Printervention: An Ode to Magazines

Call in the A&E folks, it’s time for an intervention. You see, I have a little problem with magazines.

My coffee table is stacked with them, my dining room table has a few scattered on it, ditto on my nightstands, and for certain, you can find a few in my purse right now.

But the problem isn’t so much that I have so many, it’s that I just can’t seem to part with them. 

Sometimes I organize them all into neat piles or stash them in lovely oversized baskets. But I just can’t seem to throw them away. I’ve tried occasionally to stage my own intervention—sometimes in the form of an urgent text: “Gayle, do I really need a year and half’s worth of New Yorkers?” (“No.”)

Other times, I’ve had to summon reinforcements to physically remove them from my apartment. (I avert my eyes.) I even once contemplated calling Death Bear. A shrink or an A&E producer might connect this to deeper issues, but I think it has more to do with the power of print.

People say that print is dead. One of my best friends, who makes her living online, taunts me with this refrain regularly (I taunt her in return with the fact that I’ve busted her multiple times buying Wired).

Perhaps I’m old school. But I don’t think it’s as simple as that. There is an experience to print that cannot be replicated online or on an iPad or a Kindle, despite their bells and whistles.

I do not—cannot—deny that those platforms create and enhance content in ways that are far-reaching, thoughtful, powerful, and, well, marvelous. But print creates moments. A colleague once described sitting down to read O: The Oprah Magazine (which is my true guilty-pleasure read) as feeling like she was curling up on a comfy couch for a long chat with a good girlfriend—and I knew exactly what she meant.

The only part of air travel I like these days is hitting up the airport newsstand. I look forward to it more than Christmas. I’m often the person you see sprinting wildly to the gate, usually because I’ve gotten lost in the magazine racks, trying to decide which ones to buy. My budget is generally about 20 bucks (which gets me about four), and it’s always so hard to choose, but there is an immense satisfaction and unbridled glee in forking over that cash and tucking those pubs in my bag. And, oh, where to begin once I’m settled in for the inevitably cramped flight?!

Do you ever really have that feeling when you fire up your laptop or iPad?

When I think about how I use the Internet and even electronic devices, I realize I use them to consume information. Not to be comforted, surprised, delighted, engaged, tempted. Maybe I won’t get through the whole issue of any given magazine, but the possibility exists. If it’s on my table or in my bag, I can pick it up and easily jump right back in and get swept away.

As technology advances the world faster and further, making us all a little more connected and slightly more frenetic, print forces us to slow down. Its permanence is a reminder that not everything moves at warp speed. And we’re all going to be looking for a little more of that in our lives pretty soon, if we aren’t already. There’s going to be a backlash, just you wait. Everything old—or “dead”—is eventually new again.

I should point out that there is one magazine that I do not have a problem throwing away: Us Weekly. I actually take great pleasure in tossing it. Maybe it’s because I digest every last bit of the addictive pop candy it contains, or maybe it’s the rush I get every Friday when I open my mailbox to find it, or maybe it’s because I always know when the next hit (I mean, issue) is coming. This really is starting to sound like a serious problem.

So, which show’s producers to call in: Intervention or Hoarders? You decide. But whatever you do, don’t ever tell me that print is dead.

[image: galant]