The stack of magazines I'd dragged outside under the umbrella was formidable.

We fully intended to do more today. But when I got done with my workout and my husband and daughter returned from the grocery, there were three small children waiting under the tree, one of them wielding an umbrella. Ever since our neighborhood barbecue, the children of our street have been playing a bizarre game involving umbrellas as houses and curtain rods as swords every chance they get. This girl with a golf umbrella was a sign from the universe to abandon the plans for the Labor Day fest and just chill out.

So I did. I dragged my magazine pile outside and also the boombox I got as a senior in high school way back in 1992.

Three or four magazines in, I learned what Sarah Palin actually did do for the citizens of Alaska.

On the fifth, I learned that Amy Chua's publicist should have a nice fat promotion, because in the no-ink-is-bad-ink category, this author was getting more press than I've seen in years. At least half of one magazine was dedicated to whether or not she should be lauded or imprisoned. And article after article devoted itself to this generation of mothers and children -- how the mothers are too fixated on extreme parenting after becoming so well educated ourselves and how kids, dagnabbit, don't know how to play. They're so used to structured time and toys that talk that this poor, poor generation of Carly-loving zombie-heads is doomed, DOOMED I TELL YOU, and maybe Amy Chua is right.

I looked up once while reading that article to make sure the child using a curtain rod as a sword didn't impale the other four on bikes festooned with my daughter's stuffed snakes as protection.They seemed to have negotiated fair use of a curtain rod, in fact deferring it to one another at certain points, so I returned to my reading.

Two more magazines later, I learned that the state of education in America is in a terribly state, largely because we won't fire any teachers in New York City. And how nobody can get into Harvard anymore because there are a certain number of seats that need to go to legacies and a certain number that need to go to under-represented minorities and the seats that are left require an IQ of eighty gazillion plus an aptitude for restructuring small countries and OHMYGODAMYCHUAWASRIGHT. Literally, I was shocked at how often since March Amy Chua was mentioned in the intellectual news media. I think she freaked out writers for these highbrow magazines more than she did anyone else in the country -- perhaps because the rest of the country (which I also learned in another article) isn't college-educated in the first place, with only 30% of American adults possessing a BA, let alone one from the Ivy Leagues. The gap, the middle class, is doomed. And also, apparently, the middle class doesn't read The Atlantic.

Existentially questioning subtext: Maybe we should all teach our kids the violin and withhold slumber parties, because oh my Lord, we are certainly going to hell in a Dora-driven handbasket.

I looked up at this point as a child I'd met two weeks before when her family moved in behind us handed me a hand-copied recipe for the chocolate chip cookies her mother had brought over an hour earlier. She left the cookies on the floaties in the middle of my yard, because they were homebase from the Pretty Pony squadron, who had now taken to scooters. Or something. This child was also covered in fairy glitter and face paint, which I fully admit to having given the lot of them.

I returned to my magazines. I'd plowed through about half of them, skipping any article dealing with Iraq or terrorism (so tired of it) and focusing mostly on the 2012 election, literature, education, parenting and the economy.

Literature is still the bright spot. And I can't believe I still haven't bought Mark Twain's autobiography. I was going to, and then I forgot, probably because I'm a distracted working mother 67% more likely to spend more time with my daughter than a mother in 1972 and therefore completely neglect my own marriage and personal time because I have, oh, a full-time job, which, according to another article, it is truly an anomoly that I was not attending to there under the umbrella because I should be chained to my smartphone at all times thanks to the economy.

I chucked that magazine onto the pile for recycling.

All in all, the children appeared at noon and ate the lunches their parents had packed them under the birdfeeder tree, then played until five pm when I kicked them out under extreme duress so we could eat an early dinner. I read thirteen magazines in five hours. And I learned a lot about the state of our union, about the state of myself. I value these long-form articles so much because they really get me to think about my own life and the state of Rita, and I do want to spend time pondering the economy and education and the arts as they pertain to my life, and if I had even one moment of concern that I was letting the kids play with pointy objects, it was allayed by the articles telling me that children these days? They don't know how to play. They've forgotten, or they never knew, or something.

It's not true.

They do need each other. They need small groups of kids with no game plan, and a lot of space, and an adult close enough to bail them out of a pinch but not so close as to interfere with the spat solving and game rules.

I don't know what to say about Obama or Sarah Palin or the state of the economy or of education, but I learned a lot today that I wouldn't have learned had I been checking my email or reading Twitter. In order for me to bring a 360-degree self to my work and my writing, I have to read, and often it's stuff that doesn't appear on a backlit screen. I have to read 8,000 words in order to fully process the issue. I have to spend six days with a person to know them, as the reporter doing the interview for a magazine did. I love you, old media, I do. When I read the article about Gawker headquarters and existing only for traffic and how there should be no verbs in the headlines and how we have to stop force-feeding stuff Americans don't want to read just because it's good for them, I was a little sad. I hope there is always an outlet for the kind of articles that stir my heart, the kind that are well written enough to demand my attention for five hours straight when I get the chance to read them. I may very well have to pay a lot of money to keep some of these magazines in circulation. I may, in fact, need to renew my subscriptions even though for some reason they keep sending me the magazines for free. 

I need to put my money where my mouth is, I see now. Because I feel smarter for having spent today doing what looked like absolutely nothing.