TNY weekend reader: The old and the new
I get my TNY by subscription as a reward for my contribution to WNYC, which I support in spite of my occasional objections to Leonard Lopate (his gospel hours, his embarrassing adoration of Patricia T. O’Conner), a heck of a lot of religious content, and Jonathan Schwartz’s strange insistance on sharing his love affair with the insane-sounding “Carousel Waltz”. My contribution is ten dollars a week, forever, or until my credit card dies. All I asked for in return: my reward and a mailbox free of WNYC requests for contributions.
Anyway, never mind my grumpy nature: the thing is, even though my contribution is ongoing, my reward apparently isn’t! They have not coordinated their gift-giving to synch with their gift-receiving. That means that I will spend the next month not getting my TNY in the mail. The E.T.A. of my next issue is apparently May 7th. Get it together WNYC!
Being too cheap and stubborn to go out and buy my own (alas, here we go with my grumpy nature again!), I have been reading The New Yorker on my cell phone instead. Thus, the illustration above in honor of my stalwart efforts to read TNY come hell or highwater, or not.
But it’s not just in my honor, because how am I able I do this? I found that Opera, a web browser recommended to me by my high-tech medievalist friend Maria in Berlin, does a “mini” version, aptly called “Opera Mini.” It’s free, just like the computer-based version. I downloaded it onto my cell phone, and found that the magazine was quite readable, even on my inch and a quarter by inch and six-eighths screen. I was even able to view my own cartoon this week on the site. Very satisfying.
Yesterday, I spent my lunch break reading Atul Gawande’s “The way we age now” on my cell phone in the “Go Sushi” downstairs from my next fitting client, and was quite pleased about it, however horrified I was by the prospect of my future and inevitable calcification.
Calcification may be in the future for us all, but so is reading magazines on our cell phones! Try it! Don’t be an old fart!
PS - in case anyone has tried to post a comment lately and not succeeded, it seems my anti-spamming measures have been nuking perfectly acceptable comments before I even see them… Sorry about that! 
Please keep trying, and let me know if you’re still not getting through.
