to Customer Service at Banes and Noble but I suspect this will have no effect.
I was looking for New Left Review in Boston, hardly a backwoods rural outpost and a found a few scattered places which carry it. However, they were out of the current issue. I've tried many of the left wing bookstores in the area but they have back issues. It would have been much easier in the past to pick up magazines with a left wing point of view say ten years ago than now, although at least in Boston sources are sporadically available.
While I am probably happy personally to subscribe to New Left Review and Monthly Review. I cannot do this indefinitely for all the journals which have interesting articles. I can go to the library to read archival Jounals but not all the time. Boston is hardly a backwoods kind of place, its one of the more cosmopolitan cities in the country. In the grand scheme of things I'm lucky to be able to find interesting Journals in libraries around. If this is true of Boston, hardly a backwater it must be doubly true of places like Cincinatti, Sacremento, Des Moines, ..... .
While I cannot prove it I suspect that the lack of diversity in the readily available press and magazine alternative or otherwise explains at least some of the shift rightward of political opinion in the U.S. If all one has available is TV broadcast and commentary and the New Republic or Commentary as the "Left Wing" its not surprsing the compressed range of publicly expressed opinion. While we all can generalize from our own struggles and those in our immediate surroundings the more diverse material available, the better all of our understanding is.
--mike
-- Michael Cohen mike at cns.bu.edu Work: 677 Beacon, Street, Rm313 Boston, Mass 02115 Home: 25 Stearns Rd, #3 Brookline, Mass 02146 Tel-Work: 617-353-9484 Tel-Home:617-734-8828 Tel-FAX:617-353-7755