National Geographic

 

 "National Geographic is laying people off," My husband said. We are still in bed and like most mornings we read before we start the day often sharing bits and pieces of what we're reading.

Circulation is down from 12 million to 1.8 million. It has/had 40 local language editions and a digital version. It has been owned by Disney since 2019.

"How will little boys look at pictures of naked women?" he asks.

I remember as a child looking at it monthly, but not for naked women. I found the photos of places that were as different from New England childhood experience as if they were photographed in another universe. I suspected there was a world outside of my existence that was waiting to be explored or at least thought about.

Stacks of National Geographics were in the bedroom that we used as a store room. They went back to forever in my childish mind. We didn't save other magazines such as Look, Life, Colliers, etc. which that were part of our household reading.

I've read that the Newton Public Library has 132 years of back issues. I don't know if it is digitalized or in paper. The magazine was founded in 1888 as a scholarly journal and only started publishing photographs in 1905.

Admitted, I haven't read or bought the magazine for years. I remember coming down from the chalet in a tiny Alpine village where I'd spent the weekend and stopping at a restaurant. Its attached store sold copies of the magazine along with Reader's Digest and National Enquirer among the French magazines. I didn't buy a copy.

Memories of being curled up on the couch and reading copy after copy on a rainy Saturday. "Make sure you put them away when you're done," my grandmother would say.

I think of a favorite cousin who worked as a photographer, going all over the world to capture places most of us would never see. Will there be less work for people like him? What about the writers? Can AI produce the stories?

It's a strange world we are living in. All the world's knowledge seems available on a phone that seems to be another appendage on most people's body. 

I suppose one can curl up on a couch on a rainy Saturday and thumb thru their telephone. It won't be the same.