Can the “Bookazine” Save Magazines?

37m
Magazines have fallen on hard times – especially the weekly news, fashion, and celebrity mags that once dominated newsstands. The revenue from magazine racks has plummeted in recent years, and many magazines have stopped appearing in print or shut down altogether.
And yet, there is something growing in the checkout aisle: one-off publications, each devoted to a single topic, known as “bookazines.” Last year, over 1,200 different bookazines went on sale across the country. They cover topics ranging from Taylor Swift, Star Wars, the Kennedy assassination, K-Pop, the British royal family, and as host Willa Paskin recently observed, the career of retired movie star Robert Redford.
In today’s episode, Willa looks behind the racks to investigate this new-ish format. Who is writing, publishing, and reading all these one-off magazines – and why? Is the bookazine a way forward for magazines, or their last gasp?
Voices you’ll hear in this episode include Caragh Donley, longtime magazine journalist turned prolific writer of bookazines; Eric Szegda, executive at bookazine publisher a360 media; and Erik Radvon, comic book creator and bookazine fan.
This episode was produced by Max Freedman and edited by Evan Chung, who produce the show with Katie Shepherd. Derek John is Executive Producer. Merritt Jacob is Senior Technical Director.
If you haven’t yet, please subscribe and rate our feed in Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. And even better, tell your friends.
If you’re a fan of the show, please sign up for Slate Plus. Members get to listen to Decoder Ring and all other Slate podcasts without any ads and have total access to Slate’s website. Your support is also crucial to our work. Go to Slate.com/decoderplus to join Slate Plus today.
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Listen and follow along

Transcript

Listen.

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Wow, it's busy in here.

I find myself at CVS all the time, looking for toothpaste, aspirin, scotch tape.

Who knows?

I wander back and forth in the aisles, trying to find what I'm looking for, or someone who can point me in the right direction.

Excuse me?

Do you know where the magazines are?

Oh, right in this corner.

Okay, well, thank you very much.

I don't know if you've looked at the magazines available in a CVS or a Walgreens or a Rite Aid or a supermarket lately.

Years ago, they were full of monthly and weekly news, fashion, food, and celebrity magazines.

And of course, tabloids.

As a little kid, I loved reading headlines about aliens and ghosts and tawdry celebrity scandals while I was helping my parents at the checkout line.

But the magazines available at CVS don't look anything like this anymore.

So I'm looking at A.

The story of Jesus, the essential tax guide, Lucille Ball, her life, love, and legacy, the history of the occult.

Sure, there's a handful of familiar titles, a vogue, a vanity fair, but mostly there are dozens and dozens of one-off publications, each devoted to a single topic.

Taylor, The Music and the Magic, a Walter Payton Memorial, The Kennedy Assassination 60 years later, the story of Ellis Island, ultimate guide to Pokemon, 100% unofficial.

I first noticed this phenomenon a few months ago.

I was wandering in the aisles when my eye caught on what I thought was the monthly women's magazine Redbook.

But when I looked more closely, I realized it was actually Redford, as in Robert Redford, the now retired 87-year-old movie star of such films as The Sting, All the President's Men, and Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid.

Don't tell me how to rob a bank.

I know how to rob a bank.

I'm a journalist.

I've worked at print magazines.

I thought I knew the gist of how they worked.

But staring at Robert Redford's floppy blonde hair on this cover was like looking at a picture you've walked by a million times after it's been moved.

Suddenly, you really notice it.

And I had questions.

Like, who's making a publication devoted solely to Robert Redford in 2024?

Who's making all these other one-offs too?

Who's writing, publishing, and reading them?

Need a bag?

No, I'm good.

And most of all, why are there so many of them?

I mean, aren't magazines dying?

How often do people buy magazines anymore?

Not a lot.

Not a lot.

Not a lot.

This is Decoder Ring.

I'm Willa Paskin.

Magazines have fallen on hard times, and nowhere is that more true than at the checkout line and on newsstands, where revenue has plummeted by billions of dollars.

And yet, there is something growing there.

They're called single-issue publications, or bookasines.

And last year, over 1,200 different bookasines went on sale across the country.

Maybe you've bought one of them.

