We all need editors, even those who don’t write. We need editors to separate the wheat from the chaff, to guide us through this world of too-much-information.
The thought occurred to me after we visited our old friend, former state Senator Helen Gordon Davis. Her heart is wearing out, and she is under Hospice Care. She’s not in pain and not on drugs, so her mind remains good. As we chatted, she asked Hubby how he spends his time now that he is retired. Unless he has meetings, he said, he begins his day by turning on the outdoor fountain, drinking coffee on the deck, and reading magazines for a couple of hours.
Helen was surprised that anyone still reads magazines, let alone devote that much time to them. He explained that magazines are the best way to cut through the noise on the Internet to find what is new in subjects that interest him – and to know that the story has been vetted by someone who knows what he/she is talking about. That’s the vital job of editors. Helen asked explicitly what magazines, and he said his absolute favorite is Popular Science.
I just went out to the deck and looked in the plastic beer cooler that he uses to protect his reading material from rain. The current edition of Popular Science includes articles titled “Astounding Auroras, Hiding Black Holes, and More Amazing Images of the Week;” “How Gorilla Poop Could Stop Ebola;” and “Five Beloved Scientists Who Actually Were Bullies.”
He’s subscribed to Popular Mechanics even longer than Popular Science. My dad read Mechanics from cover to cover every month and once won $5 for an idea he submitted; mom threw it in the wastebasket, thinking it was junk mail, but he retrieved it in time. So when I was a newlywed and got discounted subscriptions while working for US News & World Report, I subscribed to it for Hubby. (I also subscribed to Soviet World or some such title, thus risking his more-than-top-secret security clearance with the Army. I was young.)
The cover of Popular Mechanics this month features a man with what looks like a super-long vacuum cleaner hose that points to a title, “Technology to Make Daily Life More Fun.” Vacuum cleaners, as it turns out, have been one of my chief complaints for decades. We just bought a new one, and no, it isn’t robotic; I’ve decided those are toys, not tools, and I’m still holding my breath on the vacuum cleaner news front. Another Popular Mechanics article was on a tunneling machine that is stuck sixty feet beneath Seattle, and there was a report on the current state of car safety.
That brings us to “Car and Driver,” which he also reads. This month, it has stories on the next Corvette and the next BMW, but also on hatchback concepts for NASA’s vehicles. I liked the sound of a column titled “Detroit Gave the World Freedom, Literal and Figurative.” That’s true. I’ve often written that transportation improvements played a big role in women’s liberation. When a woman could get in a car and go away, she became a much more independent creature.
And without Detroit, we never would have won World War II. It’s an embarrassment to America that we have allowed it to degrade to the point that it is now.
* * *
Helen didn’t recognize Wired, a relatively new magazine that began about the time that the Internet did. This was about the same time that more traditional publishers complained that they weren’t making enough money and, blaming the Internet, closed down rather than giving serious thought to what readers really wanted.
With a table of contents divided into topics such as “Infoporn” and “Gadget Lab,” this month’s Wired includes “Oh Pioneers! India, Manifest Destiny, and the Myth of Silicon Valley;” “Alpha Geek: Heather Willauer is Turning Sea Water into Jet Fuel;” and “Garbage Collector: One Company’s Trash is Another Company’s Business Model.”
Hubby also reads the monthly Harvard Magazine, which features many cutting-edge subjects, as well as Colloquium, the monthly of Harvard’s Graduate School of Arts and Sciences. He even reads the publications that come with membership in AARP, AAA, and our insurance company, USAA. He reads a newspaper made up solely of political cartoons and satire, Funny Times, and was longtime subscriber to The Onion, a similarly wry publication. And like others of his age, he waits in line at the Brandon Barnes & Noble for the Sunday edition of Business Investor Daily. In another case of publishers failing to comprehend their markets, the store gets about a dozen copies on Saturday nights, and if he waits until Sunday morning, it’s sold out.
