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The Agony and The Ecstasy of Subscribing to Everything

Bev Potter
5 min readMay 25, 2023
Photo by freestocks on Unsplash

Can you even remember a time when you didn’t have to subscribe to everything?

Sure, maybe you paid an annual fee. But you didn’t subscribe to anything except magazines.

Remember magazines? No?

Well, the weird thing is that magazines are incredibly cheap now (except for The New Yorker, of course — that tote bag ain’t free). I get Elle for $10 a year. Vogue used to be something like $50 a year and it’s probably just as cheap now.

I think I’m paying $5 a month for New York Magazine just so I can pretend I don’t live in Ohio.

Vanity Fair is $14 a year, but it’s a sad imitation of itself since Christopher Hitchins died, Graydon Carter left, and Anna Wintour was named the Chief Content Officer (whatever that means) of all Condé Nast magazines.

Let’s call it the inverse law of magazines. The more precarious their situation becomes, the cheaper they get.

If you had told somebody 30 years ago that they would one day subscribe to food, they would’ve looked at you like you were crazy.

1990 me: “Why would you subscribe to food? You go to the store, you buy the food, you bring the…

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Bev Potter
Bev Potter

Written by Bev Potter

Legal secretary by day, insomniac by night. Ally. BA, MA. Humor, pop culture, and things that make you think. My weekly-ish newsletter is bevpotter.substack.com

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