Maybe you would never buy one of them.

Maybe you've never even noticed them.

But the innocuous-looking bookasine is either a way forward for the magazine or a last gasp for a format trying to survive on the very racks that used to be its natural habitat and might not be for much longer.

So today, Undecodering with some help from Robert Redford.

Love to.

Can the Bookasine Save Magazines?

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In the 1970s thriller Three Days of the Condor, Robert Redford plays a CIA employee whose job is to comb through magazines every day looking for clues.

I look for leaks, I look for new ideas.

We read everything that's published in the world.

Now, I don't have a CIA operative who looks like Robert Redford to help me with this particular mystery.

But I did have Redford, the magazine, with his name in big white font on the cover and him staring right out at me, his gaze intense.

And so I started trying to piece together what's going on with Bookasines by combing through it.

There's actually no advertisements, just

not interrupted at all.

It's just like endless articles and pictures about him.

A lot, a lot of pictures.

There's full pages of Redford in a bathrobe, his blonde chest hair exposed, Redford as a child, Redford on a horse, Redford giving his co-star Meryl Street a piggyback ride, Redford shirtless, and his jeans slung low.

Like, Rillo?

Every single picture comes with a caption that contains a quote or concrete detail.

Although 1972 comedy The Hot Rock was a box office bust, it did inspire indie rock band Slater Kinney to name their 1998 album in honor of it.

The care put into these captions tips you off that Redford magazine is not just a copy and paste job or created by ChatGPT.

In fact, the whole thing was written by a very real person who's listed on the last page three times as the managing editor, research editor, and writer.

Her name is Kara Donnelly.

My professional resume is, I think, a textbook example of what's happened to journalism and my bank account as well.

Kara has been, among other things, a movie critic, a city hall reporter, and an executive editor at TV Guide.

But she spent the biggest chunk of her career in the 1990s at the weekly magazine, People.

Interesting, entertaining, conversation, stimulating, nevertheless than fascinating.

And this week's People.

In those days, People was kind of like the magazine of record for culture.

And you would know from one day to the next, maybe today I'm going to watch Jackie Collins make meatloaf, which is a thing I actually did.

Or there's an earthquake somewhere and you got to get to Haiti or

spend a night on a mountaintop with John Bon Jovi.

When Cara was there, People's readership was close to 40 million, and some of its best-selling issues could move nearly 3 million copies.

And it wasn't just People.

Time, Newsweek, TV Guide were all riding high.

7,000 magazines were available on newsstands, breaking news and brimming with commentary, flush with advertising dollars and readers, and full of authority.

It was a great time to be in that business, and I did not regret all the money I spent getting a master's degree in magazine journalism.

But then the magazine industry started changing fast.

Weeklies that had thrived for decades by bringing people the news first couldn't compete with the immediacy of the internet and then smartphones.

Advertising dollars disappeared and revenue tumbled, leading to mass layoffs and consolidation.

By the 2010s, Kara found herself freelancing.

She took writing assignments and worked on Queen Latifah's talk show.

But as the decade passed, money started getting tight.

One day, working on a freelance article, she found herself in Dwayne The Rock Johnson's trailer, looking at a very fancy bottle of booze.

He said it was like a $6,000 bottle of tequila.

I went, okay, when I paid this last bill today, I had $80 in my account, and now I'm sitting here with a guy who thinks nothing of a $6,000 bottle of tequila.

And that's what it actually hit me.

I gotta do something to get some money.

The thing Cara was by far the most qualified to do was make magazines, which was also what she liked doing.

But traditional magazine jobs had dried up.

Even so, she emailed everyone she could looking for any kind of editorial work at all.

And I think it was within about two weeks after that when I got the call from a friend of a friend about, hey, do you want to do this weed magazine?

This weed magazine wasn't High Times or any other regularly published magazine.

It was a standalone single issue devoted entirely to marijuana, which was being legalized in a number of states.

It was exactly the type of bookasine I saw on the racks and CVS.

And Cara and her bank account jumped at the chance to work on it.

I did one and that sold apparently pretty well.

I did another one that sold.

I did, I feel like it was about eight separate magazines on weed and CBD, which was great because I have never used drugs in my life.

