CP: Poor magazines.
RN: I know. I've been getting subscription offers from titles I used to carry, and they're practically paying me to take them back. Details for a year for eight bucks? Maybe. But even at that price, it starts to look like so much recycling.
CP: Then there's the timing issue. In the recent old days, I'd become ultra-miffed upon seeing the new issue of a magazine to which I subscribe on a newsstand days before it arrived in my mailbox. Now it's gotten worse. By the time my letter carrier showed up with the latest issue of New York, I knew via Twitter that Ward Sutton had done the cover illo, and I had read most of its contents on my phone. And that's a weekly.
RN: Exactly. By the way, can we just pause for a moment and gush over Mr. Sutton, our former Twin Cities Reader colleague? The man is a modern-day Michaelangelo, and I'm thrilled for his success.
CP: Ditto.
RN: I will say that you'll have to pry Saveur out of my cold, dead hands. Only boy genius editor Jimmy Oseland, the talking head of "Top Chef Masters" fame, could commission a heartbreaking coming-out story wrapped inside a food-porn spread on the glory of Southern layer cakes. That, my friend, is the beauty of magazines.
CP: You foodies. I swear. Anyway, I'm at O'Hare the other day, thinking, wouldn't a nice magazine help me ignore a chatty seatmate? It's still fun to peruse them and read the come-on lines, but we know darn well that what's behind those shiny covers is older than Demi Moore.
RN: And just as skinny. The Newsweek that landed in my mailbox this week had roughly the same heft as my co-op's monthly newsletter.
