Tethered Swimming

A couple of weeks ago I fixed up an old Hewlett-Packard laptop for my dad.  It had been my brother’s laptop but as he’s moved on to a new and better one the three year old HP got passed down (or is it up?).  Once I was done removing all of my brother’s old software (which was now merely clutter) I installed Firefox, added Adblock and Flashblock to keep my dad’s surfing quick and painless, and imported a bunch of my news and politics bookmarks.  Thanks to wireless internet my dad can now sit comfortably in his chair by the fireplace and read endless stories about Iraq, Afghanistan, Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama, John McCain and George W. Bush.

Then one morning last week my dad and I were talking and he said he had spent a couple of hours that morning reading on his laptop.  His previous custom had been to read the paper copy of The New York Times that arrives on his doorstep every morning.  He said he preferred the laptop.  I told him that even though there is an unlimited amount of high quality content on-line, I still like to begin my day by reading the A section of the Times.  This is backwards; the seventy year old is supposed to be the one defending the ink and paper version, not the one trashing it.  Maybe he’s just enamored with his new toy and he’ll eventually return to the paper; then again, if a septuagenarian prefers the on-line version maybe the newspapers are in even more trouble than is generally suspected.

Personally though, I like the dead tree version of the Times in the morning.  I even have my own arrogant, self-congratulatory saying to go along with it.  As far as I’m concerned, “There are two ways to start your day, one is having read The New York Times, the other is not.”  Despite my smarmy syntax I am not so foolish as to think that reading the Times makes me a better person, or even better informed than other people.  I like to read the Times in the morning because it’s a well written, well edited little window on the world.

It’s the same reason I like the dead tree version of the Economist.  The Times and the Economist provide news from parts of the world I wouldn’t ordinarily hear about.  They have their editorial biases, but so does everything else and, for my money, they are the two best print sources of English language international news.

There are more stories every day than any one man can take in, and that’s a good thing.  But I don’t need to know about them immediately.  It doesn’t matter if I get the news about Europe, Africa, South America or any other worldly place a day or two after the fact.  It happened didn’t it?  There’s no need to rush something like the news.  Very little of it is immediately pertinent to my life, but immediacy doesn’t make it any less interesting.