Saturday, August 24, 2019

My favourite magazine

I don't read magazines as much as I used to.  I still read Harper's. Last Friday I went to the dentist and got a filling, and that afternoon in Harper's I read an annotation thing--in which someone shows a text or images and adds telling notes--by someone talking about the dental care problems she's had because she grew up poor in the U.S.A.

Back in the '90s I used to read the left-wing magazine The Nation faithfully, in big part for the colums of Alexander Cockburn and Christopher Hitchens.  But these days they're gone, and the current magazine has tended to take a disappointing "play it safe approach," as when they denied the fould play that resulted in Hillary Clinton winning the 2016 Democratic nomination instead of Bernie Sanders.

I'm ashamed to admit that I read Time magazine back in the '70s.  They've long been notorious for playing favourites like Nixon and Thatcher, shamelessly and repetitiously.  I recall that after Nixon resigned they put the new president Gerald Ford on the cover with the headline "The Healing Begins"! (A note of wishful thinking there...) And as for Ronald Reagan--they reported his 1980 election with the headline "A fresh start." In 1986 they put Reagan on the cover with the headline "Why is this man so popular?" (Hmm, could worshipful press coverage have something to do with it?)

I liked The New Yorker until Tina Brown ruined it in the '90s.

1 comment:

  1. Who is Tina Brown, and how did she "ruin" the New Yorker?

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