But what Cara did have experience with were these one-off publications.

They've actually been around in some form for decades.

She used to help make some back when she worked at People.

We started doing what we called SIPs, special interest publications, which were like single issues that were devoted to a topic.

If a celebrity passed away, you would do a whole issue about

their life and career.

But back at People in the 1990s, SIPs were an add-on, a sideshow to the Weekly magazine, which was selling millions of copies.

Now, many of these bookasines are not affiliated with any regular weekly at all.

They're either completely standalone publications or they use the branding of a magazine like Entertainment Weekly that's no longer published in print.

In any event, Cara had a new source of income, and she didn't stop with the weed bookasines.

She did ones about Star Wars, Star Trek, financial planning, you name it.

It's me having decades of training to just try to find a balance between what people need to know on the topic, what they should know on the topic, and just what will be fun.

I have bosses who will weigh in, but it's kind of fun for somebody to say, here, we're doing 100 pages on Robert Redford.

Go find however you want to tell that story.

Like a lot of these projects, Redford started with a call from an old colleague.

Someone else I knew from previous jobs who knew I had done a bunch of these because that's kind of what we all do now, that we can't get real jobs.

The colleague was working for one of the smaller editorial content companies that oversee the creation of each bookazine before turning them over to a publisher.

These companies are themselves founded and run by former high-level magazine editors and designers who have changed jobs as the industry has disintegrated.

They have a core of full-time employees, but they hire a freelance team to actually execute these publications.

That team typically includes a freelance art director, a freelance copy editor, as well as someone like Cara, who wrote the entire Redford bookasine with just the help of her son.

They're all paid out of a lump sum that doesn't get bigger if there are more people working on the bookasine.

That lump is typically between $17,000 and $30,000.

That's how much this group of freelancers makes all together, which doesn't come out to that much money for any one of them.

The new world is you don't get paid nearly as much and your deadlines are much faster.

It typically takes about six weeks for a bookasine to come together, though in the case of a celebrity death, they can pump one out in just a few days.

But when you don't have to wait for interviews, like it's totally doable.

It's just doing research and attributing everything that you find, but there's no like interviews like a traditional magazine.

So it's not the same as her old jet-setting job at people.

But Cara likes the work.

She also considers herself fortunate.

She now works in TV as a senior producer on the Kelly Clarkson show.

So she can take a bookasine gig whenever she needs some extra money, just because she wants to.

Because I feel like the hours between midnight and six are just wasted on sleep, then I'll come home and work on one of these magazines.

But bookezines remain a lifeline for many middle-aged magazine professionals who know what they're doing and want to to keep doing it, even if they're now doing it on tighter deadlines with less resources and without health insurance, at least they're a relatively reliable source of work and income.

Because someone is commissioning lots and lots of them.

And that's who I wanted to talk to next: someone who could tell me why

there are so

many bookasines.

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When it started to change, it was quick.

He kept saying, no, no, no, I'm in the hospital now, but next week I'll be ready for the show.

Now, Charlie's sober.

He's going to tell you the truth.

How do I present this with any class?

I think we're past that, Charlie.

We're past that, yeah.

Somebody call action.

Aka Charlie Sheen, only on Netflix, September 10th.

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It's called Pears.

Like the fruit, pears.

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We'll post a new game every day, and your job is to make as many words as you can, to find great pair words, and of course, to beat your friends.

If that sounds like you're kind of fun, head to slate.com/slash games to find pairs today.

That's slate.com/slash games and look for pairs

If you can quote any line from All the President's Men, the movie about the journalists who broke the Watergate scandal, I bet it's this one.

Follow the money.

I mean,

I can't tell you that.

Just follow the money.

That's the mysterious informant known as Deep Throat telling the journalist Bob Woodward, played by Robert Redford, how to proceed with his investigation.

And in much lower stake circumstances, I decided to heed this advice and follow the money too, because the money is the most confounding thing about bookasines.

Specifically, what's confounding is how they're making any.

As you've probably heard, things are not going well for print magazines.

Newsweek has announced it's scrapping its print publication after 80 years.

National Geographic will stop selling its regular printed issues on newsstands in the year.

