I have only one magazine subscription that I really care about.
I subscribe to two newspapers — the New York Times and the Washington Post, both online — and if I lived one county closer to Atlanta, I would get home delivery of the Atlanta Journal-Constitution.
For the entire 20-plus years I lived in California, I got home delivery of the Los Angeles Times, It took me a long time to become accustomed to reading newspapers online with any degree of portability. Even now, most of the news I read is on my 27-inch iMac screen while sitting at my desk.
I have a good-sized iPad, although I keep it on my desk as well.
I do read on my iPhone 13 Pro Max, mostly books and the CNN Website, though.
But I have one magazine subscription delivered every week — actually 48 weeks a year — that I enjoy holding in my hands and turning the pages.
I read the Atlantic Monthly and The Economist online, but I pay $129 a year to have The New Yorker delivered to my mailbox. I’m not sure there’s a magazine still publishing that is as imaginative in its design of its covers as The New Yorker,
I particularly liked the one at the beginning of the piece from two weeks ago, and it immediately brought to mind my favorite magazine ever. One that no longer exists.
I’m not sure there was ever a funnier magazine than National Lampoon, which began publishing in 1970 and was a big deal until the end of the decade. It lasted a lot longer than that, but it sort of ran out of steam when the movers and shakers behind it got more interested in making movies.
When the first issue came out in April 1970, it was something different than we had ever seen before. Each monthly issue had a theme, so of course the first one was Sex. In its bizarre way, Lampoon was brilliant, from the fake letters to the editor to monthly features like Mrs. Agnew’s Diary to Ask Debby, a spoof of Dear Abby in which Debby gave absolutely to helpful advice to anyone.
Of course eventually the magazine took shots at Mad, which preceded it by 20 years and wasn’t as outrageous.
The Lampoon benefitted from coming along in an era when magazines aimed at college-age readers started demonstrating a lot more freedom in the language they used. It wasn’t the first magazine to start dropping f-bombs, but it certainly made good use of them.
Nothing was sacred, as witnessed by the spoof of the Dick and Jane readers Baby Boomers learned to read on in the 1950s.
Sadly, it has been more than 30 years since the last issues, and nothing seems to have captured the same audience and the same spirit. These days when people think of National Lampoon, it’s the goofy “Vacation” movies they made with Chevy Chase in the ’80s and ’90s.
But look at the New Yorker cover from two weeks ago and you can see it may be gone, but it isn’t forgotten.