Printed and Unrepentant

Magazines are my bathroom religion and I’m not apologizing for it. I’ve been reading them in there for as long as I can remember, and no blog, no feed reader, no algorithmically curated anything has displaced them from that particular ritual.

I buy two kinds. On the design and tech side, I used to pick up everything Mac-related—the whole ecosystem of print, month after month. That habit mostly shifted to blogs, because the web moves faster than print can follow. But Computer Arts is still a regular purchase: good ideas per page, consistent, and it makes me want to get up and make something, which is the only real test for a design publication. PAGE too—good for keeping track of what’s moving in web and design culture.

The other category I’d call new-generation lifestyle: the titles that sit somewhere between long-form journalism and glossy provocation. NEON runs stories that stay with you for days. Blond has the aesthetic right. Then there’s Muteen, a French title I buy mostly because I can’t read it—the language barrier strips the text away and leaves you just looking at the design, which is often worth the price on its own.

The magazines-are-dead argument has always felt lazy to me. My laptop is not going in the bath. Print demands a different kind of attention—slower, less interrupted—that a browser tab is constitutionally incapable of providing. Screens refresh. Paper just sits there.