“I think we’ve always been snickered at, for at least the last 35 years,” High Times editorial director Dan Skye tells Jason Fagone. Fagone says the magazine anticipated the mainstreaming of pot use:
Lately I’ve been trying to think of non-obvious reasons why High Times doesn’t get more respect in magazineland, given its influence. (When I asked Skye why he’d never submitted any of his staff’s work for an Ellie, he said, “That’s a good question.” He laughed for four seconds. “It’s just nothing that really occurs to us, frankly, to go after the awards.”) I wonder if it’s because a lot of magazines make their bones by doing the inverse of what High Times is so good at.
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A great magazine is aspirational. High Times is not. High Times is populist, egoless, frictionless. High Times will welcome you into the life for the price of a vaporizer and some bud. This is its quiet greatness: magazine not as mirror but window.