And the owners of Entertainment Weekly, in Style, Eating Well, Health, Parents, and People, and Espanol announced they are ending the print versions of the magazines.

Redbook, the magazine I'd confused Redford with, also stopped printing in 2019.

And there are many other examples besides.

Basically, newsstands are a disaster, except somehow, for bookasines.

So, like Robert Redford and all the president's men, I decided to chase the cash.

And to do it, I went back to what I had.

Redford, the magazine.

On the last page is the name of its publisher, A360 Media.

A360 is owned by a hedge fund, and it turns out it's one of only a handful of companies driving the entire bookasine industry.

You may have heard of it by its old name.

A360 used to be called AMI when it was the publisher of the National Enquirer and other supermarket tabloids.

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But the National Enquirer notoriously went from breaking stories to being the story in 2018.

The Associated Press reporting the National Enquirer kept damaging stories about President Trump, along with details about hush money payments locked away in a safe.

This is the secret.

As the dust settled from the series of catch and kill scandals, AMI changed its name to A360 and eventually sold off the Inquirer.

A360 still publishes some weekly titles like Us Weekly and Women's World.

But in recent years, it has stormed into bookasines or SIPs.

When I first came to A360, we were publishing about 200 SIPs a year.

Last year, we topped out at a little over 500.

Eric Zegda is Executive Vice President of Consumer Revenue and Marketing at A360.

His name is right there on the last page of Redford.

And I wanted him to help me understand how SIPs can work financially when traditional magazines can't.

And he told me they're apples and oranges.

SIPs is a completely different ballgame.

What's very unique and different about bookasines is they are basically a single revenue stream.

Eric explained that traditionally, magazines have had three revenue revenue streams: advertising, subscribers, and retail sales.

But bookazines make all of their money from that last stream.

They make all their money in stores by appealing directly to consumers.

So they're less like GQ and more like gum or chocolate bars or soda or whatever else you see for sale on the checkout line.

But even there, right in potential consumers' eye line, they they don't sell that many copies.

They are lower cirque, meaning the magazines with subscriptions are in the 1 million plus circulation range.

Special interest publications are selling more like anywhere from 25 to 100,000 copies an issue.

So, bookasines have one revenue stream and they don't sell that much, which does not sound that promising.

Certainly, it would be disastrous for a traditional magazine.

But remember, that's not what bookasines are.

They are a different kind of product with a different business strategy, and they are made to extract value from troubled newsstands in a number of ways.

First off, bookasines are cheap to make.

As you heard earlier, their content is outsourced to smaller editorial companies who turn them around fast.

That content is also reusable.

A celebration of Robert Redford can be reprinted, say, a commemorative issue when he dies.

Secondly, bookazines stay on newsstands for a long time, 90 days, longer than a monthly or a weekly.

It gives them a bigger window in which to find a prospective buyer.

Third, they're pricey.

They can run from $12.99 up to $18.99.

That's pretty much the price of a book.

So how does a publisher like A360 get people to pay that much?

It's because this is 100% focused on a topic that they are extremely passionate about.

Bookazines look old-fashioned, but they are animated by the same impulse that drives so much contemporary pop culture, intense niche interest.

Consumers are now saying, well, if I'm interested in the Royals, I want a book that's 100% about the Royals.

So Eric Zegda's company, A360, churns out deep dives into specific topics that have the feel of a magazine, but the narrow focus of a subreddit.

You know, there are niche fans, whether they're into manga or anime, and they found a community in chat rooms or whatnot.

And that's what a bookasine tries to do is tap into that fandom and create a product for these consumers.

Fans come in all ages, and that's the insight here.

For older, less online readers, bookasines can function like an internet deep dive without the internet.

They're for people who don't want to go into a Reddit thread to learn about CBD or want to ogle octogenarian movie stars who don't have robust fan sites.

We do and have a lot of success with our bookasines that tap into that, you know, whether it's like the Robert Redford or the Harrison Ford.

But then there is tapping into pop culture and what's hot right now.

So like last year, our year was made

because of the Taylor Swift phenomenon.

A360 sold $12 million worth of Taylor titles last year, including a crafting guide, trying to reach young people who want a keepsake, a status object, a magazine about their idol.

