![\"depression](\"http:\/\/tedkrever.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/12\/depression-newsstand.jpg\" "\\"Berenice")
<\/a>This is a famous Berenice Abbott photo of a newsstand from the Depression, when a third of the country was out of work and even those earning some kind of living had very little money for frivolous reading. The magazine stand I remember wasn’t quite as thickly populated as this one but I still remember hundreds of publications on display, \u00a0such dense variety you couldn’t see the entire cover of more than a handful.<\/p>\nThem days are gone, as they say…<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
I know we read differently now. Most everything is\u00a0free (for the moment) and online and instantly searchable and that definitely has its advantages. But I felt very aware, all of a sudden, of how different the experience was of buying magazines at\u00a0the stand, making a public decision like declaring an allegiance in a public square. And it feels like a connection to the way\u00a0people got through the Depression with a sense of\u00a0solidarity that we certainly haven’t been able to muster\u00a0in a financial crisis that is\u00a0tiny by comparison.<\/p>\n They made those declarations every day at the newsstand, going to see a\u00a0movie with friends\u00a0at\u00a0the theater, listening to radio shows on the three available networks and discussing them the next day at work. Did that contribute to a level of solidarity and understanding? Certainly the music and film of the day had\u00a0a sense that we were all in this together, as opposed to the solitary-loner, beat-the-other-guy-to-the-punch nonsense paraded\u00a0these days by\u00a0Trump, Cadillac ads and every politician but Bernie Sanders, that wonderful relic.<\/p>\n We don’t really believe in progress anymore and we have plenty of reasons not to. But even where we seem to be moving forward, it seems important to take a few minutes here and there to consider what’s being lost…or what we never had.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" We went to a New Year’s party last night. I know it’s a night early but who’s counting? I came from work and met Claire on Sixth Ave near Waverly. And, waiting for her (because the F train was actually …<\/span> Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"_uf_show_specific_survey":0,"_uf_disable_surveys":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2343","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"aioseo_notices":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/tedkrever.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2343","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/tedkrever.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/tedkrever.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tedkrever.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tedkrever.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2343"}],"version-history":[{"count":12,"href":"https:\/\/tedkrever.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2343\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2357,"href":"https:\/\/tedkrever.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2343\/revisions\/2357"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/tedkrever.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2343"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tedkrever.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2343"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tedkrever.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2343"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}<\/a>Here’s what I saw last night. About ten newspapers, some of them mere classified ad sheets, some Chinese and Russian language, a few rows filled with\u00a0candy and some soft drink displays–and no magazines. Zero. All those banal and beautiful thoughts and passionate causes and idiotic space filling, gone.<\/p>\n