* * *
But Helen was most interested in another relatively new magazine, Men’s Journal. Its October cover features “When to Say No to Your Doctor;” “Inside the NFL’s Pot Problem;” and “Life Advice from Anthony Bourdain,” the popular globe-trotter for CNN.
This potpourri in Men’s Journal, of course, reminds me of Ladies Home Journal, which began in 1883 as an offshoot of an agricultural magazine. Cyrus and Louisa Curtis published it out of Pennsylvania, and they soon noticed that the “women’s section” in the back pages drew more attention – and subscriptions -- than did “main” magazine. Smart enough to switch to what their readers wanted, Curtis Publishing became the world’s biggest magazine operation.
It also has a Florida connection. The Curtis’ only child, Mary Louise, married Dutch immigrant Edward Bok, and they eventually built the estate near Lake Wales known as Bok Tower. Its chimes ring out every hour, and the moonlight concerts in its lovely garden are especially nice. The museum there, however, gives almost no recognition to Bok’s wife, whose inheritance made this possible. She was the founder of the famed Curtis School of Music in Philadelphia and gets more attention up north, although she lived at Pinewood, their Florida home, in the winter and happily showed off its tropical flowers to visitors.
Pinewood’s gardens were designed by famed landscaper Fredrick Law Olmstead, co-creator of New York’s Central Park. President Herbert Hoover came to dedicate the whole thing in 1929, and Edward Bok died in 1930. Mary Louise lived on until 1970 and thus had much longer tenure there, but even modern writers refer to the place as his, and to her as “his wife.” It’s probably another case of women’s history getting lost because name changes: she took her husband’s name when she married again in 1943 -- to another immigrant.
He was a Russian Jew, internationally known violinist and composer Efrem Zimbalist. (Yes, he was the father of Efrem Zimbalist, Jr., an actor whose face you recognize for many TV roles. His mother, Alma Gluck, was a famed soprano, and he grew up in boarding schools while his parents worked classical concert tours.) Zimbalist Senior taught at the Curtis School of Music, and after Gluck’s death, married Mary Louise Curtis Bok. Although she was fourteen years his senior, she changed her name to his, and thus her individual identity – including that of her mother and Curtis Publishing -- was buried still deeper.
Other journalists thought of Edward Bok as almost absurdly Victorian, and in fact, Ladies Home Journal was nearly bankrupt when another couple, Beatrice and Bruce Gould, took it over and delivered a more feminist message. Now 111 years old, the magazine has demonstrated a long history of understanding what women want to read. It was one of my chief sources for my books on World War II, as it was much more likely to publish relevant articles than other major magazines.
Its featured columnist in that era was Dorothy Thompson, a brilliant woman whose image was eclipsed by that of her husband, novelist Sinclair Lewis. Unlike Mary Louise Curtis Bok Zimbalist, Dorothy Thompson kept her own name, but again, many in the era saw her simply as Lewis’ wife. His Babbitt and Elmer Gantry had been worthy hits in the 1920s, but he was an alcoholic by the 1940s, and she had to toil to support him. Nonetheless, she interviewed Hitler two years prior to his takeover of Germany, and published a book, I Saw Hitler! (1932), with views that were much more prescient than those of the guys in our government.
Her husband copied her idea with his It Can’t Happen Here (1935), an anti-fascist message that, because of his name recognition, received much more attention than her more original work. Meanwhile, she gave up her New York connections to buy a place in Vermont where he would be less tempted to drink. They finally divorced, but not before she bore a child (at age 37) and became a devoted mother to Lewis’ son, who died in the war that she tried so hard to prevent.
The postwar period was less rewarding for Thompson, as feminism was supposed to have ended with the war. Moreover, her prescience led her to write stories on the Middle East from an Arab point of view, which was not popular when the new state of Israel began – but which could have prevented some of our modern troubles had more people paid heed to Arab complaints. Her last book was poignantly titled The Courage to Be Happy (1957), and she died in 1961 in Lisbon, still chasing the news.
Doris Weatherford writes a weekly column for La Gaceta, the nation's only trilingual newspaper. With pages in Spanish, Italian, and English, it has been published in Tampa since 1922.
