Listening to: New Buffalo, "Recovery."
Things I learned flipping through a recent issue of Fast Company: Experts predict that fish stocks will be overfished by 2048. The world population in 2050 will be 9 billion; it's currently at 6 billion and climbing. Forty percent of the homeless people in San Francisco have been there for less than three months. Olive Garden and Red Lobster are owned by the same parent company (Darden Restuarants) and have average check prices of $15 and $19, respectively.
In sum, I'm glad I'll be close to death when fish and space on Earth run out, I've been in SF longer than almost half the homeless in SF, and I need to go to a Red Lobster soon because it's great. I had cut all magazines out of my reading diet, focusing strictly on books and online things for awhile. However, I think I should subscribe to a few magazines again because I miss flipping through articles while brushing my teeth, making something to eat, etc. And you can learn a thing or two. Sometimes more than you wanted to know actually.
If I had a permanent address to send subscriptions to, I'd want to get: Entertainment Weekly, The New Yorker, Fast Company, Us Weekly, and Wired. A few weeks ago, when I was over at Victor and Anne's house, I was flipping through their Cook's Illustrated, which is an awesome magazine with Wall Street Journal-like pen and ink pictures. They scientifically test all sorts of cooking gadgets and have very tightly composed recipes. I don't even cook but found much of the content fascinating.
Once upon a time, I had dreams of starting my own magazine. Nowadays, I'll just happily settle for admiring others. The magazine business is under as much fire as the newspaper industry and now's not the time to start something. Or is it?
"Some of the problems that have beset music magazines are familiar from discussions about the publishing industry's woes in general: Readership's down, advertising's down, the old guard has been slow in adapting to the Internet. But like newspapers and shelter titles, music magazines have proven especially vulnerable."
-Why music magazines are dying-
