On Instagram, I follow my son, so I can keep up with him. He's 11 — he just got his first phone about two weeks ago, so he's very active. I have to make sure he's not being followed by or following someone suspicious. So I do a little fathering at the same time I'm figuring out what else is going on in the world.
By that time, I'm probably arriving in Grand Central. I always walk through Grand Central on a couple of errands. One, is that I stop at the newsstand and just check it all out. I always feel like, breezing through there, I pick up something. Whether it's the way things have been displayed, or a coverline, or I see somebody who reminds me of somebody else. I always look at where Town & Country is being displayed, and whether the stack looks like it's been dented by sales, even though they probably restock it every night. It's just a reassuring thing when you're in our business to walk through the newsstand there and see four or five hundred magazines displayed 15-deep. This is a business that's going to be around a long time.
I love print, I have to admit it. I have an iPad, an iPhone, a Kindle, all of those things. But I'm finding that the way I like to digest the stuff and make sense of it is that I like to tear things out, mark it up. Keep a lot of the things to refer to later. For me, it's probably more based on what I do and what I use a lot of the reading for — making the magazine that I make.
I feel like my day is so busy with interacting with actual human beings that there's not a lot of time left for horsing around on the Internet. So what I do is, on the way back home, I'm back on the train, and there is a little bit of the guilty pleasure. You know, the you've earned it of heading back to wife and family and trying to wrestle three kids to bed. So I read the New York Post, of course. And I read Page Six and WWD's MemoPad. I take the Wall Street Journal back with me. So I take a little broccoli and I also take some dessert. I might look at the New York Review of Books, because again, that's a strain of part of who I am, and I love keeping up with it. I look at The Paris Review, I look at The New Yorker. The places I've been, if I'm an alum, I keep up with them because they have a special place in my heart. So I look at Vogue, I look at The New Yorker. And then my wife tells me I need to read People, so I read People, and I look at Us Weekly.
When I get in the car on the way home, I don't listen to the radio. If I'm a good boy, I listen to my Italian lessons. I've been learning Italian for about a year and a half, and I have this amazing DVD series that's also an app, called Pimsleur. I hate going to Italy and not being able to speak that fantastic language with those lovely people.
If I'm reading books, I read things that my own magazine inspired me to read. For instance, in the May issue, we have a great piece by Martin Amis. Of course I've read a lot of Martin Amis, but there's always a little bit I haven't read. I'm not pretending to be able to read a book every week — there's no way. I have a lot of guilt from my college years of not having read all the things that I was assigned. I read a lot, but I wasn't always the best at it. So I always go back to the things I cheated myself out of in college. I read a lot of the classics.