Dude-Bro Reading in the Penny Press!

As I’ve readily admitted in the past, the lad-mags for which I have something of a pronounced sweet-tooth aren’t really the places you go if you’re looking for literary coverage. It’s true that some of them pay their freelancers well, so in the rear pages of many an issue, you can often find writing that you don’t want to miss. But that writing will almost never be about books (and that’s often a good thing – I’ve lost count of the number of “25 Books Everybody Should Read” lists with no entries by the little ladies). The editors of these magazines love to tout the well-balanced life, so they sometimes feel compelled to pop in little features about how a self-respecting dude-bro should work in a little reading in between the four-figure shoe budget and the gym squats, but the features usually have a hit-and-run quality to them.

Take, as the latest instance, the November issue of Men’s Fitness. It’s got a bald no-neck thug on the cover, and it’s got a full-page ad for the Amazon Kindle that made me want to push somebody off a rock wall worse than I’ve ever wanted that in my life, and sure enough, there was a little factoid article about reading. It was written by James Rosenthal, and it read in its entirety:

Getting your nose out of the gossipy websites, clicking off all the streaming screens and picking up a book for just 30 minutes a day can help you live longer. Yale researchers surveyed general data (income, education, health) on 3,600 subjects, ages 50 or over, who’d participated in a previous study. They looked at how often the subjects read books, periodicals, or nothing at all. Over the course of the study, researchers found, people who read books more than 3 ½ hours a week had a 23% decrease in morality compared with those who didn’t read at all. Those who averaged 3 ½ hours of book reading had a 17% lower risk. In all, book readers lived 23 months longer than their non-reading counterparts. Interestingly, newspaper and periodical readers had an 11% drop in mortality risk – but only if they read at least seven hours a week. Scientists speculate this may be because books are longer and more complex plots, so they require more brain power than periodicals (not counting the one you’re holding, of course). So finish this up, then go grab yourself a hardcover.

These kinds of name-checks always prompt conflicting responses in me. On the one hand, I’m glad to see the periodical bros getting exposed to anything more complex than cross-training and the latest oatmeal trend. But on the other hand, the diffident, embarrassed tone the writers take is depressingly confusing. I mean, just look at those stats from Yale: reading books decreases mortality by an enormous chunk. Even on the outside chance that there’s any validity to anything Rosenthal quotes, why wouldn’t those figures stop Men’s Fitness readers in their tracks? Nothing else in the November issue – or any other issue – comes anywhere close to promising a 23% decrease in mortality, and yet is this little squib the headline of the issue? Is it anything perusing dude-bros will pause over for more than a second or two?

It’s a shame, in balance, and this time – as always – I finish my own two-second perusal hoping for a Books issue of a lad-mag, just once.