Periodical Ramblings (18) (And Much More)

    This is one in a series about serials and I have likely written a similar sentence in one of the other seventeen posts related to magazines. The periodicals covered range from Arizona Highways to the Village Voice, and include lesser known literary publications like The Sewanee Review and Prairie Schooner. The last one was about The Farmers' Almanac, which ceased publication and The Old Farmer's Almanac which is still going strong.

WIRED
    If you are vaguely aware of Wired and are thinking that, a magazine covering technology started over 30 years ago, back in the last century, is one you are not much interested in, you might want to have another look. Like The Old Farmer's Almanac, it is doing well and lately it has been doing much better.
    One reason it is doing much better is that it now covers much more than technology and it appears that Wired has gone off-topic largely because of a new energetic editor. She  is a Canadian, who travelled from Calgary to a bigger stage and has nimbly moved through some rather tough publications as a writer and executive. Along the way, she probably had to fetch a few coffees for the guys, but she was well prepared. She credits her stint at Tim Hortons when she was in high school: "It taught 16-year-old me that I like chaos, I like a fast pace, and I like to do something demanding." She has tattoos.
   

   I will not write much about Wired. Go to Wired.com and have a look for yourself. I just did, which is unfortunate since I really can't subscribe to another magazine, even though you will know that I just cancelled my subscription to the Washington Post. The illustration next to this, is one iteration of the cover of Wired, which was also pasted on various billboards in some major cities in the U.S..

Katie Drummond: A Real Golden Gael
   The newish editor at Wired is Katie Drummond, who continued her education after Tim Hortons and went to Queen's. (As someone who went to and worked at a rival institution, I will say only that Queen's is ranked higher than Tims. Those associated with Queen's are known as the "Golden Gaels".) I know much of this because I still have a subscription to the New York Times. In it, there was recently a good article about Ms. Drummond and Wired and I will supply for free, some of the information it contains, since you are likely to trust more, the information for which I have paid. 

   As the title implies, Ms. Drummond can be direct. When asked if Wired "has strayed too far from its techno-optimism roots with its hard-hitting coverage of the Trump administration and skeptical eye on billionaire tech bros?," her reply: “If you still don’t understand why Wired covers politics,” she said in an interview, “you are either willfully ignorant or a complete idiot.”
   Ms. Drummond was hired as editorial director in August 2023 and "she immediately focused on getting scoops and speeding up the pace of publishing. On her second day, she decided she needed a politics team. She rehired a former executive editor, Brian Barrett, to run day-to-day operations and built up a social video team to increase the number of vertical videos shared on social media. She shook up the staff and made hires; revamped newsletters, launching five new ones for paying subscribers; and started podcasts that placed a greater spotlight on Wired’s journalists and their work...."
   “She’s gone after stories the publication has normally avoided and avoided ones the publication has normally gone for. Wired is never boring to read.”

    "But Ms. Drummond’s approach appears to be working. Condé Nast does not disclose profits or losses for its publications, but Ms. Drummond said Wired had added more than 200,000 new paying subscribers in the past year, and subscription revenue increased 24 percent last year in the United States. Wired currently has more than 500,000 paid subscribers. It has a newsroom of around 80 people with plans to hire up to a dozen more this year, and was recently named a finalist for general excellence in the National Magazine Awards."

   At a time when many periodicals are struggling, it is good to see that Wired is doing well. Ms. Drummond is also apparently doing well and can be spotted running in Brooklyn, where she lives with her husband and daughter. If she needs advice, she should run over to Greenwich Village and chat with another Canadian expat who had great success at Condé Nast - Graydon Carter. 

Sources:
  The New York Times article is by Katie Robertson and appears in the the March 17, 2026 issue. 
   That Ms. Drummond valued her time at Tim Hortons is reported by Jeff Pappone, in Queen's Alumni Review, Feb. 2, 2025.
   "After Exiting Vice, Katie Drummond Joins Wired as Top Editor,"Todd Spangler, Variety, Aug. 10, 2023.

   "Drummond’s background in online media spans hard news, technology and lifestyle coverage. At Vice, as SVP of global news and entertainment, she led the expansion of Vice News across Latin America, Europe and Asia, and oversaw all Vice digital brands including Noisey, Munchies, Rec Room, Motherboard and Waypoint. She also led efforts to create opportunities for the editorial brands across Vice TV and Vice Studios.

   Prior to Vice, Drummond was deputy editor at Medium, where she oversaw editorial content across politics, wellness, science and technology, and ran the audience development team for Medium’s subscription program. Drummond began her career as a reporter, writing for outlets including the New Republic, New York Magazine, Popular Science, Marie Claire and Wired, where she covered military research and medicine for Wired’s Danger Room blog. She then served in a managing editor role at the Verge and as a deputy editor for Bloomberg News, before taking on executive editor appointments at The Outline and Gizmodo Media Group, where she was editor in chief of Gizmodo."

