What Magazine do you miss the most?

I really liked Interview magazine... I got it as part of one of those rip-off deals where you'd order 17 magazines for the price of one and 10 years later, they're still coming to my childhood home.

 

I was living in San Jose Costa Rica in 1990-1991 and after my job finished I would walk through this really nice, tree line street past the central park of Costa Rica to buy a copy of The National . San Jose is at 4,000 feet so a 90 is a really hot day. It would have cooled a bit and the sun would be setting over the mountains. The owner of the newsstand would sell me The National fresh off the plan from Miami. I would read it while I ate dinner and thought it was great.

Then I went back to Denver to visit my family. The Newsland (a great newsstand, R.I.P) by my parents house could not sell me the National because it was not distributed in Denver. Which, I guess, explains why it died.

 

I was a high school senior in 1990-91 and toting The National to lunch gained me entry to the cool kids' table. Imagine that shit today (kids reading newspapers, not me being cool, though I suppose they may be interchangeably incomprehensible). Among the things we could include w/our bios in the yearbook were career objectives. I wrote mine was to become the editor of The National. The paper folded the week we got our yearbooks. I didn't take the fucking hint.

 

How long ago was 1990-91?

I was a freshman at Northeast Missouri State in Kirksville (before it became Truman State, and before I transferred the next year to the University of Iowa, where the young woman who is now “Mrs. Coco” went).

Anyway, I remember those of us with early morning classes would look for USA Today in the cafeteria, because its sports section had all the baseball box scores. The early edition of the Post-Dispatch did not.

No surfing through Facebook (or SJ.com) during breakfast back then!

 

I think it was amazing. I read the Denver newspapers at the beginning of the newspaper wars of the 1980's and they were good. But the National was operating about five levels above the Post or the News. What a talented staff.

 

Yeah, anyone can flood a newsroom with money for a year or two.

But we saw what happened, of course. RIP, National,
but we kicked ass on our Metro Final for 20 more years.

That was amazing, too.

 

I used to really enjoy Time, Newsweek, SI and Car and Driver. Then they all started going down the shitter. I think I dropped SI first; it seemed like they were focused more on athletes' tattoos than what they did during actual games. Newsweek went next when they were trying to cut circulation and wanted $100 bucks for a year or something. Then Time, because I never got a chance to read it, then Car and Driver, which seemed to go downhill.
I still get The New Yorker though. I don't always have a chance to read it every week, but I'm always engrossed in it when I do.

 

I have several decades worth of hobby-specific magazines in boxes in the attic.

So, no, I don't miss any magazines.

 

As an eighth grader with (a) a watch and (b) way too much time on his hands and (c) way too much passion for sports, I realized that I could get dropped off by my bus and make it to the local convenience store and back four blocks away before school started. School had a long concrete staircase and I'd slow walk it until the bus cleared the corner, then book it down to Stop-N-Go, grab the USA Today and head back to school. I was a huge Portland Trail Blazers fan then and I'd walk down to get the paper the day after games to have the recap and box. After about the fifth time I did this the bus driver pulled me aside and asked what I was doing. I had nothing to hide and told him, then opened my backpack and showed him two old papers in there. He said, "you know, what you're doing could get me in trouble since you're leaving school grounds," so I stopped.

 

The National's brief existence came and went when I was 12 years old. Back then, my dad commuted into New York early every morning and came home every night with the Times, Post, Daily News, and Wall Street Journal. We lived a short ways from the train station, where there were 20+ boxes on each side of the tracks for all the dailies, including the Inquirer, Philly Daily News, Financial Times, USAT, and so forth. If it wasn't pouring rain after school, friends and I would go to the station and check the coin returns - at least twice a week you'd be able to scrounge a dollar or more in abandoned coinage that we'd usually turn around and spend on a copy of The National and packs of baseball cards.

 

Lines and lines of newspaper vending boxes. Man, that's a great (and sadly dated) memory.

Anyone here ever spend 50 cents and grab multiple papers out of the box? Pretty sure I did that for my Mom's obit in our hometown paper, but I felt zero guilt about that and neither would she, since she knew how terrible management was.