In fact, the only reason that I did is that I have become adept at reading the New Yorker while on the treadmill at the gym, running at a steady pace (ie., doesn't work with speed intervals). This has the twin benefits of advancing me in my quest to get caught up on the New Yorker while distracting me from the length and monotony of a treadmill training run. I should mention that this example of multitasking is only possible with the New Yorker -- the binding of most other magazines make them susceptible to falling over or off the machine, and the slow rate of page turnover means you're not always flipping through ads to get to the copy you want to read. Plus, it's so easy to get lost in an article or story, you don't notice that twenty minutes at 6 miles an hour have gone by!
While I appreciated that I was reading last year's issue with the Easter cover during this year's Easter week - thereby appearing completely normal and up to date to anyone with nothing more than a passing interest in what I was reading - I realized as soon as I flipped through it that there were no major articles that I wanted to skip. At first I thought I would not care about fracking for oil in North Dakota, but since fracking has been in the news lately, I thought reading the article would be a good way to learn what fracking actually is. And it was. Normally, I would skip an article about professional basketball, but the one in this issue was really about a team's female coach, so I read that too -- fascinating. However, the most interesting article for me was the one about the scientist studying the variability of our perception of time. The fiction story was good too.
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