Gathering Moss

Sometimes, timing is really odd:  Consider the recent Rolling Stone story about Obama and the military in Afghanistan.

The oddity is this:  My subscription to Rolling Stone just ran out with the issue before this forthcoming one.  Last Christmas, after ordering something or other on Amazon, I had the opportunity to get a 6-month subscription to Rolling Stone for $1.  I hadn't read an issue of that magazine for years, so I figured I couldn't go wrong for a dollar.  I wish I had my money back.  Six months of utter drivel--I stopped even flipping through the pages a few months back.  Then, right after my subscription (mercifully) ran out, Rolling Stone actually runs an article worth reading.  Of course it isn't their cover story for that issue--that would be a puff piece about Lady Gaga it would seem--an "artist" who certainly needs a bit more exposure from Rolling Stone.

When did Rolling Stone become so silly and insipid?  I was never a big fan of the magazine, but in the old days at least I understood why someone might want to read it.  Now it is hard for me to understand why anyone would look at it--it's like People magazine, I think--though I haven't seen a People magazine in many years, so maybe it has dropped down a notch or seven too.

To think that Rolling Stone used to run things by Tom Wolfe and Hunter Thompson.  Now it runs puff-pieces by fan boys.

The end of my subscription, though, made me think about the magazines I still do get:

1. The New Criterion  I love this one--a fantastic cultural journal.  Almost every article in every issue is worth reading.  Simply and completely fantastic--they maintain a very high literary standard throughout and run articles on all sort of fascinating topics.  Just this morning, I read a great article by Anthony Daniels about a short story by Flaubert.  Riveting.

2. Wired.  My other favorite at the moment.  Also a subscription started from an Amazon Christmas offer (two years ago)--I am seriously hooked.  A magazine for geeks.  Wonderfully done.

3. First Things  I still don't know about this one.  I really want to like it a lot, but sometimes I have this nagging feeling in the back of my mind that it isn't as good as I want it to be.

4. National Review.  Ugh.  I subscribe to it out of a misplaced sense of devotion for a long-time friend.  You know those friends who gradually become alcoholics and losers and stop talking about anything interesting and yet you still feel the need to talk to them, because, well, you are friends after all?  Well, I never had a friend like that until National Review.  I used to love this magazine.  Now it drives me nuts.  It used to be good; now it is mostly the written equivalent of the evening TV news--low-brow political handicapping.  It still has some great writers whose stuff I enjoy (Goldberg, Long, Steyn, King, Derbyshire, Nordlinger), but in any given issue, anything not written by them has about a 10% chance of being worth reading.  When I get a new issue--like today, for example--I glance at the table of contents with a sense of dread--how many horrible articles am I going to have to read this week?  Yet, I can't bring myself to stop reading it.  It would feel like betraying something important to stop.  Someday it will become good again, right?