Glossy old timey media

The New York Times Magazine ends its print edition with a reader-submitted short work of non-fiction, usually hit or miss fare.

I have never seen anything better than the story from this past weekend. Please read it, you owe it to yourself.

“Don’t fall, Papa!” we called behind us. My brother and my sister and I were smuggling our 85-year-old grandfather across the deck of a cruise ship, at his request, toward the faint port pulse of the Savoy Nightclub. During the day this deck was covered with seminude Midwesterners, but now the landscape was lunar, as empty as the future. The railings were slippery and cold, and we kept checking to make sure that Papa, who had started coughing, was still with us. This was a bad idea, we all agreed.

About an hour before, our mother instructed her father to stop knocking back $14 cocktails named for bad weather. We were supposed to escort him to bed; he was bunking with us in the de facto “kids’ cabin” (my siblings and I are actually all surly people in our mid-20s). Now I worried that our mother would discover our empty beds and think that somehow everybody fell through the porthole.

Continued on the nytimes website, Disco Papa! Prepare for grinding, it is imminent!