Dear New Yorker:

I am writing to express my discontent with my current subscription. I am living in Topeka, Kansas, and look forward every week to the new issue. I love the reporting and the essays, the Talk of the Town. The fiction? Hit-or-miss. Try not to take yourselves so seriously all the time.

Anyway, the new issue, by the time it arrives in my mailbox, is the old issue. It usually arrives so late I cannot even submit to your fun Caption Contest. I’ve been a subscriber to your fine publication many times over the years and when I lived in Iowa City or San Francisco the current issue arrived even before it showed up on newsstands. So I wonder, What is the problem of getting it to Topeka in a timely manner?

Your disdain of the Midwest is well-known. What is it Harold Ross said? This will not a publication for the people of Dubuque? But he was wrong, is wrong. There are many people in these fly-over states who cherish good writing and good reporting and good wit. But if you cannot make your magazine arrive in Topeka before all that is new is old, I’m afraid I will have to cancel my subscription and demand a refund for the remaining issues—my subscription expires in January of 2012.

So, I give you a month. Please do try better. Because I really do not like having to go to Barnes & Noble every week, they always try to sell me a Nook. Thank you, and have a pleasant day.

Very Sincerely,

Robert R Herring

PS: and please don’t think I’ll buy your magazine from Barnes & Noble. Nobody buys magazines from those stores. We sit in the nasty—or in Topeka, the quite comfortable—chairs and read it from cover to cover while sipping a mocha. And then put it back with our greasy fingerprints smudging the print for the next person to find.