Magazines -- California was crumbling in 1991, too
Some of my weekly newspaper columns about how magazines were covering America and the world three decades ago read like they were written yesterday.
From 1989 to 2007 I wrote more than 800 weekly columns about magazines for the liberal LA Times, the liberal Pittsburgh Post-Gazette (in the 1990s) and the conservative-libertarian Pittsburgh Tribune Review (in the 2000s).
The column, one of only a few in the country, was designed to inform and entertain readers about the interesting or provocative stuff being printed on dead trees in thousands of magazines.
Today the columns serve as weekly snapshots of how magazines were covering the big people and momentous events of the 1990s and 2000s.
Many read like they could have been written yesterday.
For example, here’s one from November 1991 about the myriad social, economic and cultural troubles that Time magazine said were befalling California, where I lived happily from 1977 to 1989.