My Weekly Dose of Nostalgia
My Weekly Dose of Nostalgia
When I was a kid, I decorated my bedroom walls with Sports Illustrated covers. As an adult, I'm falling in love with magazines all over again.
When I was a kid, I covered my bedroom walls with Sports Illustrated covers.
Each week, after I had devoured the articles of the latest edition, I utilized my carefully honed technique to separate the cover from the rest of the issue without any rips or tears. For a messy child who otherwise grew up to be a clumsy adult, I was remarkably successful at this process.
Eventually, the covers wrapped all the way around my room, at which point I would remove the oldest cover and replace it with the latest edition. If the featured athlete was a particular favorite, I relocated their image to a separate section of my walls. The rest were given last rites and solemnly recycled, akin to a burial at sea.
Growing up under the watchful gaze of Usain Bolt and LaMarr Woodley imprinted on me, but not in the way middle school Ben had hoped. Instead of becoming an Olympian or Super Bowl champion, I grew up to be a writer.
My family — mostly my mother — received a lot of magazines. I would say “read” instead of “received,” but I never saw her nor anyone else reading a huge chunk of the magazines delivered to our house. I assume to this day that subscriptions like O, The Oprah Magazine, Good Housekeeping, and People were inadvertently maintained, as their weekly editions were immediately consigned to the nice bathroom to serve as in-seat entertainment.
Other publications to which we subscribed, proved to be quite popular, however — to the point that my parents, siblings, and I had to work out an exchange system for each new edition. Mom always had first crack at Time and and dad had dibs on National Geographic, while I exercised my oldest sibling privileges to flip through Sports Illustrated, Nintendo Power, and Game Informer before my brothers and sister. In a time before smartphones, a magazine was the go-to source of diversion during harried breakfasts before school when no one was yet awake enough to want to talk.
Growing up in a magazine family is one of the main reasons I maintain such a love for longform journalism. Sadly, many of the publications I read so diligently as a kid no longer publish print editions, or, as is the case with Popular Science and National Geographic, have ceased to publish anything resembling a magazine at all.
Between the digitalization and ensuing contraction of legacy media outlets of the 2010s and the general instability of life as a college student and young adult, magazines largely faded from my life, resurfacing only in nostalgic reverie whenever I visited my parents and encountered the few covers still clinging to my childhood bedroom walls.
A few months into my newly independent post-college graduation life, something changed. While checking the mail at my first apartment in Sacramento, I was surprised to find a physical magazine staring back at me.
My alma mater had sent me my first issue of Notre Dame Magazine. Alumni offices must recruit former employees of the NSA, as this subscription has since followed me to three apartments and two cities without me once having provided Notre Dame with my post-grad address. Once per quarter, rain or shine, Notre Dame Magazine arrives in my mailbox.
Once I overcame my surprise, I flipped through the Fall 2020 copy I had received. Most of the writing is — obviously — dedicated to developments on and around campus, little of which is of interest to a young alumni living 2,000 miles away and having grown fairly disillusioned with his former institution. However, I will cop to immediately opening to the “Alumni News” section at the back of each edition, scanning for self-reported gossip from the class of 2020.
While my university’s official publication might not be the type of publication I would voluntarily purchase, a lifetime subscription seems like a fair deal for the $240,000 in tuition the school extracted from me. More importantly, the surprise arrival of the magazine reawakened the feelings of joy I had as a kid hearing the Post Office truck pull away on Sports Illustrated or Game Informer delivery day.
I love the way magazine paper feels to the touch, how its paper is glossy and a bit thicker than what you find in a book. I love the insane advertisements you find toward the back of most weekly publications, with blurbs for fortune tellers and matchmakers and snake oil supplements seemingly straight out of the 19th century. I love how print editions function as time capsules you never realized you created, as by nature a paper magazine will always be slightly outdated upon delivery.
And while a lot of magazines have closed their doors or moved entirely online, there are still plenty of great outlets that continue to mail out excellent writing to old fashioned readers such as myself. Thanks to Notre Dame Magazine’s surprise arrival, I began slowly exploring what other options I still had.
As it turns out, no matter how privacy conscious you are, once a publication’s marketing department discovers they found one of the 17 people still willing to pay for print media in the year 2024, they have you marked for life. These targeted offers for steeply discounted trial subscriptions are how a single indulgence — the quarterly print version of Jacobin — has morphed over the past two years to include In These Times, The Nation, and, soon, The New York Review of Books. The year is halfway complete, and I still haven’t finished the stack of books I was given for Christmas, but how could I say no to 24 issues for the low, low price of $10?
Everyone has their nostalgic media format of choice. On a recent flight, I sat next to a middle-aged man listening to music from an honest-to-God MP3 player, and it wasn’t even an iPod! In 2022, vinyl records surpassed CDs as the most popular form of physical music sales for the first time since 1987, a resurgence driven largely by Millennial and Gen Z customers. Maddening digital rights management policies and a pandemic-inspired boom in popularity pushed the prices of used copies of physical copies of classic video game series like Pokémon and Super Mario well-over $100.
Nostalgia is driven by your amygdala, the same part of your brain that connects the five senses with your emotional processing center, which is why tangible media inspires warm and fuzzy feelings in a way digital media cannot. I never find myself yearning for my first Kindle when I peruse an ebook, but the flutter of magazine pages folding against each other while I browse the latest copy to hit my mailbox takes me back to wolfing down cereal at my family’s kitchen table, testing the patience of my neighbor waiting to walk to school so I could finish reading the latest updates on Shaquille O’Neal’s coaching disputes.
There is a healthy balance with nostalgia, a point where you can become lost in the past . Magazines are, hopefully, largely immune to infantilization, as they are full of new content in a way that nostalgic collectibles like GameBoy games and Yugi-Oh cards are not. Magazines are also disposable, with each edition deposited in my recycling upon completion rather than sent off for professional grading and preserved on a shelf.
But I must remain vigilant. I can indulge my inner child while still making prudent financial decisions, and there are only so many hours in a week that can be used for reading. I just need to convince these subscriber retention departments to stop sending me such compelling offers.
Things I Recommend This Week
The Great Zelle Pool Scam | Business Insider
I Quit Music Streaming for a Month | Mic the Snare (YouTube)
Between lacrosse and football, Jordan Faison does it all for Notre Dame | ESPN
In the mountains of the world's most remote country, baseball takes hold | MLB.com
Revenge of the Renter | Maclean’s
Thank you for reading and for your patience, as I have been in a bit of a funk and found it quite hard to focus on writing over the past few weeks. The IBT cadence may remain slow during July, as I have some travels planned, but I am working on a new project to hopefully allow me to pre-write some pieces to queue while I adventure.
Have a great weekend.
Relate to the "bit of a funk, difficult to write," feeling, but still enjoyed this very much. Gonna check out the "I Quit Music Streaming For a Month!"