   "Katie Drummond: ‘Democracy in the US is Under Threat. And That Threat is Facilitated by Technology and the Makers of that Technology’," Ana Vidal Egea, El Pais, July 5, 2025.

    "Since 2023, this Canadian philosophy graduate has directed the most influential publication in the field of tech. She was a pioneer in understanding what is now obvious: the inseparable connection between technology and power. Since Donald Trump won the elections, ‘Wired’ has also been covering US political news, and subscriptions have skyrocketed." 

The Bonus:
  For an enjoyable read about the career of the other Canadian at Condé Nast who went to Carleton see: When the Going Was Good: An Editor's Adventures During the Last Golden Age of Magazines, by Graydon Carter. 

 

London's Bicentennial (Snippet 9)

 A Train Wreck - 1902

   Someone made a mistake near Wanstead, which was close to Watford, which is not too far from here. The piece above is from the Akron Daily Democrat, Dec. 27,1902
   A search revealed more: "Wanstead began in 1858 with a hotel, post office a few businesses and a sawmill. In 1887 a fire destroyed the entire town. The people here rebuilt it and were instrumental in helping the survivors of a horrific train crash December 26, 1902 here until help came. The 'Chicago Flyer' slammed into the rear of a frieght train in the middle of the night during a violent blizzard. Thirty-eight died [other reports 31 died 35 injured] as the frieght train didn't reach the siding tracks in time to get out of the way. Wanstead was named after suburban village of London, England and dates back to the time of the Saxons and mean's "Woden's Place." Wanstead, Ontario Train Collision, Dec 27 1902. 

The Happiness Rankings

 Not Happy
  Folks up here were really unhappy recently when Canada lost both the Olympic Men's and Women's Hockey matches against the U.S. teams and then lost again to the U.S. in the Paralympic gold medal match. The boasting about the "Gold Medal Hat Trick" could be heard far beyond the border. 
   Searching for something about which we could gloat, I remembered that the World Happiness Report has just been released. Surely the citizens south of here have to be sadder than we are. Thinking that we must beat the Yanks at something, I went looking for the rankings.

We Lost Again
   The Americans are higher in the rankings than we are.


   I thought that maybe they are happier because they are warmer. That does not appear to be the reason since Finland, Iceland and Denmark are 1-2 and 3. 

     I hoped that maybe the rankings are American and rigged. But, the World Happiness Report is published by the University of Oxford, in the country where our King lives.

   It helps a little that we used to outrank the Americans and were happier. 

  Now, even the Israelis are much happier than we are. At least we beat Botswana and Zimbabwe, so the American President cannot call us a "shithole country."

   Two of the six names appearing in the Executive Summary are even Canadian, John F. Helliwell at UBC and Lara B. Aknin at Simon Fraser. Perhaps they did not fight hard enough for our team, since they are out in B.C., and may be sadder than the rest of us since they are worried about their property rights.

For a look at the report and rankings see: World Happiness Report. 

The Washington Post

 Bezos Begging

    At the end of February I cancelled my subscription to WaPo and Bezosbub probably didn't notice.  The remaining people who work at the Post did and for them I feel sorry. Here are the two latest offers I have received via email. For American readers, the CA$2 is about US$1.45.

Early Offer:

Later Offer:

A Solution: 
  In a Post "Post Mortem" a former employee notes:
"When Jeff Bezos bought The Washington Post in 2013 and promised to find inventive ways to make journalism profitable in the digital age, he seemed like a godsend. He wasn’t...."

   The Post is again in the market for a new publisher, but saving this splendid national treasure requires more than that. The real need now is for a new owner, or a big endowment that would allow it to carry on as a nonprofit public service. Do we know anyone who could spare a billion or two to fund such a noble cause and assure his or her place in American history?"
  
   I do! While Bezos has been boating, his ex-wife, MacKenzie Scott has been giving. She has been generous with gifts and grants to a variety of institutions, but has only given away $26 billion of her $40 billion fortune. Giving well could be the best revenge if she gave a portion of her wealth to support the paper Bezos abandoned. 
(The quote is from "Post Mortem" by Robert G. Kaiser, NYRB, March 26, 2026.)
(Analogy alert: One definition of "Beelzebub" - "a fallen angel in Milton's Paradise Lost ranking next to Satan".)

London's Bicentennial (Snippet 8)

Transitory Frenzy - 1888

I don't have time to check and see if "transitory frenzy" is defined in the most recent Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Disorders. It probably is, just under a different name. Keep it in mind if you need a defence attorney. I also don't know if this fellow made it back to London or stayed in Winnemucca, Nevada. This article is from The Silver State on Feb. 27, 1888 which was in Winnemucca.

Book Promotion

 Advertising and Books

   Promoting a book is harder than publishing, or even writing one. According to Publishers Weekly, about four million of them were produced in 2025, which means that being an author is somewhat easier than becoming an astronaut. The hard part is getting a reader to choose your book from a pile of 4,000,000 of them.

