Some Words

In a few weeks, my subscription to the New Yorker runs out. This has left me wondering if I should renew it. In the past, I had been getting gift subscriptions from my parents. A while ago, I hinted heavily that I wasn’t sure they should bother. They obliged and I did not get a renewal notice this time around. At this point I’m getting the tail end, from when Conde Nast decided my address had changed without me moving. It didn’t come for a whole and when I called up they said that it was undeliverable, which was of course odd, as it had been delivered for months previous.

Regardless, that gave me a backlog, and now I have to do the math on this thing to see if I really want it. It’s a harder choice than I had realized. Most New Yorkers have one or two articles I find interesting, and catty movie review, and maybe a profile of an artist or two that perks my interest. There’s nothing wrong with that. Sometimes, as was the case with this last issue, almost the entire magazine is interesting.

But that is a lot of time sunk. The New Yorker has its style. That style happens to be one that leads to a lot of extrea reading. People are introduced, given hundreds of words of background, and then given a single meaningful quote. I know why they do it. I think it works quite a bit of the time, but I don’t know that I have time to read it, especially since I’m going to grad school. So, now the question is, do I resubscribe? How much of that paper is going to be wasted?