Written Pyramids

My roommate and I together subscribe to seven magazines. In subjective, increasing order of snobbery they are:

USWeekly (hers), New York (mine), Time (hers), Newsweek (mine), National Geographic (mine, a recent gift from my dad), National Review (hers), and The Economist (mine).

That's not counting The New Yorker, which I cannot bring myself to subscribe to because of the sheer amount of reading material that comes to our door every week, but which I buy at news stand price about twice a month. And of course there is the daily dose of the Washington Post and its weekly magazine, which is supposed to be part of our rent, but which I have been buying daily at newsstand price because there is something wrong with the delivery system.

Many of these magazines end up in our bathroom, prompting a friend to quip "there is so much good reading material in there. I didn't want to leave." That same friend, on a different visit, came out of the bathroom and said "Uh, not to judge, but you have USWeekly in there." To which the other friend visiting with her responded "I was a lot more concerned about the National Review." (Side note: The New York Times, ran a long and well written obit of the National Review founder, William F. Buckley, today. It says that he may have died in the middle of writing a column, That's incredible).

In its defense, USWeekly is on a "must read magazines" compiled by a former EIC of my college newspaper who is currently writing for Fortune. He put it on there, because like it or not, celebrity journalism (I resisted the scare quotes) is here to stay, and USWeekly does what it does well. But I would not go so far, as a friend recently did when asking a question to the Executive Editor of the Washington Post, to call it an "arts magazine."

Anyway, all of this musing was sparked by this quote from Overheard In New York:

"Chick: My life has really changed since moving to New York. Like, in L.A. I use to read Us Weekly, and now I read The New Yorker."

Ha.