an infestation of new yorker magazines

originally posted June 3, 2006
My mom gave me a subscription to The New Yorker last Christmas. She got a free gift for signing someone up. As soon as I received the card in the mail, I groaned. The pressure she’d suddenly placed on her only son, and for what – a tote bag emblazoned with an Ed Koren cartoon? I’d been through this before, and am still finding random New Yorkers from the late-’90s, the last time I was a subscriber. They arrive so frequently, are so densely packed. At first, I’d set aside certain issues with compelling-looking articles. But I quickly fell behind, cringing every time I saw another magazine rolled up in the mailbox. Soon, I only had time to scan the table of contents to make sure it didn’t contain the byline of anyone I knew in graduate school. Now, I barely get around to the cover. But it seems wasteful to toss them straight into the recycling bin. So the magazines lay scattered around my house – piled on the counters, on the coffee table, on the stairs, on the toilet tank, in the car. There are always more. I’ve tried giving them away but I’d need to hire an intern just to make sure they left the house in a timely fashion. And when the magazines get moved for cleaning or vacuuming, they always leave behind one or two subscription cards, like some kind of magazine eggs. I’m convinced they spawn new issues at night. In the mornings, I see covers I don’t recognize. The house is completely overrun, like forest tent caterpillars dropping from the ceiling. Perhaps these really are The End Times – frogs, locusts and New Yorker magazines. Is that The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse galloping on the horizon? And is that last summer’s Fiction Issue sticking out of Pestilence's saddlebag?