Alas, months of lugging 50-pound totes of magazines each weekend for an hourly wage have passed, and practically no periodical I'd regularly buy has crossed my path.

The New Yorker? Of course not. Adbusters? Too controversial, apparently. Surely Time? Maybe two copies a week -- and they forget to deliver them half the time. Social commentary, humor, literature -- these cannot be found at the Bellefonte CVS.

What I can offer you, however, is the precise time and location of the last time Jennifer Aniston scratched her nose.

From one end of the store to the other, hundreds upon hundreds stand in strict formation between the shopper and the cashier. These are the last reserves on the battlefront of publishing, stripped of legitimacy, bereft of intelligent discourse, devoid of anything one might term "news." Life & Style, US Weekly, Star, OK!, In Touch, and who could forget The National Enquirer. These are your checkout line tabloids.

Hey, you say, there's no harm in it; just a little diversion. And at first, I was inclined to agree. When I began stocking magazines at local chain stores this past fall, my opinion was that everyone does something now and then just to procrastinate for a few minutes. I'd never read them, but I can't cast any stones. We have no idea where Osama bin Laden is, but hey, at least we can be damn sure where Nicole Richie ate lunch last Wednesday.

I idly shelved these magazines for a semester, sparing barely more than a glance at the sporadically smiling, grimacing, crying and laughing face of Angelina Jolie as I roughly shoved her next to Martha Stewart's Living.

Sure, this is empty entertainment, but where's the harm? If you want to spend your free hours tracking the inevitable fall of the Kenny Chesney-Renee Zellweger union like it were Anna Karenina, what's the problem with that?

A few weeks ago, however, apparently the repairman finally got around to fixing the signal on my social irresponsibility meter.

Two publications caught my eye as I went through the shipment. First, Vanity Fair (being a publication of at least some legitimacy, you usually have to go to the semi-hidden "specialty" magazine section at the back of the store for that one). In a February 2006 article, "Confessions of a Teenage Movie Queen," teen actress Lindsay Lohan admitted that she had recently struggled with illegal drug use and bulimia. A strong confession and some important issues at hand. The next publication in the bunch? US Weekly. In the corner, a picture of Lohan on the beach, and the headline "Lindsay's Diet Secrets Inside!"

While I'm sure this is nothing but an unfortunate coincidence for the publishers of US Weekly, think about this for a minute. Lohan drops a significant amount of weight in short order as the result of an incredibly unhealthy eating disorder. A publication, while ignorant of the precise source of her weight loss, thinks, "Hey, she's looking great. I bet our readers would love to look like her. We can sell a few copies with that."

Of course, no magazine would consciously support bulimia as a means to an end. But would your friendly supermarket tabloids see no evil and thus cry they had printed no evil when such a disorder could well be present? That's not too much of a stretch.

It's not exactly a new argument to say that celebrity culture encourages unhealthy lifestyles. But it's not just the blatant cases that can have a harmful effect. Relationships, appearance, scandal -- these are things that cannot be reported in an unbiased way. Someone is implying that you should feel one way or another about all this. Who that "someone" might be is masked by the smiling face of Paris Hilton on the cover.

What do you get when you read this sort of writing? Are you learning anything? Are you enriching your life? No, certainly not. Are you buying into a culture that can do much more harm than it can possibly do good? Yes.

There are an infinite number of ways to waste your time. Anyone can find a better one than this.