Price-hikes and Lookalikes in the Penny Press!
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The New Year in the Penny Press started out for me with a nasty little shock. Despite bungling my subscription paperwork to such an extent that I get two copies of every issue of the New Yorker in the mail ever week, I had occasion shortly after the year began to buy a copy of the magazine at a newsstand – at which point I noticed for the first time that the New Yorker is now $10 an issue (if the actual cover-price of a thing leaves you with insufficient change out of a $10 bill to buy anything else, that thing costs $10).
Circumstances were such that I would have felt awkward not going through with the purchase, but the issue curled like a rattlesnake in my leather shoulder-bag, and when I finally got around to reading the issue, I read it with a wounded squint of eye. It’s true that there was a first-rate profile by Laura Secor of Asieh Amini, an Iranian activist who’s dedicated her life to attacking some of the barbarities of the Iranian penal system. And there was a very good short by Ottessa Moshfegh called “The Beach Boy.” And there was some typically smart TV criticism by Emily Nussbaum of a show called “Transparent.” And there was a long review of a recent volume of the poetry of Yehuda Amichai by James Wood, and an opera piece by Alex Ross, and a typically witty movie review by Anthony Lane, including some sharp observations on the filmmaking of the loathsome Quentin Tarantino in context of talking about “The Hateful Eight.” “Above all,” Lane writes, “we get confirmation of the director’s preeminent perversity: patient and elaborate in his racking up of tension, he knows only one way to resolve it, and that is through carnage, displayed in unmerciful detail.”
Admittedly, it’s a profusion of first-rate material, a lineup of some of the best writers appearing in periodicals today. But not every issue boasts such a lineup, and every issue on the newsstand now costs $10 apiece, which is highway robbery, a price that would be excessive even for the big square-bound glossy magazines. It makes buying the latest issue while out-and-about in Boston or New York unthinkable; buying an annual subscription is now the only non-insulting way to get the magazine, and it’s easy to imagine the subscription price skyrocketing in similar measure sometime soon.
Maybe I allowed too much of the irritation of that New Yorker issue to slop over into my reading of the new issue of Smithsonian, a magazine I’ve come to like very much. This latest issue has a fascinating story on WWII bombs and another first-rate story on the white storks of Europe, but the cover story is “Unearthing the World of Jesus” by Ariel Sabar, with its arresting “artist’s interpretation” of a sixth-century painting that’s possibly of Jesus as some kind of unshaven epicene Apollo figure.
The article is classic Smithsonian in its beautiful layout and careful writing, but it irritated me because both the article and all the experts quoted in it seem to be angling toward a pre-set conclusion, which isn’t how history or archeological interpretation are supposed to work. The reader-friendly assumption throughout the article is that Jesus – the more-or-less recognizable figure from the Gospels – actually existed at one point as a real person, and it’s the job of relic-hunters and site-diggers only to find more and more evidence of that. Some of the experts Sabar quotes sound downright impatient not to have turned up a driver’s license or a verified Twitter account:
“The sorts of evidence other historical figures leave behind are not the sort we’d expect with Jesus,” says Mark Chancey, a religious studies professor at Southern Methodist University and a leading authority on Galilean history. “He wasn’t a political leader, so we don’t have coins, for example, that have his bust or name. He wasn’t a sufficiently high-profile social leader to leave behind inscriptions. In his own lifetime, he was a marginal figure, and he was active in marginalized circles.”
Not a sufficiently high-profile social leader? A guy who, according to his own 
mythology, was followed everywhere by crowds numbering in the thousands, all of whom hailed him as a great miracle-worker capable of raising the dead? Seems to me if there had been such a figure in first-century Judea, somebody would have mentioned it at the time, even as a passing anecdote. The fact that in two thousand years not one single such mention has ever been found would, I’d think, be grounds for a bit more critical distance even in a piece called “Unearthing the World of Jesus.” After all, the title of equivalent pieces is never “Unearthing the World of Hercules,” right?
But as I mentioned, probably I was taking out some unfair frustrations on the innocent Smithsonian. Either way, one thing’s for damn certain: if he really did exist, Jesus would never have charged $10 for a single issue of the New Yorker, for God’s sake.