“Magazines were expected to be magisterial registers of the passing scene”

Magazines in their great age, before they were unmoored from their spines and digitally picked apart, before perpetual blogging made them permeable packages, changing mood at every hour and up all night like colicky infants—magazines were expected to be magisterial registers of the passing scene. Yet, though they were in principle temporal, a few became dateless, timeless.

Adam Gopnik, “Yellow Fever”, The New Yorker (22 April 2013), 102.

Every magazine is addressed to a readership for whom what the magazine presents as attained is in truth aspirational

Every magazine is addressed to a readership for whom what the magazine presents as attained is in truth aspirational: Seventeen is read by twelve-year-olds, and no playboy has ever read Playboy. The explicit goal of the National Geographic Society, and of its house journal, was to show the world to the worldly, to enlarge the map, to support exploration with grants and medals. But the real task of National Geographic was to show white people who rarely got far from Cincinnati or San Francisco what lay beyond their ken.

Adam Gopnik, “Yellow Fever”, The New Yorker (22 April 2013), 104.