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September
8, 2003, 9:00 a.m.
You
Asked for It
Now sign up!
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get asked a
lot of questions via email. "Man, how did you let yourself go like
that?" "Is John Derbyshire an android?" "Would you
like to save BIG time on Viagra? Mmmnnxxx197.9 ninhao." You get the
idea.
But perhaps the question
I get asked most is, "When are you guys going to put the actual magazine
online?" For almost the last five years, readers have been clamoring
to get the actual issue of National Review without having to rely
on a government-run delivery service staffed by men in wool shorts. "My
issue of NR doesn't get here for weeks!" complain many. "I
travel all of the time; why can't I have NR to read on my laptop?
I've memorized the entire SkyMall catalog already!" And, of course:
"My pants make a wooshing sound when I walk!"
Well, I can't do
anything about the wooshing sound (though you might try to skip the corduroys
in the summer, regardless). But I can — finally — do something
about the lack of a digital version of NR. After months of brutal
"negotiations" in the Nut Cracker Suite (A.K.A. the publisher's
office), I've managed to get them to introduce National Review Digital.
I'm sure you've already
guessed this part: It'll cost money. The good news is that it won't cost
much. For a flat $19.95 you will get the entire National Review
On Dead Tree in a convenient ones-and-zeros format. That's the editorials,
the book reviews, the columns by Brookhiser, Long, Frum, and Derbyshire,
The Week, For the Record, the letters, and, occasionally even stuff by
yours truly. You will get it light years faster than the government ever
delivered the print version — and for a third of the price. You can
get it in either HTML or PDF format almost the moment the gang at NRHQ
have put that puppy to bed.
Now, the suits were
very reluctant to do this because, well, the economics sound crazy (Typical
suit: "You want us to give away the whole magazine for a third
of the price of a subscription? Good lord, man, do you understand what
you're saying? Why don't we just give everybody a living wage and medical
benefits? Do you even understand how the magazine business works?) But
we're doing it.
Now, here's the thing:
We want it to succeed, if for no other reason than we want to prove the
frugal pessimism of the suits as misplaced. So please sign
up. If you wanted to buy a gift subscription for your friends, but
it was too expensive, give
them this instead. If your kids are in college and you don't want
to send them a print magazine which will keep getting lost in the shuffle,
buy them this.
If you already love getting the magazine in print — they add in the
smell of rich Corinthian leather at the factory — but want to have
it on the go as well, buy
it for yourself. Buy it because it will make you cool and help you
pick up women — or men — at the beach. Buy it, because if it
fails they're going to drag me back into the suits' office, and like Roy
Scheider said in Jaws 2, I'm not going through that Hell again.
So, whatever your
reasons — intellectual perspicacity, human pity, whatever —
this
is an offer too good to pass up.
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