Catching up with magazines.. Ah, yes. I glance guiltily over my shoulder at the growing pile of back issues of the New York Review of Books on the little coffee table in my office. There are times when I'm reminded of life as it was years ago when our home was in danger of sinking into its own basement under the weight of back issues of the National Geographic which we got in those days under the mistaken belief that they were helpful in advancing our children's knowledge of the world they lived in. I'd feel even more guilty if I passed on this pile of NYRBs to my son-in-law before I've read everything in them that I ought to read. Yet I feel guilty also at clinging to them for so long when he's waiting to read them too. Once in a while I blitz the pile, or try to. But usually I find that after an hour or two of reading, the pile has gone down by only one or at most two issues. I'm glad I resisted the tempting offer to subscribe as well to the London Review of Books.
The brutal truth is that I'll never catch up. There's a law of physics that covers this situation; Newton's 5th law of motion I think, which states that no matter how hard you try, you can never catch up with the accumulated back issues of magazines you subscribe to. In fact, you fall into arrears at a rate which is the square (or maybe square root) of the number of magazines to which you subscribe. It was all spelt out in a learned article in the Christmas issue of the Lancet about 30-40 years ago if my memory is reliable.
How true!
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