[blabberwocky]

I think some part of the luxury experience is the intentionality involved in buying a physical magazine.

I’ve been a subscriber to a number of publications that might be considered luxury media - think the Financial Times, Times Literary Supplement, and New York Review of Books, and more popular (“middlebrow”) titles like the Economist and New Yorker. In almost every case where there wasn’t some utilitarian value proposition, I found myself opening the covers (or apps) less and less over time while still getting unreasonably excited when buying single issues at airport newsstands and such.

[smcnally]

Buying things makes us feel good. Intentionally purchasing a magazine also gives us time to dig into other rituals we like. It spreads the cognitive load of information gathering we do all the time: We've bought into the PoV of editors and designers who crafted the experience and got our attention. They're now curators of our filter for as long as they deliver on the promise we bought into at the newsstand. We've got more cycles to enjoy and ingest/digest/synthesize what's been put together for us.