““People don’t read” is a canard, a silly thing that grumpy people say. It’s patently untrue. There’s no other way to learn physics or chemistry or medicine or software design. We still have physicists and doctors, so someone reads. We don’t read short fiction. ¶ Why not? Because we watch a lot of movies, and we read a lot of novels, we all have bookstores and everyone has Amazon. Magazines were designed for a different set of constraints: tiny bookstores, subsidized postal rates, exorbitant shipping rates for parcels. The gas-powered truck, not the Web, killed magazines by making it as easy and cheap to stock a good bookstore in San Francisco as in Manhattan. ¶ The constraints of the short story are dictated by the shape of the magazine, just as the constraints of the novel are dictated by the shape of the bookstore.” - × × ×