As I mentioned, I read almost a year’s worth of Readers Digest magazine last week (that year being 2024-2025), and I have been thinking about the experience this week.
I found myself on several occasions telling my beautiful wife about something I read in the magazine. That doesn’t happen with what I read on the Internet; mostly, I read political blogs and Substacks, and the news media I read tends to lean toward crime and celebrity. Instapundit has some science links and sometimes music links to innumerable Matt Margolis PJ Media pieces, but, man, I miss general interest magazines.
Readers Digest has “Drama in Real Life”, the various humor sections (now overtaken by reprinted and perhaps uncompensated tweets–remember the old days when they paid hundreds of dollars per anecdote?), some health bits, generally a bit about food (November is good for reminding us where cranberries come from, which is generally Wisconsin), “It Pays To Enrich Your Word Power” (which I just scan looking for words I don’t know–generally, I know 14 or 15 of the 15 unless they have a strange theme), and so on. Every month it runs a piece on “The National Interest” which is a touch to the left of the spectrum, but not crazy. Things like “Teachers don’t make enough money and are leaving the field” (touching mostly on the money, not the institutional flaws which also might account for it). And a lot of articles still mention climate change, although that will probably diminish over time. Even though it was 2024, nothing hammered on Trump or lauded Biden–Elizabeth Warren got a shout out from someone who got scammed out of $30,000 as she (Warren) agitated and/or legislated some customer protections, but probably not the kind that says “Don’t Venmo thousands of dollars based on a text message from an unknown number.”
You know, newsstands used to be full of magazines with this sort of content. Lighthearted, light weight often, varied, and generally interesting. Even at the high end, The Atlantic Monthly, Harper’s, and The New Yorker proffered longer but varied bit which I often read cover to cover.
But those have all gone leftwing nutso after the turn of the century (when George W. Bush was the worst thing in the world). I gave up my subscription to The Saturday Evening Post about a decade ago when its contents got to be a little one-sided (see this for example). National Review used to have decent book reviews and pop culture stuff, but I let that lapse when it went all anti-Trump and started shifting its editorial viewpoint to match the full page Google ads–First Things kind of fills this void now, one of the two magazines I subscribe to now (New Oxford Review being the other, although I get the NRA, Ducks Unlimited, AAA, and electric co-op magazines for free).
I don’t have a current Readers Digest subscription–I let it lapse because they sent me constant reminders to renew my subscription before my subscription was lapsing–and sometimes, I ended up paying ahead for a couple years because I was not attentive. But maybe I’ll resubscribe if I get another card sometime soon.
Or, maybe, I should not and instead focus on clearing out the drawer full of decade (or more)-old magazines which piled up. History magazines, Renaissance festival magazines, even Beer magazine…. I probably have First Things and National Review magazines from the Obama administration in there somewhere. Maybe, with enough vacations, I can catch up on them.
But I probably won’t mention tidbits from them in conversation.
