Last week I wrote a splendor-in-the-tall-grass story about how Anything’s Possible in 2025, zooming in on the apparent, to my eye, transition of The New York Times to a satirical digital/print company. And, adding to Jacob Bernstein’s Spy-esque foray into the minds of “plutocrats” allegedly worried about a Mamdani victory in NYC this November, a few days later Katie Rogers had a ball with the rumors that Donald Trump was dying or dead. She wrote: “For a swath of hyper-online Americans over the long Labor Day weekend, all of this was explanation enough: The president was either dead or about to be.” Rogers didn’t say if Trump made it to heaven or not, but Rooster Quibbits (a friend, I think!), assures me that the softened President will soon play a harpsichord for his new pals up above. Anything’s possible, and I didn’t make this up.
On the other side of this life, I’m duty-bound to point out, here’s something that isn’t remotely possible. I recently received in the mail a come-on from Harper’s (a subscription I let lapse right around the near-riot of absurdity—but maybe satiric—of Barack Obama receiving a Nobel Peace Prize not even a year after taking office) with the message they’d like to have me back. It’s nice to be nice, my five-year-old motto, and the magazine’s implicit flattery merited at least a glance. Unless the Harper’s Magazine Foundation’s portfolio hit an iceberg, I assume the monthly is still cash-flush (like The Atlantic, bankrolled by Laurene Jobs for “journalists” who’ve washed out elsewhere but are glad of her inherited lucre), and this USPS cold call struck me as bizarre.
I scanned this September cover and saw these headlines: “WHY CONGRESS MUST IMPEACH TRUMP”; “The End of Public School as We Know It”; “Who Decides What Antisemitism Means?”; “Whittaker Chambers’s Lies About Alger Hiss”; and “A Swamp-Rat Slaughter On the Bayou.” Maybe some smartypants at the Harper’s office was having a laugh, and if so, “good on” him/her/non-binary.
I receive numerous emails from The New Republic about re-upping a sub (nyet), as well as The Nation’s invitations, which come with “bonus” advantages of enrolling in their progressive wine club and hopping on a cruise with left-wing kooks giving lectures that, if the one-in-a-billion-plutocrat’s chance I boarded the ecologically-approved boat, would put me to sleep faster than a Jake Tapper monologue on saving democracy. (I didn’t expect Tapper would survive CNN’s purge of “talent” after the embarrassing Biden book—name erased from memory—he co-authored last fall, but Jake must have, like Trump, divinity on his side.)
A curious part of this fleeting Harper’s episode, and this is semi-arcane, is that the sample issue proffered didn’t contain even one blow-in card advertisement. That took me aback, as well as back to the late-20th century task of, when piling up the magazines received at home or the office, removing those annoyances (some publications took it to an extreme, but money’s money) and all those foul perfume inserts from the likes of Vanity Fair, Esquire and GQ. If I’m not mistaken, even the short-lived Wigwag (a marvelous monthly that didn’t catch on, maybe because of its literacy/bad marketing), and Malcolm Forbes’ Egg (awful stuff, an example of media excess in 1990 when the thought was just chuck in innocuous content and watch the dollars roll in; they didn’t for Egg), had them damn blow-in cards.
And this was before the flood of tech magazines in the late-1990s that grew so fast in pages that earnest editors got no sleep inventing stories to complement the ads. That dot com bubble, as some remember, was loudly popped around 2000 (along with, regrettably, all those full-page “Computer Class” ads that put a twinkle in my accountant’s eye at New York Press).
I counted 21 advertisements in the September Harper’s that I’ve now recycled (a nod to the staff), but most were trade, heavily-discounted or “house” ads, including those from PETA—haven’t heard of them for a long time—and a pro-choice organization. I’m betting the Princeton University Press full-pager was a freebie too, judging by the titles displayed. Same with the quarter-page vertical from the bimonthly newspaper County Highway, a broadsheet that bears no resemblance to the doctrinaire Harper’s.
The picture above of my parents and two oldest brothers was taken on July 4th somewhere in New Jersey (they moved around a lot), a long time before the ill-fated inception of Egg. It’s possible Mom, who voted for Norman Thomas in 1948, assuming Thomas Dewey would win, subscribed to Harper’s, but from what I’m told the growing family preferred newspapers (lots of them) and weeklies like Time.
Take a look at the clues to figure out the year: The Cleveland Rams win the NFL championship; the Cleveland Buckeyes win the Negro World Series; Byron Nelson takes the PGA Championship; the Davis Cup wasn’t held; Joan Crawford stars in Mildred Pierce for director Michael Curtiz; Sylvester the Cat makes his debut; Carousel opens on Broadway; the Set Decorator’s Union goes on strike in Hollywood; Tony Dow is born and Theodore Dreiser dies; The Andrew Sisters smash the charts with “Rum and Coca-Cola”; “Who Threw the Whiskey In the Mill” by Lucky Millinder is a hit on r ‘n’ b radio stations; Ebony begins publication; and John Steinbeck’s Cannery Row is published.
—Follow Russ Smith on Twitter: @MUGGER2023