   I thought of this while reading the March 2026 issue of The Atlantic, which I am pleased to promote. The articles in this issue are first-rate. Even the advertisements are good and are our subject for today. Some of them were full page promotions for books. 

One of These Ads Is Not Like the Others

   You may have been watching Sesame Street, rather than reading a book, and remember the song containing the words above. Your task is to look at the four book ads below and identify which one is different.

1.

2.

3.   

4. 

And The Answer Is?
   The most obvious answer is #3 since the ad is for six books rather than just one. The less obvious answer and the one I prefer is #4. 

   The book about Lincoln is published by W.W. Norton & Company. The Deserving is published by Bloomsbury. The six books in #3 are published by Princeton University Press.  It is usually the case that full page advertisements for books are paid for by publishing companies or university presses.

   The ad for Isabel, Anacaona & Columbus’s Demise: 1498–1502 Retold, by Andrew Rowen was likely paid for by Andrew Rowen. All Persons Press appears to be a publisher solely for Andrew Rowen publications. There is nothing wrong with this at all and I am glad to assist author Rowen by promoting the prequels to the work above: Encounters Unforeseen:1492 Retold and Columbus and Caonabó: 1493–1498 Retold.
   One of the reasons self-promotion is resorted to is, as I mentioned when I wrote about the Washington Post, that there are now few book reviewers around to go through the four million produced. I found very few reviews for the books of Mr. Rowen and know about them only because I read the full page advertisement in The Atlantic. 
   You now may be curious about the cost of a full page ad in a national magazine. That is difficult to determine and the rate provided for a person is likely less than the one quoted for a publisher. I will say, however, that the number is a big one.
   Mr. Rowen is apparently a Harvard Law graduate and a retiree from a New York city law firm. He seems to have had the means to spend a lot of time in the Caribbean doing research for his books and enough left over to promote them. He should not be blamed for that and I do hope he recovers his costs and carries on. 

Nature Dies In Darkness

    Events are being cancelled, some news is censored and other sensitive subjects are not broached. There is more silence than there was. People disappear and some things disappear, never having been seen. One of those things is The National Nature Assessment. 
   The assessment was announced on Earth Day in 2022. President Biden issued and executive order to undertake a thorough examination of the state of nature. The evaluation of the environment was to be done by a large number of experts and scientists, who were mostly volunteers. Research was undertaken and hundreds of pages written. A draft of the report was about to be submitted, but, The National Nature Assessment was cancelled by the Trump administration.

   The National Nature Assessment disappeared, but The Nature Record exists. The authors of the Assessment thought their work needed to be evaluated and made public. They did not want the data to disappear. 
   The 800+ pages of the draft is available for public comments and scientific review. "For a chapter-by-chapter journey through the state of nature in America," here is The Nature Record.  It can be read online or downloaded. If you fear that nature is not in good shape and don't want to read about it, skip to Chapter 4: "Bright Spots in Nature."

Samizdat:
   I usually write "Sources", but perhaps that word is now appropriate. For more background see:
   Catrin Einhorn produced two good reports for the New York Times:
1) "Trump Killed a Major Report on Nature. They’re Trying to Publish It Anyway: The first full draft of the assessment, on the state of America’s land, water and wildlife, was weeks from completion. The project leader called the study “too important to die.” NYT, Feb. 10, 2026.
  "The draft was almost ready for submission, due in less than a month. More than 150 scientists and other experts had collectively spent thousands of hours working on the report, a first-of-its-kind assessment of nature across the United States.
   But President Trump ended the effort, started under the Biden administration, by executive order. So, on Jan. 30, the project’s director, an environmental scientist named Phil Levin, sent an email telling members of his team that their work had been discontinued.
   But it wasn’t the only email he sent that day.
   “This work is too important to die,” Dr. Levin wrote in a separate email to the report’s authors, this one from his personal account. “The country needs what we are producing.”

2) "Nature Report, Killed by Trump, Is Released Independently: A draft assessment of the health of nature in the United States is grim but shot through with bright spots and possibility."
Catrin Einhorn, NYT - March 5, 2026
   "The report’s name has changed from the National Nature Assessment to the Nature Record, to reflect that it is a new, independent effort, but it builds off work that was already underway and most of the authors remain the same. Its scientific review will be conducted by the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine, the same organization that would have reviewed the report had it remained under the auspices of the federal government.    
   The first two chapters that will summarize the sprawling endeavor are not yet written, because the authors are waiting until after this round of feedback. But 13 other chapters are in place.
   The report explores not only actions that harm nature, but also how people are affected by nature and its loss, with chapters on human health, the economy and national security. And throughout, the report highlights solutions and nature’s ability to recover when given the chance."
  For an example of reports on various substacks see:
"Why the Trump Administration Couldn’t Kill the Nature Record: Science has a way of refusing to stay buried", Jeff Nesbit, The Contrarian, March 16, 2026.