You're entrenched in the digital nest. All sorts of news, info, entertainment explodes helter-skelter. It's dizzying, exciting, mesmerizing.
HuffPost is a good example.
However, there are active and passive parts of the day. Without getting into too much psychobabble, as you get older the passive side needs more nourishment. It's not really passive. It's focused absorption. At some point you have to climb out of that frenetic digital nest and concentrate on one thing. It might be reading a book, watching a TV show or movie, listening to music, looking out the window.
Or immersing yourself in a magazine.
This isn't "down time" (that would be sleeping), but nourishing your psyche by absorbing and not actively being involved.
When radios became must-haves in the late 1920s and early 1930s, the doomsayers said this would be the end of magazines and newspapers. When television became popular in the late 1940s and early 1950s the doomsayers said this would be the end of radio. When the WWW became popular in the late 1990s and early 2000s the doomsayers said this would be the end of everything. They're still saying it.
I think not. (Although I do wonder about the fate of daily newspapers.) Magazines will be around for awhile.
Personally, I love when a new Smithsonian or National Geographic shows up. I grab it, steal away, devour. Certain people in my circle love Popular Mechanics and other specialty magazines. My more-significant-than-I-am other knows when her Country Living is supposed to be sitting in the mailbox, and hollers every day until it's there.
AARP Magazine faithfully arrives every so often. It's been getting better thanks to Myrna Blyth (Ladies' Home Journal, More) and Bob Love (Rolling Stone) taking over.
In Europe there is PLUS Magazine with editions published and distributed in France, The Netherlands, Germany, Belgium, and a handful of other countries. The same house publishes other magazines for the 50+ demo.
A new large-format magazine for us is Dinosaur: Defying Cultural Extinction. The pub focuses on current art, literature, music, and everything else created by people over 50. I'm not sure the T-Shirt model would even know what that weird thing is on his chest -- but most of us older folks will recognize it. I might still have onetucked somewhere in a box of old records.
Dinosaur is easy on the eyes (meaning, older eyes) and full of cutting-edge photos and graphics. I kind of wish it didn't have a website. A landing page might simply say: This is a magazine, not a web site. Go find a copy at a newsstand, or subscribe and we'll send them to you. Make sure you have an oversized mailbox.
A middling medium at the moment: magazines designed for tablets. I'm sure there's a name for these but I don't know what it is. Tabzines? T-Zines? Maglets?
Purple Clover is one. Flick and poke. Lots of fun. And Huffington Post has one. These are passive experiences (good) but for maglets to take over the world we'll have to wait for tablets to get bigger, lighter, thinner, probably less expensive, have perfect resolution, and be flexible enough to roll up and kill flies.
Until then, if I want excitement and thrills I'll wriggle around in my digital nest. If I want to lean back, rest a bit, absorb -- toss me a magazine.