I attended a magazine conference on "Leadership in Independent Publishing" in New York City last month, at the hip W Hotel on Union Sqaure. (How hip? Another attendee told me she saw Kiefer Sutherland walk through the bar, right after I left.) Among the assembled publishers, CEOs, sales directors, and editors of Scientific American, Dwell, the Nation, Out Traveler, National Geographic, there was a lot of talk among the participants about community. Not community as an idea so much as communities as fetishized quantities of readers and advertisers that could be exploited as consumers in various ways—e.g. with spin-off magazines, books, website offerings, events, cruises (very profitable for the Nation).

(Undoubtedly you know this, but I am writing it anyway: Unlike Chronogram, which is provided to you, the reader, as free as—what's actually free anymore? As free as...lunch with your aunt Sadie, who insists on picking up the tab; magazines are almost exclusively subscription-based, and spend vast resources developing their subscriber base in order to maintain or boost their ad rates, the amount of money they can charge advertisers.)

At the conference, what screwed me up at first was that whenever someone would say community, I thought: I wonder where she lives? What are the people there like? What are the pressing issues in her community? My thinking wasn't abstracted enough. These communities are communities of interest. They are far-flung, often international, and do not exist in place so much as in time and identity. There is no there there.

Now, I am not an idiot. I know that groups of readers unlinked by locale have existed since Gutenberg started fumbling with type. The pace is quickening however, as the Internet hastens this process of the creation of virtual communities (I am surely a dozen years behind the times for saying so), whether it be on MySpace or www.librarything.com, an application that allows you to catalogue your personal library online so others may browse it and comment on it as if they were standing in front of your bookcases. Interesting, for sure, but we seem to be edging into the territory of Princess Adelaide's whooping cough. (NB: Please do mistake my wariness as to the banality of much Internet-driven communication as a wholesale denunciation of virtual communities, many of which are virtuous and useful.)

As the editor of a local magazine, I am afforded the pleasure of stewarding a community of interest—Chronogram readers—that exists as a significant subset of a real community—the Hudson Valley. (Think of this ratio in relation to the Nation's 200,000 subscribers in the context of 295 million Americans.) The former, with a few exceptions, fits snugly inside the latter.

Just as Aristotle recommended for the theater, this community possesses a unity of time, place, and action, and there's definitely a there there.

I thank you for continuing privilege of serving this community.

—Brian K. Mahoney

According to the Bureau of Justice statistics, 2.2 million people were behind bars by last summer, or one in every 136 US residents. This was a 2.6 percent increase from the previous year. Overall, 738 people were locked up for every 100,000 residents, compared with a rate of 725 at mid-2004. The states with the highest rates were Louisiana and Georgia, with more than one percent of their populations in prison or jail. The states with the lowest rates were Maine, Minnesota, Rhode Island, Vermont, and New Hampshire. Men were 10 times more likely than women to be in prison or jail, but the number of women behind bars was growing at a faster rate. The racial makeup of inmates, however, has changed little in recent years. In the 25-29 age group, an estimated 11.9 percent of black men were in prison or jails, compared with 3.9 percent of Hispanic males and 1.7 percent of white males.
Source: AP