It’s funny what can cheer you up. I hadn’t done this feature in a long time—I had the notion to record the moments when I noticed people on a means of transportation reading The New Yorker—but this morning on the L train to Manhattan, there was a perfect triangle—or, give the cherries shiny red apples on this issue’s back cover, a winning slot-machine combination—of three of us reading the magazine (me and the guy next to me reading Susan Orlean’s nimble story on the umbrella inventor—in which she quotes my esteemed umbrella-critiquing colleague Julie Lasky!—and a cute blonde chick, if you like that sort of thing, reading Anthony Lane and the Critic’s Notebook), all of us standing coat-to-coat, since it was rush hour.
Then I looked down the car and saw a tall guy reading the David Owen Personal History on nicknames and grinning like crazy, then laughing outright. When I changed to the 6 at Union Square, I noticed three more readers in quick succession, then four. All were under 40 and had iPods in their ears (except me—my Shuffle’s busted). It made me smile. Maybe, just maybe, print culture’s going to survive in style and life will be halfway livable, even if they don’t throw paper like they used to.