Paper rules.

Some 20 years ago I cancelled my paper subscriptions to the New York Times and Wall Street Journal and commenced online reading.

And while the WSJ online sub was, in turn, cancelled many years ago when the paper was bought by an Australian barbarian fascist, the NYT remains the paper of record and a superb one at that. If you want to know what is happening in our backyard or in Borneo’s, for that matter, this is where you go.

Anyway, a while back the NYT’s splendid journalist Farhad Manjoo (Cornell, 2000) detailed a two month experiment where he cancelled his online access and opted for the (costly) paper subscription instead. So I thought I would give it a shot, missing the physical experience of paper and realizing that by the time the presses have run most errors and omissions in the online version of a story would have been fixed. Plus, I’m not in that much of a hurry to learn of the latest porn star the leader of the Western world may have bedded.

My first concern was that a paper which is the bastion of liberalism and free thinking could not be delivered in the heart of redneck country, here in Arizona. Yet, amazingly, my zip code is on the delivery route!

There’s a sort of cyclical pattern to the week’s deliveries. Monday starts off thin, doubtless hungover from the weekend’s tweeting from Mar a Loco where the white powder and showgirls run freely. No ads on Mondays. The momentum – and weight – build through the week until, lo and behold, Sunday arrives and along with it the eighth wonder of the world, replete with costly jewelry ads:

The eighth wonder of the world. Sunday’s New York Times

But, superb as the paper is, and pleasurable as the experience of ink stained hands and rustling of the Arts section may be on sunlit patio mornings, there is a big snag. What I had not anticipated is that during the twenty year hiatus my eyes had also aged twenty years. And that small print is awfully tough to make out. So a valiant experiment, but one sadly doomed by age.

Subscribe to the New York Times. Keep America free.