Meg Houston Maker

Reading Glasses, Snow Shovel

Earlier this year I canceled my subscription to the New Yorker. The damned thing comes on like a snowstorm, all prose and folly, a blizzard of words. It's impossible to read it all in the time allotted, and the following week it comes around and hits you again. It seemed so bourgeoisie to subscribe and yet not read it all, almost unethical. I felt ashamed of the issues lying about, drifts of them languishing, reminding me of my inattention, my dilettantism. So I canceled.

Usually I feel better after a decision. Not so here. I missed it. Friends would occasionally remark on New Yorker stories they'd read, and while I'm never bothered when a friend talks about a television show (I haven't lived with a television since moving to college), I felt sorely left out. This mattered more. Here was compendium of our best writing by our best writers, the mouthpiece of our culture's mind, our collected ideas about who we are and what we are about. But I had willingly, willfully, set it to mute.

So today I re-subscribed. There was no one to stop me, to throw themselves, open-armed, before me, pleading sense and reason. I figure I'll read it at the gym while climbing my one hundred twenty-five stories on the stair mill (thirty minutes of slightly breathless vertical effort that always lands me, oddly, in the same place).

Batten down the hatches.

Magazine Archives: Easier is Better

It must happen a thousand times a day, all across North America. Someone picks up a copy of The New Yorker, maybe in the hair salon, maybe while waiting to tell their psychotherapist about the latest development in their extramarital affair. She, or he, gets through three quarters of an article before her dye job's ready to be rinsed out, or his analyst's previous client exits discreetly through the side door.

So later, maybe much later, she, or he, goes online to the New Yorker website to try to find the article and finish it. Now, who was that author? Was it Atwan or Menand? And what issue was it in? Maybe the Fiction Issue—which was, maybe, a two-week issue. But which two weeks was it? I think it was in... June?

This happened to me, recently (I was the one at the hair salon). The article was in fact by Menand, and it appeared in the June 8th and 15th Fiction Issue. But I didn't remember all that when I began.

There is an "Archive" section of the New Yorker site, and I started there. But the archive doesn't present a list of issue dates, with articles contained therein. Instead, users are invited to search for contents. But search, of course, requires you to know something of what you're searching. My hair appointment was a week ago. I didn't remember all the particulars, so I had to poke away at it to coax the final answer.

Search is nice, but for my use case, a simple taxonomy of the last hundred or so issues, in reverse chronological order, would have gotten me there sooner.

Engaged Readership

In the past month, my food journal, Maker's Table, has been visited by people in, among other places: Petalin Jaya, Malaysia; Lingen, Germany; Copenhagen, Denmark; Casablanca, Morocco; Guelph, Canada; and Mountain View, California. Because it's on the web, and because all web users have network connections, my data collectors can finger them out.

It is a wondrous thing for a writer to get a glimpse of her readership, and doubly so when her readers find her from the globe's four corners.