Print Magazines are Awesome

When we lived in London, our house had a small second bathroom next to the kitchen. Nothing fancy; just a toilet, and sink. Oh, and one surprisingly useful feature: a magazine nook.

This was nothing more than a lit space in the wall, sized just right for most magazines. It was there when we moved in, and for a few years, it was where we put the soap.

As hard as it is to believe, in 2009/10 there were still plenty of print magazines around. I even wrote for a few of them, and over time, I began to accumulate author copies. One day, I went to take a shit, and I wanted something to read, so I grabbed a copy of Wired that happened to be lying around. When I was done, I absentmindedly stuck it in the nook.

It was only a few days later that I happened to glance into the bathroom as I walked past, and noticed just how natural the magazine looked there. And if this is the part where you make a joke about its natural proximity to the toilet, I'm going to drown you in one.

Eventually, I started stashing all my magazines in there. The pile grew quite large, and every time I looked at it, I felt a sense of strange satisfaction. Smugness, even. Printed words make me happy. Each of those magazines was the result of hundreds of hours of work from teams of (usually, if my track record was to go by) severely underpaid people, and they were marvellous.

Except now it's 2022. The world sucks. And one of the things that I let fall out of my life since the happy days of reading while taking a shit are magazines. I don't know why. It certainly wasn't because I take fewer shits.

Perhaps I became too used to contributor copies arriving in the post, and when they stopped, I simply never got around to subscribing. Now and then, I would think fondly about print magazines, and promised myself that I would get some. In the future. When I was less busy.

And last year, I decided that this entire situation was completely ridiculous. I might have no control over the world, or climate change, or wars, or pandemics, but I certainly had control over my reading matter. With that in mind, I subscribed to the basketball bible: SLAM Magazine.

It has a phenomenal story behind it. It was launched in the 90s, as a competitor to the stuffy Sports Illustrated, and its stance was unapologetically street. It was just as likely to feature stories on hip-hop culture and street fashion as it was basketball. I'd never actually subscribed to them before, and I was delighted to find out that I could have a years' worth of issues delivered to my door for around forty bucks.

In short order, I discovered a few things.

1. Sports magazines used to come weekly, or almost monthly. Nowadays, they come every two months, if you're lucky with the post. I don't mean to sound old or curmudgeonly here, so count this as nothing more than a simple observation about the financial realities of print publishing in 2022.
2. The writing is crap. That's me being generous. It's predictable, puffy, low on insight, and sometimes wildly stupid. They seem to have a particular love for Kyrie Irving, a player who has been in the news recently because he is an ardent anti-vaxxer and generally a bit of a buffoon (he also happens to think that Earth is flat. No I'm not joking). I don't mean to suggest that the SLAM staff are antivaxxers, or that they believe in brick-dumb conspiracy theories, but they do seem to uncritically except all players regardless of how loony their views may be.
3. Getting back into magazines is just THE BEST.

You wouldn’t think it, would you? Sporadic, crappily-written publications filled with uncritical nonsense doesn’t sound like fun. And yet, it is. It really is. It feels almost illicit—like you’re doing something mildly illegal, like your friends would give you weird looks if they knew.

I'd forgotten the joy of leisurely paging through a print magazine, putting it down, picking it up again later to pick up where I left off. I forgot how good it feels to hold printed journalism in my hands. I love the Internet, and I will go to some lengths to defend the publications on it. But no magazine is going to flash irritating pop-ups at me. The closest they come to asking me to subscribe to their newsletter is a small cardboard insert that I can immediately throw away. There are zero autoplaying videos.

It must also be said: fair dues to SLAM. They put just as many female players on the cover as they do male ones. That is an unquestioned improvement over the 90s.

Again, I realise that I'm coming off as a slight Luddite here, so I do want to say that magazines aren’t perfect—SLAM certainly isn’t. And I don't want to go back to a time where the Internet didn't exist, which was a time where it was exceptionally difficult to write for a larger audience if you were a woman or a person of colour. That would be, it almost goes without saying, a terrible idea.

Just about everything in the world sucks at the moment, and it's nice to have one simple, calm, stress-free thing that I can occupy myself with. Unfortunately, the magazines can't live in the bathroom; we've moved house, and country, and apparently the Canadians don't believe in magazine nooks.

(Or, weirdly, ceiling lights. No, honestly. Every house I've lived in in this otherwise splendid country has no lights in the ceilings. No-one seems to know why. They always look mildly worried when I point it out, as if they hadn't noticed.)

If you're looking for a low-stress, surprisingly affordable way to enjoy yourself, I recommend subscribing to magazine. The writing certainly isn't better than the Internet, but you get to feel awfully smug.

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