Oh my God.

No, when I tell you, I'm so excited.

I feel like...

I feel like I'm a teenager again.

This strategy doesn't just work with Swifties.

This is a TikTok from a fan going through a bookazine about the K-pop band Stray Kids.

Oh my gosh.

Here's like the contents.

And it's like, you can go there.

I'm so excited.

I'm sorry.

So, to recap, bookasines are cheap to produce, expensive to buy.

They target a passionate audience and stay on high visibility racks for a long time.

But there's one more thing.

Remember, magazine sales overall are still falling.

So newsstand sales overall are still contracting.

And so bookazine publishers need other advantages to make everything work.

Follow the money.

Just follow the money.

A360 has one particular advantage, and it has to do with the magazine supply chain.

30 years ago, there were scores of thriving magazine publishers, four national distributors, and over 350 wholesalers getting magazines to tens of thousands of stores.

Today, there is only one national magazine distributor in the country, and that's for all nationally distributed magazines, not just bookasines.

There's also one national magazine wholesaler that controls about 90% of the market.

And both of these are owned by the same hedge fund that owns A360.

That fund also owns one of the largest magazine printers in the country and the company that places magazines into checkout racks.

So for every bookazine published, that's a lot of different pieces of the revenue going back to a single entity.

A360's group, it turns out, is just about a vertically integrated monopoly, the 800-pound gorilla of the magazine retail space, which is one way to help make the math work.

The money's the key to whatever this is.

A360 is only one publisher, though, and other bookasine publishers are making it work too.

They use many of the same strategies and some different ones as well, like leveraging famous legacy magazine brand names and repurposing their old content.

Whatever the strategy, altogether, they've been enough for bookasines to come to dominate the CVS checkout line.

There is a seminal point point in 2019 where the SIP segment surpassed weeklies and they have not looked back since.

And so the SIPs now represent over 50% of magazine sales and are by far the largest category now.

So I'd followed the money far enough to understand how this worked for the publisher, but I had a question left.

As weekly magazines are replaced by bookasines on the checkout racks, what does it mean for readers?

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So, I want to cop to the fact that from the moment I first laid eyes on Redford, the magazine, I've been a little skeptical of bookasines as a reader, but yes, also as a journalist.

As bookasines announce right there in their goofy name, they are not quite magazines.

They're the size of magazines, they fit in the same racks as magazines, they employ some people who used to work at magazines, and they do some of the fun stuff magazines do.

But they do none of the more imperative, original, challenging, culture-setting, far-reaching, expensive things magazines do either.

And I wasn't the only person to be suspicious of them.

I was a little skeptical.

I didn't expect much.

Eric Radvon is a writer and comic book creator who knows the value of a traditional magazine.

I grew up in like a magazine heavy household.

So we got like time and news week and TV guide and it was just like part of the fabric of life, right?

It was just like these piles of magazines all over the place.

And that went away when like kind of like the newsstand started to shrink.

And what was left wasn't like super appealing.

You know, it was like celebrity magazines and, you know, crossword puzzles.

But during the pandemic, when he was at Walmart buying supplies for his new baby, something at the checkout line caught his eye.

A Star Wars bookazine.

It was sort of like, you know, impulse buy, like, hey, why not?

I kind of got like some sticker shock.

I was like, oh, wow, this is $13.

But he bought it anyway.

And many more soon followed.

And then as I started to grab them, I was like, oh, wow, these are actually pretty great.

I was just really impressed how much research and thought and care there was put into this thing that like was on the shelf at CVS.

He loves them.

Loves how it feels to slow down, shut out the noise, and dive into a subject.

It's also a very human experience or a much more healthy human experience to just kind of like allow yourself the time and space to explore a topic in more than like five nanoseconds.

He's got ones about Indiana Jones, David Bowie, the legend of Zelda, the Beatles, and Superman.

I have an extra bounce in my step when I'm in the Super Walmart and I need to get diapers and wipes.

And then I see that checkout lane and my eyes are like scanning a mile a minute, looking for like what's new.

My son, who's four, really enjoys like scanning the items.

And like, I get this cool commentary of like, here's another one of Papa's magazines that he needs to get.

