I drove down to Tijuana this morning (another dental appointment) and then made my way back this afternoon. It took almost two full hours of bumper-to-bumper traffic to get through the U.S. border checkpoint. Anyway, as I was idling and enjoying the warmth of the Mexican sun on my left arm, I discovered a piece on The Awl that seemed at first glance to be a reasonably comprehensive abridged history of the rise and fall of Entertainment Weekly, for which I served as a freelancer from ’91 through ’96. The author is Anne Helen Petersen, who was just a tyke when EW began publishing 24 years ago. I sent the piece to a couple of ex-EW staffers but no replies thus far. It’s composed from the perspective of upper-echelon staffers. I could have used a few more anecdotes and first-hand recollections but it’s not a bad stab for an article of this size. Petersen excerpt: “Some would suggest it [it’s not] the content but the delivery system. Who wants to pay for a magazine, delivered once a week, when you can find deeper, more visual, more immediate content online and for free?”