We’re not here to complain about the many indignities of air travel. Price, legroom, and fellow passengers’ varying degrees of socialization are all well-worn complaints. Nor are we here to mourn the magazine as a physical artifact. But the rapidly declining health of the inflight magazine is a specific enough phenomenon to warrant a moment of contemplation. CJR‘s comes courtesy of Lucy Schiller, who memorializes the seat-back pocket mainstay with a mixture of media-crit savvy and legitimate nostalgia. Tray tables up, everyone.
Put a different way, the lure of print, now, might present itself only inside of constraint—and the constraint of no Wi-Fi is rapidly disappearing. It was in a Wi-Fi void, inside of a highfalutin, high-altitude tin can, that the in-flight magazine once thrived, both opulent and casual, an object of simultaneous aspiration and reassurance. Its cousin Skymall understood these brief, buoyant contradictions acutely, offering, via its contracts with the airlines that stocked it, an array of smart idiosyncrasies, luxurious gags whose appeal also seemed, maybe, specific to the temporary whims of air travel: Harry Potter wands, Easter Island doorstops, personal sauna systems, mittens for two, toasters that would burn the silhouette of your dog’s head into a slice of bread. These were not necessities, in the same way that in-flight magazines never pretended to offer breaking news or timely political analysis.