweeney’s is $95 for 4 issues.) The closest that I know of in national magazines are mentioned above, The Atlantic and Harper’s and the New York and London Reviews of Books. New York magazine has no fiction but its political commentary was useful until they started believing that Kamala would actually win. Lots of good articles generally and far hipper than any of the others.
The Guardian, a British newspaper that has been actively pushing into the U.S. market with their website, now has The Guardian Weekly, a collection of bullet-point news with longer articles and criticism in a refreshing we’re-just-journalists-here style.
If you want a progressive left-wing slant, The New Republic and Nation and Mother Jones will pile on the sauce like a Buffalo Wild Wings joint.
General interest magazines as a genre, though, are dead meat.
Despite the sticker shock, one issue of the Quarterly Concern is easily a better value than two New Yorkers for the same price. For those that don’t know, it’s not a fixed magazine style format. From issue to issue it can be in the form of a coffee table book, a trade paperback, a bundle of letters, a deck of cards, or even a lunch box.