The thought occurred to me after we visited our old friend, former state Senator Helen Gordon Davis. Her heart is wearing out, and she is under Hospice Care. She’s not in pain and not on drugs, so her mind remains good. As we chatted, she asked Hubby how he spends his time now that he is retired. Unless he has meetings, he said, he begins his day by turning on the outdoor fountain, drinking coffee on the deck, and reading magazines for a couple of hours.
Helen was surprised that anyone still reads magazines, let alone devote that much time to them. He explained that magazines are the best way to cut through the noise on the Internet to find what is new in subjects that interest him – and to know that the story has been vetted by someone who knows what he/she is talking about. That’s the vital job of editors. Helen asked explicitly what magazines, and he said his absolute favorite is Popular Science.
I just went out to the deck and looked in the plastic beer cooler that he uses to protect his reading material from rain. The current edition of Popular Science includes articles titled “Astounding Auroras, Hiding Black Holes, and More Amazing Images of the Week;” “How Gorilla Poop Could Stop Ebola;” and “Five Beloved Scientists Who Actually Were Bullies.”
He’s subscribed to Popular Mechanics even longer than Popular Science. My dad read Mechanics from cover to cover every month and once won $5 for an idea he submitted; mom threw it in the wastebasket, thinking it was junk mail, but he retrieved it in time. So when I was a newlywed and got discounted subscriptions while working for US News & World Report, I subscribed to it for Hubby. (I also subscribed to Soviet World or some such title, thus risking his more-than-top-secret security clearance with the Army. I was young.)
The cover of Popular Mechanics this month features a man with what looks like a super-long vacuum cleaner hose that points to a title, “Technology to Make Daily Life More Fun.” Vacuum cleaners, as it turns out, have been one of my chief complaints for decades. We just bought a new one, and no, it isn’t robotic; I’ve decided those are toys, not tools, and I’m still holding my breath on the vacuum cleaner news front. Another Popular Mechanics article was on a tunneling machine that is stuck sixty feet beneath Seattle, and there was a report on the current state of car safety.
That brings us to “Car and Driver,” which he also reads. This month, it has stories on the next Corvette and the next BMW, but also on hatchback concepts for NASA’s vehicles. I liked the sound of a column titled “Detroit Gave the World Freedom, Literal and Figurative.” That’s true. I’ve often written that transportation improvements played a big role in women’s liberation. When a woman could get in a car and go away, she became a much more independent creature.
And without Detroit, we never would have won World War II. It’s an embarrassment to America that we have allowed it to degrade to the point that it is now.
* * *
Helen didn’t recognize Wired, a relatively new magazine that began about the time that the Internet did. This was about the same time that more traditional publishers complained that they weren’t making enough money and, blaming the Internet, closed down rather than giving serious thought to what readers really wanted.
With a table of contents divided into topics such as “Infoporn” and “Gadget Lab,” this month’s Wired includes “Oh Pioneers! India, Manifest Destiny, and the Myth of Silicon Valley;” “Alpha Geek: Heather Willauer is Turning Sea Water into Jet Fuel;” and “Garbage Collector: One Company’s Trash is Another Company’s Business Model.”
Hubby also reads the monthly Harvard Magazine, which features many cutting-edge subjects, as well as Colloquium, the monthly of Harvard’s Graduate School of Arts and Sciences. He even reads the publications that come with membership in AARP, AAA, and our insurance company, USAA. He reads a newspaper made up solely of political cartoons and satire, Funny Times, and was longtime subscriber to The Onion, a similarly wry publication. And like others of his age, he waits in line at the Brandon Barnes & Noble for the Sunday edition of Business Investor Daily. In another case of publishers failing to comprehend their markets, the store gets about a dozen copies on Saturday nights, and if he waits until Sunday morning, it’s sold out.
* * *
But Helen was most interested in another relatively new magazine, Men’s Journal. Its October cover features “When to Say No to Your Doctor;” “Inside the NFL’s Pot Problem;” and “Life Advice from Anthony Bourdain,” the popular globe-trotter for CNN.
