Attention America!
Americans! What with the various shipping problems we’ve been having between our two landmasses (not least the ridiculous cost), I’d like to recommend Magazine Café as a place to order New Escapologist in print.
They are a real-life brick-and-mortar store in New York City, so you’ll be supporting their pleasant enterprise as well as ours. Issues 18 and 15 seem to be in stock for $16.50 each with free shipping. There also seems to be a subscription offer.
Shall we try and sell them out? Hopefully that will mean they can order the next issue in larger quantities AND solve the logistical problem of getting the magazine onto American soil.
Other US stockists are available. I’ve just had good feedback about these guys and not all stockists offer a mail-order service.
Unscreened
Globally, on average, people seem to spend close to half their waking hours looking at screens, and among young people in the rich world the number is a good deal higher than that.
Isn’t that the saddest thing you’ve ever heard?
I don’t say screens are an inherently bad thing. They’re useful when you want to, you know, look something up on Wikipedia or type something or lazily read a few blog posts. But that’s bananas. To be clear, it says waking hours, not working hours. So in other words: half your life. Your LIFE.
This is your occasional reminder that you can at least escape social media if you want to, winning back at least two hours a day and therefore about 750 hours of your life each year.
I recently received some nice paper mail from Jonny, a New Escapologist contributor who has turned his Substack newsletter for writers (already a noble step away from the worst of social media) into a paper newsletter for anyone who requests it. It was lovely to get. My address had been typewritten on the envelope, the newsletter itself was simple and pleasantly laid out on a single folded sheet of A4, and I think he might have coloured in the letterhead (a pineapple) by hand. Thanks, Jonny.
It made me think about Analog Sea Review, a muscular and wilfully offline publishing enterprise. I pulled my copies down from the shelf and spent some pleasant time reading high-quality essays and poetry selected not by dubious algorithm but by a real person I trust.
When I searched for the “at least two hours a day” statistic cited above, the report it came from notes that “despite the apparent expansion of social media’s role in our lives, the amount of time that we spend using social platforms has actually declined over the past two years.”
So there is a pushback against this screen mania. Good.
More from the Guardian:
[we all] already have things we do and care about that put us beyond the reach of the algorithms. We all already know the deepest truth: that true human attention isn’t the click and swipe of screen time. True human attention is love, curiosity, daydreaming and taking care of ourselves and others.
The piece was written by a trio of activists called the Friends of Attention, another pillar of the resistance. They blame this screentime madness on “human frackers,” unscrupulous business interests who pump us full of crap to mine the resource that is our precious attention.
Get offline. Buy a nice notebook. Read books and magazines. Use the library. Walk.
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Letter to the Editor: Like a Dissatisfied Chimp
To send a letter to the editor, simply write in. You’ll get a reply and we’ll anonymise any blogged version.
Reader M writes:
Thanks, as ever, [for the newsletter]. There are thoughts on my mind right now…
Being somewhat short of cash again (again, again…), I’m learning to “want what I have” instead of what I don’t have. This has involved a joyful replay of my old LPs and CDs: old friends I forgot I had.
Time slowed down, as I wasn’t permanently clicking buttons like a dissatisfied chimp when the first ten seconds of a track failed to ignite my interest. I’ve now cancelled Sp*tify.
On a recent podcast, the host mentioned that they watch out for apps which “have access to them.” An interesting concept. I don’t access X, for example. IT accesses me. So true.
Keep fighting the good fight.
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Thanks M. Your LP and CD odyssey reminds me of Friend David Cain’s Depth Year. It puts quality over quantity, is cheaper, and more rewarding. Capitalism makes us want more,-more-more instead of appreciating what we already have. That includes wide open freebies like nature and good company, but since most of us were more rampant consumers in the past we’re probably also sitting on a wealth of recorded culture in the form of records and books and videos. In situations where we have more time than money, the solution is precisely as you describe. Go deep instead of wide for a while. That’s no defeat, it’s an opportunity to finally enjoy something instead of merely acquiring it.
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Chair of the Month
In doing research for Issue 19, I chanced upon a website called Work Design Magazine. I do not sneer at it: the world of work, after all, needs to be improved. If only for wage slaves to have somewhere nicer to plot their escapes.
Amazingly, they have a column called Chair of the Month in which they review a different office chair each time. It’s been running since March 2023.
One shouldn’t really be amazed. Of course a publication about office design would take an interest in chairs. It’s still funny though.
The granularity of special interest and trade magazines was precisely the spark that set off New Escapologist in the first place. Ours is a niche magazine for those engaged in plotting their escape. That’s supposed to be funny because it makes one wonder what the contents of such a magazine could possibly be, what our equivalent of “Chair of the Month” might be.
For anyone yet to buy a copy of our physical magazine, our columns include:
* Workplace Woes – in which our readers blow off steam about their crap workplaces
* Scarpernautics – the latest technical developments for those on the run
* Notices for Wage Slaves – a pin board for those still stuck in day jobs
* Master Flee – a letter from your Escapologist-in-Chief
We also print escape-relevant cultural reviews, lengthy feature articles that might concern escape artists, interviews with expert lock pickers, and thoughtful columns from those who’ve legged it.
