I came across a large book the other day on a subject I’m interested in, and as I leafed through it, there was something tucked inside — a page from Newsweek. Curious, I stopped and read it. The article mentioned that autobiographical writings by Albert Camus had been published. Now, I’ve read most of Camus — he’s one of the great thinkers — but I don’t recall ever seeing that news item.
That discovery got me thinking: where do you get your news digest these days? I’m talking about those short, tightly written snippets of world news that Time and Newsweek used to do so well. The kind of pages that gave you a sense of what was happening in Paris, Moscow, Tokyo, and New York — all in one sitting.
Yes, there’s The Economist, and it’s excellent, but it’s very compartmentalised. It doesn’t quite have that compact news-summary style that those older magazines had — where you’d turn a page and find a little gem of a report about a new artist in Italy or an environmental protest in Brazil.
The cost of magazines has gone up, of course, and while I’d love to subscribe to Time again just to get that broad, summarised view of the world, it’s become an expensive habit. Still, Time remains a high-quality weekly, both in print and online, with deep, considered writing. Newsweek has survived too — it went digital for a while but brought back its print edition in 2018. It’s changed a bit — more opinionated and provocative than before — but it’s still there.
U.S. News & World Report is the one that really shifted gears. It no longer prints a regular magazine. These days it’s mostly online, known for its rankings of universities and hospitals, though it still puts out special guidebooks and “Best Colleges” issues.
If you’re longing for that classic “digest” feel, the closest you’ll find in print today is The Week. It’s built entirely around summarising the world’s news — a sort of spiritual successor to those old News Digest pages. Every issue pulls together news and opinion from newspapers and magazines around the world, giving you that quick global perspective we used to rely on Time for.
And then, of course, the digital world has taken over the role entirely. Aggregator apps like Apple News, Google News, and Flipboard serve up snippets and summaries by the thousand. Many people now get their “weekly digest” through email newsletters — The New York Times’s “The Morning” or Axios’s quick bulletins, for example. They’re efficient, timely, and easy to skim over a cup of coffee.
But somehow, it’s not quite the same as holding a magazine in your hands — the texture of the paper, the design of the layout, the small, fascinating stories that seemed to appear out of nowhere.
I suppose that’s what I miss most — the sense that the world was all in one place, bound together under a red Time logo or the familiar Newsweek font.