He keeps them all in an Ikea cube in his office, even the ones he thinks are mediocre.

They're not all created equal.

So some of them are like these like, you can tell, just like a pretty obvious like copy and paste job of like old material from like Entertainment Weekly in 1993 or something, right?

But then some of them are actually like really, really good.

I think what jumped out to me was like this thing that we don't really get so much of in the internet age.

The real feeling of like an editorial,

I don't know, filament going on there where there was like, yeah, somebody actually like thought about this and put this together.

And he's right.

There are real people throwing themselves creatively into some bookasines.

People like Kara Donnelly.

Well, that's the joy of doing these.

I mean, these magazines, at least everyone I've been a part of, are actually fun.

They're good reads.

And she has fun making them.

Probably the biggest testament to her enjoyment is that she keeps doing them, even though she has a lot going on.

So we share a lot of stories on this show, some more personal than others.

Today's episode was made possible because of my next guest.

She is one of our producers and has been since season one.

Please welcome Kara Donnelly, Gonley, everybody.

This is from the Kelly Clarkson show, where Kara works.

On this episode, Kara stepped in front of the cameras for once because she had her own story to tell.

So you, you always knew, right?

Yeah, I mean, from the time you're conscious, when I was seven, I had this dream, recurring dream, that Tabitha from Bewitched would come over to our house and she would ask me if I wanted to play.

I would say, sure.

She would say, drink this first.

I would drink it.

Then I was a girl and we'd go play.

At age 63, Kara came out as transgender.

After that episode, there were probably half a dozen, you know, burly Teamster dudes who didn't want to do it in public, but like they would catch me, you know, wherever I'm going, hey, I'm sorry to bother you.

I just, I, when you do that episode, it just, it changed my mind about a lot of things and it made me cry.

And so I am on this sort of mission now to be America's friendly neighborhood trans person.

And yet, Kara still finds time to make bookasines because she loves the work and she loves it even though it doesn't involve in-depth reporting and it doesn't pay nearly as much and it's not unearthing new information.

Like at her old job.

Would I like those days back?

Yeah.

Is there anything I can do?

Will they ever come back?

Nah.

The plus with everything now is at least it's a facsimile of what I used to do, what a lot of us used to do.

And it's still a chance to have fun.

Working on this piece, I started imagining designing a CVS from scratch.

There are a lot of things one might change, but I was thinking about magazines.

If you were starting over completely right now, would you set aside a space for them?

Or would you put something else up at the front?

More chocolate.

More soda, more chapstick.

I know the absence of magazines would bum me out.

I I love magazines.

Way before I worked at one, I read them.

I poured over the articles and the pictures.

I thrilled to pick one out before getting on an airplane.

I was delighted by them.

I learned stuff from them I never would have found out about all by myself.

As you can tell, I feel nostalgic about magazines.

You could even say I miss the way they were,

which happens to be the name of a nostalgic romance co-starring Barbara Streisand and you guessed it, Robert Redford.

Katie, it was never uncomplicated.

But it was lovely, wasn't it?

Yes, it was lovely.

But nostalgia can't bring magazines back.

Bookazines are imperfect and compromised.

Who knows how long they'll be successful or how long they'll be written by human beings.

But for now, they have something that a lot of magazines don't.

The undeniable virtue of still being here.

Can it be that it was all

so simple then?

Oh, has time

rewritten every line?

This is Decoder Ring.

I'm Willip Haskin.

If you have any cultural mysteries you want us to decode, please email us at decodering at slate.com.

This episode was written by me.

It was edited by Evan Chung and produced by Max Friedman.

We produced Decodering with Katie Shepard.

Derek John is executive producer.

Merritt Jacob is senior technical director.

I'd like to thank Bob Dare, Cynthia Wang, Todd Lundgren, Lisa Chambers, Lisa Gorin, Kit Taylor, Joe Berger, Samir Housni, Michael Rothfeld, Margo Suska, and Diego Romero.

If you haven't yet, yet, please subscribe and rate our Feed in Apple podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts.

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Member support is crucial to our work, so please go to slate.com/slash decoderplus to join Slate Plus today.

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