Facts learned and opinions gained from the weeklies this week

In a sketch from IFC’s Portlandia, two friends meeting for coffee try to outdo each other’s hunger for publications. They’ve read everything from The New Yorker, to The Seattle Stranger , to last night’s fortune cookies, to the phone book they eventual race to devour, only to be run over by a car because they neglect to read the stop sign.

If this sketch made you chuckle, you might have also found yourself in a situation like this: you were stuck at a news stand debating whether to shell out seven dollars for The New Yorker, which you finally did. A catalogue of thoughtful experience is a bargain at any price. You carried it around all week, planning to devote a week of concentrated subway reading to its contents, and after losing a page off the most promising story to the bottom of your bag, never got around to anything but the cartoons. At a doctor’s office you made it through some of Harper’s, which, since you did it without a dictionary, should count for double, but it doesn’t since no one else at the party seems to have tried. Come Monday, a new fan of magazines confronting you at the news stand looks ominously like an addictive cycle. You might find yourself wondering unpretentiously whether those printed insights were worth the paper if they don’t result in a conversation.

With all the video in the world who still has time to read all that text every single week? This week, I did. Here is what I read.

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