Another casualty of the newspaper buyout frenzy

Peter Carlson, who wrote the funny and revealing Magazine Reader column for The Washington Post for 12 years, is taking the paper's buyout. Today is his last column, and as usual, it's smart and trenchant:

For nearly 12 years, I've been paid real American money to read magazines and write about them. During those years I've pondered the glories of magazines ranging from Life to Sounds of Death, from Reason to Paranoia, from George to Jane, from Spy to Sly, from Good Dog! to Murder Dog, from New Beauty to New Witch, from Modern Maturity to Modern Ferret to Modern Drunkard. And let's not forget Wrapped in Plastic, a magazine devoted to David Lynch's long-dead TV show, Twin Peaks.

He sums up the appeal of magazines as well as I've ever read:

Human beings love stories and a magazine, at its best, is where a writer can take the time to sit down and tell a good story: I went off on an adventure and here's what I saw and heard and how it felt and what I think it means. Newspapers sometimes do this, too, of course, but not as often as they used to, alas. Most magazines don't do it very often or very well but some do -- Esquire, Harper's, Smithsonian, Vanity Fair, the Atlantic, GQ, Rolling Stone, Texas Monthly, National Geographic, and, of course, the best of them all, the New Yorker.

Thanks for sitting down and telling a good story, Peter Carlson.

Comments

[Harriet Elliott]

Peter Carlson, I was looking for your 1987 WashPost article titled ¨Life in the Shadows¨ and find you are leaving. Is taking a buy-out similar to being eased out of a job? If so, please find solace that most liberals are losing jobs , and that´s better than another fate that´s a lot worse. Dr. Robert Duncan (PhD from Harvard) was not fired but he has been erased from the internet because he speaks the truth. He majored in artificial intelligence and worked with new electronic weapons used on Americans secretly. Ducan, PhD, (a blond who appears to be in his 40s) and claims there have been silent assasinations. I have been victimized by some of the electronics he brings to light. NSA is able to stimulate a man sexually from a distance. In other words, these neo-fascists are in our bedrooms!