Not too long ago I ordered a subscription to The New Yorker, the three-dimensional paper version. It’s just one of many gifts to myself in recent years that represent an attempt to regain ‘wholeness’ after the financial ruination that marked the end of my first marriage in 2012. I’m savvy enough to know there’s much from that long chapter I’ll never have, or get to experience again, and that I still miss, but a magazine subscription fits easily enough into our budget these days.

It’s a weekly magazine, though. My one regret in getting it is a dearth of time to read every issue cover to cover. There just isn’t time. To accomplish this, reading would have to occupy my every leisure moment in every day, and all weekend. Not happenin’ in this chapter of my life. Still, I like knowing they’re all stacked neatly on my coffee table and nightstand to pick up when I wish.

Did you have a Highlights subscription as a kid?

I did, and sure as heck loved it. Highlights wasn’t in the same class as the junk mail or dime store circulars your mom gave you so you could cut out pictures and paste them onto construction paper to make a collage while she put away the groceries. It was a whole-entire magazine addressed to you, that belonged to you alone. Who didn’t love fingering through a new issue, marveling at the smooth cover and that great Mid-Century Modern font and colorblock design, a different shade every month. You couldn’t scribble in a book but you could draw and color with wild abandon in your own magazine, without fear of reprobation.

Which to dig into first…Goofus and Gallant, Hidden Pictures, or the oddly noodly family in the Timbertoes cartoon. I was a neatnik as a kid, but had no qualms at all about dog-earing my Highlights magazines. I devoured each issue the same way I did books, typically in the quiet of my upstairs bedroom with the door closed and locked, lying prone on the unfortunate gold sculpted carpet that coordinated with equally unfortunate yellow-and-green floral bedding and draperies. I could lie there with my knees bent at right angles and my ankles crossed, swaying side to side, for long hours while I thought about children I knew who behaved exactly like Goofus, but wondered why in heck anybody’d want to be like Gallant, whose hair and general comportment were always unnaturally perfect. Instantly spotted the upside-down ice cream cone posing as the clown face and hat in the Hidden Pictures illustration and concluded it was too easy. Then lost myself in the fiction.

All this came bubbling up in my memories when I pulled the first copy of The New Yorker from my mailbox a few weeks ago and thumbed through its pages. The magazine has changed some, not too much, since I first read it during my late twenties and early thirties, but that familiar font is intact. So is the feeling of being a very sophisticated grownup one gets when reading it. (You imagine a friend calling. You pick up and they say, Hello, what are you up to? And you throw your head back, laugh, and say, Oh, you know, nothing. Reading Sedaris in The New Yorker.)

Back in the day I loved looking at Goings On right away, because Light Opera of Manhattan (LOOM) where my Uncle Stan was the pit conductor often appeared there touting whatever show they were doing (Stan would already have mentioned to me what the company had been rehearsing and so I’d feel a proprietary kind of thrill seeing it in print). That and a few other short features are still fun to read while pretending to be an actual New Yorker.

But now I usually head straight for Shouts and Murmurs for its intellectual parodying, all the better if I get it right off the bat. Then back I go to the table of contents to see what’s what and take it from there. When I lack the energy for heady reading, I start with the cartoon contest, or the crossword if it’s “beginner friendly.” This week’s issue also has a fantastic piece on AI, a thing that occupies my professional life daily and about which I’m pressed to write with ever more frequency—it grabbed me right off the bat. Other times I’m surprised by how deeply subject areas that interest me not one jot pull me in, because I’m reading truly compelling writing about them. Take historical piracy, for example, or a deep dive into the life of an orthopedic surgeon who caters to celebrities.

Time with my nose in these pages is time well spent.

Dog-eared page corners were proof positive I savaged—joyously—issues of my old Highlights magazines. Now it’s a page corner forever wrinkled because my thermal coffee cup lid was not pushed on quite tightly enough, or a schmear of the Tabasco from my breakfast sandwich that found its way onto the printed page. This week, reading between the lines, you can tell somebody’s gone at it in my New Yorker. I didn’t color in it, but I did scribble a caption to the naked cartoon in the back. Might even enter the contest.

Before I step away from these musings, let me just opine that the Talk of the Town—the editorial—in the October 7^th issue is one of the most thoughtful and provocative I’ve read in a while. Check it out—I promise it’ll be time well spent.