All this noise about the Koch Brothers buying Time casts it as a national treasure. But Time has its own problematic history. It was one of Henry Luce’s main vehicles for projecting his idea of an “American Century” in which the ferocious instability of industrial society (read: unions) would give way to stable consumer-driven economies. Well, that’s pretty much what happened, and here we are: a country that’s faltering in many ways because our industrial base has been offshored, leaving a growing number of “jobs” to feed off different aspects of the problem of routing cheap stuff made elsewhere to people who don’t really need or even want it, and who certainly can’t afford as much as they spend. This sudden swell of love for Time is, first and foremost, nostalgia.