Those Little Subscription Cards
From: Danny Howard <dannyman@toldme.com>
To: themail@newyorker.com
Subject: Those Little Subscription Cards
Hello,
For generations, our species has been plagued by little slips of paper that fall out of magazines like The New Yorker when we are trying to read. This is very distracting, as the environmentally conscientious reader must bend down and pick these off the ground, and carry them over to the paper recycling bin.
Some time back I read a suggestion that the a better place to put these was the mailbox, where they would be sent back to the publisher, with a bill, and if enough people adopted this practice it might cause the little slips of paper to stop appearing. I figured this was a double-win, since the Post Office could definitely use the money.
But today, it occurred to me that since these little slips of paper are pretty much the same each week, that you could take blank ones and slip them back in the magazines. The expense of mailing the slips back to yourselves would be offset somewhat by reduced printing costs. These little slips of paper could be transformed from droplets of would-be litter to a functional model of closed-loop “green” consumption.
If you are not doing so already, please re-use the subscription cards that I and other readers have been sending back to you! Even better, please encourage all of your readers to send the blank cards back so that you may re-deploy them! DOWN WITH LITTER!! UP WITH THE NEW YORKER!!
Thank you, as ever, for the great reading.
I am as ever, your loyal reader,
-Danny Howard
