I
was a “free-rider” for many years when it came to magazines with
Internet pages. Long ago, I would copy the free stuff to Word and
then print the articles out. More recently, I obtained a Kindle, and
I sent the Word files to the Kindle. I hunted among the better
magazines, the New Yorker, the New York Review of Books, The
Atlantic, Harper's, and others. They never gave away the entire
content of an actual copy of the magazine, but they'd give you some.
It varied. The New Yorker, like the New York Times, will give you a
certain number of articles every month. Then you get cut off. The New
York Review of Books gives you a few of the articles every month,
adding new ones every week or so. You can help yourself to as much as
they put up. They're very generous, actually, but then again, the
Review contains a lot of material, and most of it isn't free.
Harper's is on the stingy side. Their web page lists all of the
contents for the month, but most of the articles have a red dot next
to them. “Subscribers only.” That way you can see what you're
missing. The Atlantic? I think they give it all away, except the
archive. The sum of the free stuff from all sources was already more
than I could find the time to read. I grabbed new stuff whenever I
ran out.
We
say “free-rider” in English to describe someone who hovers around
the campsite like a wild dog waiting to pick up some scraps. The
Germans have a better term, as often happens. They call you a
“Schwartzfahrer,” or “black-rider.” You hear the term most
often associated with public transportation. Almost everyone has a
monthly pass, and they just get on the bus or streetcar and sit down.
No one says anything, and usually no one checks. If you have no
“Monatspass,” you tell the driver how far you're going and pay in
cash. Every so often, though, someone in uniform will get on the bus
and check everyone's proof of having paid, either by showing the
monthly card or showing the ticket that you got from the driver when
you paid the fare. I got the impression that not having either thing
was considered a serious breach of the public trust. People shuddered
at the thought. No jail time, but they were going to embarrass you
and hit you with a substantial fine. My advice if you ever go to
Germany is to follow all of the rules. They're very friendly if you
do, but their patience quickly runs out if you don't.
The
recent general assault on democracy and human decency, and on the
free investigative press in particular, made me rethink my casual
abuse of those magazines. I began to subscribe to some of them. Right
now I have subscriptions to the Atlantic, the New York Times, and
Harper's. I am most happy about the Harper's.
I
love getting the Harper's Index every month. (“Percentage of
Democrats who believe that their personal incomes will rise over the
next year: 60.” “Of Republicans who do: 83.”) The May issue had
a few very long articles that were fascinating and educational. One
by Thomas Frank about the way that populism has been treated in
American politics. Another by Ian Baruma about the democracy
situation in Hong Kong and Taiwan. And one shedding light on a major
scandal that hardly raises an eyebrow in America: the 1MDB scandal in
Malaysia. That would be the theft of many billions of dollars from a
Malaysian sovereign-wealth fund called 1 Malaysia Development Berhad.
The Ringit dropped about thirty percent on that one. Goldman Sachs is
heavily implicated.
There
are also shorter articles and reviews that often seem to coincide
with my own interests. Writers that I like (in May, Walter Lippmann);
artists that I love (in May, film maker Jacques Tati). The magazine
finishes up with “Findings” on the last page. Findings is a
string of random facts strung together in a manner that seems casual
but probably isn't. In the May issue, we were told that, “[d]amage
to parts of the right frontotemporoinsular lobes that spares the
anterior hypothalamus was linked to the emergence of acquired
pedophilia.” This sentence appears in the middle of a paragraph,
between two totally unrelated sentences. Fascinating, certainly, and
interesting, but also a bit disturbing. I am almost motivated to find
out more about how someone could go about carefully avoiding such
injuries. That would be a terrible malady to come down with by
accident.
I
also love Harper's because they have a deep respect for tradition.
All of the others sold me a “digital” subscription, but Harper's
insists on sending me a physical copy. I also have digital access to
their archive, but there is no option to save some money by foregoing
the physical copy. Something like two out of three actually arrive at
my mailbox, due to the vagueries of international mail. I love being
able to throw one in my attache case. It's much lighter than my
Kindle, and I never leave the house without emergency reading.
My
plan is to rotate these subscriptions somehow. Maybe next year I'll
drop the Atlantic and subscribe to the New Yorker. I'm almost afraid
to subscribe to the New York Review of Books. There are only so many
hours in a day, and I don't want to give up history books or novels.
I humbly recommend that we all do more to support our quality
investigative press. That's the key phrase to remember, the
investigation part. It's expensive for a magazine to put something
like that together. Most of the typical websites just have a bunch of
“content providers” sitting at home terminals turning out short
articles full of typos about things that they are familiar with.
Think of that Ian Baruma article about Chinese democracy. Harper's
sent him to Hong Kong and Taiwan for that one, and he interviewed
numerous scholarly individuals whom he has known personally for
decades. That kind of thing costs money.
So
I don't mind paying, within limits.
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