I Like to Read

One of the things that I like to read is medium length, well-written, informative articles of the sort that used to live in magazines before the information crushed them all like Blockbuster video or travel agencies.

I have a book by Ruth Reichl where she talks about her time as an editor for an important food magazine for Conde Nast in New York in the 80s and she is treated like a legitimate no-foolin’ rock star, there are assistants, there are perks, it is wild. Magazines were crazy in the 40 years ago universe that no longer exists.

But then, for a long time in my personal heyday, there was blogs, medium form articles written by amateurs, a wild and explosive flourishing of community writing projects, many of them utterly unreadable or punishingly mundane, but this was also a good time, and I subscribed to many via the use of my “A Relatively Simple Syndication” (or “ARSS” for short, because it wasn’t very good) technology browser.

For a brief period, I subscribed to Increment magazine, an expensive but lovely periodical, made entirely free online, that was - I imagine - never once for a single second profitable. This fabulous loss-leader was underwritten by Stripe, a company that makes more money in a day than I will make in my entire lifetime, so they definitely have a little bit of dosh floating around for weird vanity projects.

At least several dozen times I joked that they should have called it Excrement magazine because of where I read most of the articles.

It turns out that one of my likes is just compelling non-fiction articles, and being as my last real subscription ended in 2021, I feel like I was one of the last holdouts on team print media.

but (he says, patting his extremely well-laden eReader) it’s not like I’m not also part of the problem

For a while, I leaned on Pocket’s featured articles in Firefox. They’re okay. At this point I feel like I’ve encountered a lot of them again and again, and honestly I’m not sure if Pocket is going to keep them going now that Pocket is folding (it turns out, keeping a blog/article reading tool alive in the current internet era isn’t terribly valuable, because the last human-written article was some time in 2023, apparently).

anyways, no point here, no call-to-action, just… thinkin’ about articles