When you weren't looking, someone lifted about 7 days off of you.

You never noticed that some magazines become available before the date on the cover?

They're printed in advance to allow for distribution. Also, usually the date is 'the week of'.

But "distribution" has already happened. In milliseconds.

Yes, but explaining to you that periodicals that have been in print for 88 years have a certain way of working, that people like getting copies in the mail, and that people expect consistency between the printed copy and the electronic copy will probably exceed your ten millisecond attention span, so it probably isn't worth it for me to bother.

The date on a magazine is when it's supposed to come off the shelves, not when it's published.