Keeping Up

 

In the days of James Thurber, I remember as a child paging through my parents’ New Yorker magazines, looking for the cartoons. When I did find them, I often couldn’t figure out what they were about or why they should be considered funny. I did like the Charles Adams ones, which probably says more about me as a child than I’d like to think about.

          I had a similar sensation recently as I worked my way through the September 22^nd issue of fall style and design. I’m out of step again, this time on the other end of the age spectrum.

          With a yearly subscription, I do try to get into as many as I can of the wildly diverse stories, but now I seem to have hit the wall of irrelevancy. Just like those indecipherable cartoons, most of the trendy references in this issue’s Shouts and Murmurs column were wasted on me. I could almost hear the allusions to Jonathan Haidt, Zyn, and Hozier as they whistled over my head.

     

       On the other hand, it’s freeing not trying to keep up with what’s in vogue and being in ignorant bliss of what’s circling on Instagram.

 For now, I’ll happily turn the physical page of my issue to the umpteen-page report by D.T. Max about Barcelona’s massive Sagrada Familia (which, ahem, by the way, I just saw last night on an episode of BBC’s “The Diplomat”).