Aguila Bait

At TNR's The Book Tom Bissell reviews Elizabeth Fraterrigo's Playboy and the Making of the Good Life in Modern America. The opening graph:

The historian Elizabeth Fraterrigo asks us to accept a somewhat unlikely premise, which is this: A titty magazine that has been culturally irrelevant since the late 1970s was at the forefront of many of this nation’s most important social upheavals and reconfigurations. It is to her book’s credit—and, it must be said, to Playboy’s—that one closes her book largely convinced that she is right.

Hopefully this guy will weigh in, as he knows of which he speaks on this particular cultural question.

WaMo Turns 40

Washington Monthly celebrates its 40th birthday this year. As part of the celebration, the magazine has posted some of its greatest hits, which you can access here. Among my favorites: Taylor Branch on Civil Rights in Southwest Georgia, the smugness of baby boomers, the dubiousness of Woodward and Bernstein's cozying up to certain sources, and an assessment of the magazine's "Bullseyes and Blunders" over the last four decades.

Not Playing Any More

Play, the fantastic sports magazine that came out quarterly in the Sunday New York Times is closing up shop after an all-too-brief run at the top. Play fell victim to the frankly lousy economic situation facing newspapers and magazines right now. It will be missed.

The New New Republic and its Customers: Whining Alert!

As my regular readers well know, I am a loyal reader of the venerable New Republic. TNR has been relentlessly promoting its new restructuring in which the magazine is going to be thicker, more in-depth, and printed on higher quality paper. It will now come every other week, as opposed to weekly. But it's thicker!

I am fine with a restructuring, and if a bigger and better magazine comes less frequently I may actually get through the whole thing more regularly.

But here's the thing. TNR is converting its subscribers over to the new subscription not by giving us the same number of magazines, but rather by cutting our magazines in half because -- I kid you not -- the new magazine is twice as thick!

I wrote the following in the comments of one of the many posts over at The Plank pimping the new, improved TNR:

To be fair, those of us who subscribe really have the right to wonder if we are not being sold a bill of goods. We subscribed for X number of magazines, and now will get .5X under the argument that the magazine will be "thicker." Yet I did not subscribe for fatness, I subscribed with the understanding that my magazine would arrive at a certain frequency. And I don't want to call some number and unsubscribe. I paid for a product -- my options should not be to get that product at half the frequency I paid for or to end my subscription. The honorable thing to do would be to measure subscribers based not on girth (Suggested new TNR promo line: "Girth: Not just for penises anymore!") but rather on what we paid for: suck it up and give us the number of issues left on our subscription, and hit us up at the new rate/frequency for renewal. Is that really so unreasonable? After all, I subscribed based on incessant assertions of value above the newstand rate based on that newsstand frequency. Why should I have to assume that the product will be better just because you say it will?

Of course I received no response.

But here is the kicker. I finally received my new issue. (TNR tends to come very late relative to when it posts things online and unlike almost all magazines, it arrives after the issue date printed on the front.) It certainly is of higher quality. But it also comes in at 64 pages. That's four pages short of twice as long as the old issues. Not a significant number, perhaps, but it will add up to sixteen pages a month. It seems preplexing to me that TNR would nickel and dime those who are, by definition, its most loyal customers. I'd welcome a response, though I know I won't get one.