Paper or Iconoclastic?

In The Graduate, Benjamin Braddock is given a one word piece of career advice: Plastics. While it turns out that young Benjamin wasn’t quite ready to embark on a career, the advice was actually pretty good; especially since 1962, when “a Swedish inventor, Sten Thulin, filed a patent for a thin, plastic bag, folded and made in such a way as to provide improbable strength and durability.” Since then, plastic bags have been viewed as everything from a cure-all for a carrying problem we didn’t have to being a top offender in humankind’s systematic scourge of the planet (even though some environmentalists welcomed plastic bags because they’d save trees being sacrificed for paper). In NY Mag, Adam Sternbergh goes deep on plastic bags and the battle over their bans — which some see as obvious and others see as an obvious attack on the American way: The Ban on Plastic Bags vs. the Ban on Bag Bans. When my son asked me for career advice, I told him to either start a print magazine, become a travel agent, open a store that develops camera film, or drive a cab.