This potpourri in Men’s Journal, of course, reminds me of Ladies Home Journal, which began in 1883 as an offshoot of an agricultural magazine. Cyrus and Louisa Curtis published it out of Pennsylvania, and they soon noticed that the “women’s section” in the back pages drew more attention – and subscriptions -- than did “main” magazine. Smart enough to switch to what their readers wanted, Curtis Publishing became the world’s biggest magazine operation.
It also has a Florida connection. The Curtis’ only child, Mary Louise, married Dutch immigrant Edward Bok, and they eventually built the estate near Lake Wales known as Bok Tower. Its chimes ring out every hour, and the moonlight concerts in its lovely garden are especially nice. The museum there, however, gives almost no recognition to Bok’s wife, whose inheritance made this possible. She was the founder of the famed Curtis School of Music in Philadelphia and gets more attention up north, although she lived at Pinewood, their Florida home, in the winter and happily showed off its tropical flowers to visitors.
Pinewood’s gardens were designed by famed landscaper Fredrick Law Olmstead, co-creator of New York’s Central Park. President Herbert Hoover came to dedicate the whole thing in 1929, and Edward Bok died in 1930. Mary Louise lived on until 1970 and thus had much longer tenure there, but even modern writers refer to the place as his, and to her as “his wife.” It’s probably another case of women’s history getting lost because name changes: she took her husband’s name when she married again in 1943 -- to another immigrant.
He was a Russian Jew, internationally known violinist and composer Efrem Zimbalist. (Yes, he was the father of Efrem Zimbalist, Jr., an actor whose face you recognize for many TV roles. His mother, Alma Gluck, was a famed soprano, and he grew up in boarding schools while his parents worked classical concert tours.) Zimbalist Senior taught at the Curtis School of Music, and after Gluck’s death, married Mary Louise Curtis Bok. Although she was fourteen years his senior, she changed her name to his, and thus her individual identity – including that of her mother and Curtis Publishing -- was buried still deeper.
Other journalists thought of Edward Bok as almost absurdly Victorian, and in fact, Ladies Home Journal was nearly bankrupt when another couple, Beatrice and Bruce Gould, took it over and delivered a more feminist message. Now 111 years old, the magazine has demonstrated a long history of understanding what women want to read. It was one of my chief sources for my books on World War II, as it was much more likely to publish relevant articles than other major magazines.
Its featured columnist in that era was Dorothy Thompson, a brilliant woman whose image was eclipsed by that of her husband, novelist Sinclair Lewis. Unlike Mary Louise Curtis Bok Zimbalist, Dorothy Thompson kept her own name, but again, many in the era saw her simply as Lewis’ wife. His Babbitt and Elmer Gantry had been worthy hits in the 1920s, but he was an alcoholic by the 1940s, and she had to toil to support him. Nonetheless, she interviewed Hitler two years prior to his takeover of Germany, and published a book, I Saw Hitler! (1932), with views that were much more prescient than those of the guys in our government.
Her husband copied her idea with his It Can’t Happen Here (1935), an anti-fascist message that, because of his name recognition, received much more attention than her more original work. Meanwhile, she gave up her New York connections to buy a place in Vermont where he would be less tempted to drink. They finally divorced, but not before she bore a child (at age 37) and became a devoted mother to Lewis’ son, who died in the war that she tried so hard to prevent.
The postwar period was less rewarding for Thompson, as feminism was supposed to have ended with the war. Moreover, her prescience led her to write stories on the Middle East from an Arab point of view, which was not popular when the new state of Israel began – but which could have prevented some of our modern troubles had more people paid heed to Arab complaints. Her last book was poignantly titled The Courage to Be Happy (1957), and she died in 1961 in Lisbon, still chasing the news.
Doris Weatherford writes a weekly column for La Gaceta, the nation's only trilingual newspaper. With pages in Spanish, Italian, and English, it has been published in Tampa since 1922.