Maggies

Much as I love the internet, I love magazines even more.

One of my favorite solitary vices is taking a copy of The Atlantic, Harper's, Washington Monthly, Foreign Policy, The Nation, or Mother Jones into a downscale bar and knocking back the Bud Lights as I read to the thunder of a rock 'n roll jukebox.  This experience is the best of both worlds for me, a nexus between the high and low brows.

Other magazines--especially the travel and adventure rags--bring the world to me in a way that the internet does not.  I take magazines to bed and, to my wife's dismay, keep them stacked bedside.  I re-read them and as I drift off to sleep,  I plan itineraries to all the places I never knew I wanted to go.  Curling up with a laptop isn't nearly as enjoyable.

When I was a kid, I devoured the magazines that came into the mailbox--mostly news and opinion stuff--and that helped me learn to think about the world as I do.  The internet isn't as conducive to serendipitous learning as leafing through a magazine and stopping at an arresting image or an intriguing word.

All of which is presented here to back up my conviction that hiking the postage costs for smaller-circulation maggies is a bad idea.