I was at the store a while back, before the 2016 election. I was standing in line for the register and there was a bank of magazines nearby so I glanced over them and something came to be obvious to me. They were all small. Smaller than traditionally standard sized magazines. This didn't so much surprise me but was a sign of the times.
Scientific American used to be a big magazine. Thick too. One I was addicted to. As a young male I also liked Playboy, though I was never addicted to it quite like I was SA. Yet it too used to be a bigger magazine. But no longer. It just was not the mag I used to know and love so much and it was sad. The articles in comparison to its older version, I found a bit lame. I took a look at Psychology Today and wondered, "When did it turn into a glossary pop psychology form of Cosmo?"
Not unlike Popular Mechanics magazine. The quality just wasn't there anymore. These may still be good magazines, but they simply aren't great any longer. Not what they once were.
It was depressing. I learned my style of writing from SA and once years ago nearly got a software manual published world wide with Digital Press using that style of starting simple and then going deeper than anyone might want to go, or even know about. It was an amazing format I became addicted to back in the late 70s.
That manual was still being used at two of our biggest Seattle medical centers many years later, at University of Washington Medical Center and our regional Which I found humorous not just because of its earned moniker due to receiving all kinds of trauma patients, but because when I was in the military we called our on base barracks, "The Zoo".
I can understand cutting down the size of these magazines but... the quality? SA had always stood for quality and excellence. Now I guess it may be just pretty, and pretty small. I haven't read a recent copy so maybe they've gotten some of it back. Though I doubt it because that's just not the climate of the times. Today it is all about the superficial. the easy to grasp, the outrageous, the click bait.
We even have a superficial definitely non-SA type", clickbait president" in Donald Trump. Our first in that manner and our worst. Elected by a click bait electorate while all the rest stood by in shock, wondering how that could happen.
Click bat does damage. It gathers superficial attention, but it wastes time and resources and even angers some once anyone of intellectual substance finds they have once again been conned. But it gathers wealth for the click baiter because that is all they care about. Substance anymore, is irrelevant.
All those things are something those superficial Trump followers and supporters are about to find out about. Once he is abandoned and out of the public limelight that he is so very much addicted to... and pleasured by. All at our expense. Always, at our expense. One has to wonder in considering how the Republican party has devolved from George HW Bush, to George W Bush to Trump...just what the hell is next in that ever declining succession of qualitatively ever decreasing and ever more questionable "politicians".
Still, I'm open minded, believe it or not. I will have to open the cover of one of those diminished magazines the next time I am at the store. Just to check out the direction they are now headed in.
Now that being superficial is our nationalistic pastime.
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