After 86 years, they’re closing up shop. I just now found that out.
At first glance, it looked like they were shuttering for good, but they aren’t, at least not for the American edition.
I guess their audience is dying of old age.
The way that magazine’s been going in recent years, the more likely issue is the audience is dying of boredom.
I haven’t been in the waiting room of a doctor’s office since 2009, so that’s probably the last time I ever was likely to have seen a copy. I see that they’ve changed the cover style to be like larger glossy magazines. Reader’s Digest as I remember it had covers like 1996 and before. (And filled with old jokes and glurgy anecdotes.)
I used to love Reader’s Digest when I was younger. We had a subscription, and I looked forward to each edition, delivered monthly. Their “Condensed Books” were pretty sad (their version of 1984 cut off before it got to the point), but the rest of the articles were interesting, and the anecdotes and jokes were fun.
But I haven’t seen one in years. They were a staple on the supermarket racks, alongside the National Enquirer and the Weekly World News, but they seem to be there no longer.
My paternal grandparents used to buy our family annual subscriptions to Reader’s Digest, and boxes of grapefruit and oranges, every Christmas. It was a poignant moment of knowing they were gone when the magazines and fruit stopped coming.
Is it my imagination, or did “Drama in Real Life” used to have horrifying stories of, like, rape in it sometimes?
Joe’s gallbladder is going to be lonesome there.
I remember when Reader’s Digest was the biggest selling monthly and TV Guide the biggest weekly.
Things change.
“It Pays To Increase Your Rude Word Power!”
“Drama in Real Life” had all kinds of horrifying stories, across the board. The one that’s stuck with me since about the age of 7 relayed the story of a guy who fell on a ski slope, slid quite a way down the slope, and didn’t stop til he caught a fir tree between his legs 
ETA: The main reason I never took up skiing 
Here in the UK, I’m slightly amazed that it still existed - I assumed it folded decades ago. In fact, I’m almost certain that I checked this out years ago. False memory?
I remember them from Youth Hostels, on holiday, back when I was a kid. Bored, no TV… it was an easy read.
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My biological father gave me a stack of these to read when I was a kid, and I thought they were the greatest ever. I still remember some lessons from It Pays to Enrich Your Word Power. I also remember some of the jokes. I remember a story about someone getting attacked by dogs. And about a guy who tried to rob a lady but she converted him to Christianity.
I was too young to pick up on the political vibe. I don’t think I could read it now.
The political vibe has ebbed and flowed through the years. In the 1980s, it was VERY right-wing.
When I was a kid, I found a box full of back issues, from the 1940s and 1950s, in my grandmother’s garage, and loved every minute of reading them, even when kids at school made fun of me for bringing them in on free-reading day.
When this thread first started I googled around for articles on The Digest. They ranged from comments that it was going hard right to comments that it was going Woke:
I didn’t really remember noticing the political leanings when I read parts of the occasional issue long ago, just that it was a very elderly person type of thing, like Family Circus.
I never noticed any political leanings in the issues I read in the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s, but I’m in Canada, and we had our own Canadian edition of Reader’s Digest. Politics of any sort rarely made it in that edition, unless it was a profile of a (usually dead) politician and his or her legacy.
Maybe about ten years ago, I got a sample copy in my mailbox, with a “Look what’s you’re missing out on” appeal for a subscription. I always liked it, so I had a look, but it was nothing like I remembered. Not political, not “woke,” just a bunch or articles I had no interest in. No “Drama in Real Life,” no “First Person Stories,” nothing like what I remembered. So, I didn’t subscribe.
One summer in MBA grad school, my brother interned at a nonprofit where Reader’s Digest was going to profile the nonprofit’s owner and their good deeds in Reader’s Digest. Somehow my brother was assigned to write the initial draft. An RD representative told him that in order for the article to meet RD standards, it had to be very emotional (of course). The way the rep put it: “If you’re not embarrassed to have written it, it’s not sappy enough”.
No “I am Joe’s Liver”? My older sister still teases me about cutting out “I am Joe’s Lung” and leaving it for her in her bedroom when she started smoking as a teen. It worked, but it took 50 years…
In the late 80s, I remember a lot of military stories, a lot of Christian stories, and a feature called “That’s Outrageous!” which was basically complaints about liberals.
It was in Reader’s Digest that I first saw the name Dennis Rodman. He was in one of those unbearably heartwarming tales that the magazine is known for. He was working at a youth basketball camp when he befriended a kid who accidentally shot his best friend in a hunting accident. The story ends right as Rodman is drafted by the Detroit Pistons. The contrast between this sappy, cloyingly sweet tale and the first-class weirdo he became is always amusing to me.
They had a traditional mainstream conservative style that wasn’t highly political, but certainly right of center when it was political. Military, religion, US exceptionalism, were very common themes, but that was found throughout US publications in general. I think by the 80s they steered toward the right-wing politically. The magazine was created by a somewhat conservative family, but the magazine wasn’t noticeably so until perhaps the 80s. Market research may have revealed that their readership had become more politically conservative.
I recall that they didn’t have a lot of kind words for the Americans with Disabilities Act (spelled out so no one could think I accidentally typed the wrong letter for the ACA. Although I imagine that they didn’t like that either).