Renewing Subscriptions

Two semi-annual cycles ago, or one year in personal planning time, our pandemic isolation had become firmly established and indefinite.  At the time I committed myself to subscribing to two publications, one Jewish, one intellectual, selecting The Forward and The Atlantic, respectively.  Then Curiosity Stream offered a bargain annual fee for the first year so I got that too.  And my New England Journal of Medicine has been a staple for decades, keeping me in the loop of medical retirement and providing simple but valuable CME for biennial license renewal.  They all come up for renewal shortly, with only the NEJM being notably expensive.  I expect to extend all four, though none are no longer within my twelve semi-annual initiatives.

So as to get value for my purchase, and a boost to my mental engagement, I set usage goals for each.  NEJM two articles a week, which I have maintained, maybe a little more on occasion.  Atlantic one a day.  This has been more difficult to sustain as many articles are rather involved, taking more than a day to just read and move ahead.  But I do scan the titles daily except shabbos and more often than not select one to read, mostly reading it by the next day.  The Forward has been a little more problematic.  I like having Jewish news well written.  They had a readers comments option, recently suspended largely for abuse by the readers which posed a monitoring burden for the newspaper.  I assigned myself two articles and one comment a day, usually one from the News category and the other from Opinion.  Not all days included something I wanted to read but most did, and as a newspaper, the articles rarely took more than a few minutes to read any one of them.  I did not detect an editorial bias, either politically, Israel focused, or of subsects within Judaism, unlike the NEJM and Atlantic which made their publication's place obvious as sources for the university educated merit elites that America has generated, myself embedded well within them.  The price for being diverse and neutral seems to be a willingness to take a hit from everyone since everyone will object to one or more items that appear there.  That may be why direct reader comments are no more and letters are more likely to comment on specific subjects written by amateurs or agency honchos than responses to particular articles that have appeared.  For all its vagaries, it remains my best connection  with Judaism on a national scale.

Curiosity Stream has offered me the most pleasure.  My goal has been about a half hour a day of documentary, many outstanding, though often not new.  And many come from sources outside America which distinguishes the offerings from Netflix which also has a wide selection of documentary options.  While I like shows about nature and science and maybe history, all in decent supply though not always with new options introduced regularly, I think the popular culture offerings could be expanded.  Of the different platforms, this cost the least, nominal at their promotional rate, not far above nominal without the discount.  It's one of those can't go wrong purchases.

As we open back up to gathering and personal interchange, these forums purchased in part to deal with forced solitude all survive their initial intent.  All engage my mind, which remains the same whether I keep what I think to myself or engage in dialog.  All will be renewed for another year.