India, Nov. 21 -- A magazine can be a wondrous thing. It offers shelter to ideas and narratives that might otherwise scatter, furnishing an address where stories and perspectives live under one roof.

Unmoored from the compulsion to cater to the immediate and the local, it nurtures attention for subjects beyond our immediate horizons. It creates, in its recurring rhythm, a kind of permanent record.

Yet this vision can be hard to sustain.

As more readers migrate online and subscription models struggle against the expectation that content should be free, an audience that once patiently turned the pages now restlessly scrolls through endless feeds, their attention fragmented across competing platforms. Nowhere is this crisis more acute tha...