Mules and risky behaviour

Andrew Wheeler quoted a couple of passages from a New Yorker article by Susan Orlean¹ that make me wish I could afford to subscribe to all the magazines that I'd like to read:

[A] mule knows its limits. It is characteristic of the breed to have an inviolable commitment to self-preservation, which is often misinterpreted as stubbornness. In truth, it is probably a form of genius. A horse will eat until it founders and dies; a mule will only snack, even if it happens upon an open bin of oats. A horse can be enticed to gallop, fatally, over a cliff. In 1942, the Army was researching ways to deliver mules to combat zones. Someone thought that teaching the animals to skydive would be a good way to do this. As an experiment, twelve mules were fitted with parachutes and taken up in a cargo plane. The first six, caught by surprise, were pushed out the door and immediately fell to their deaths. The next six survived. This is because they must have figured out what was going on and absolutely refused to go near the door.

…

Every mule, then, is sui generis; it leaves no legacy beyond itself, no radiating gene pool to mark its visit to this world. It is as if each mule knew that it had one shot at being here on earth, and risky behavior, such as jumping out of an airplane at ten thousand feel, would interfere with that.

– Susan Orlean, "Riding High," in the 2/15 & 22/10 New Yorker

Nice work.

I wish the magazine industry would stop praying that the magazine-as-iPad-app approach will preserve their current business model and come up with some sort of central clearing house to which I could pay a reasonable sum every month in return for online-only access to a certain number of articles per month across multiple publications and publishers. I'm never going to be able to justify paying for subscriptions to the New Yorker, the London Review of Books, the Atlantic Monthly, the New York Review of Books and a good dozen other print publications every month² but I'd be happy to pay a few pounds per month to an online library service³ for pick-and-mix access to their contents.

I appreciate that the various publishers would much rather have me signed up as one of their subscribers than get the occasional slice of my subscription when I feel like reading an interesting article here or there, but the net result of their current strategy is that they get not a penny from me. I can't be the only non-subscriber who would send some money the publishers' way if only they'd let me, can I?

1. Not available to read in full for free online. ↩
2. And I don't really want the paper copies of their products cluttering up the place. ↩
3. Perhaps £5, maybe as much as £10. It would depend upon the number of magazines available and how easy it was to browse and access the individual articles. ↩