The Times

In 1978 I moved from my farmhouse apartment to a two-family house on the west side of Cincinnati. This was in Cincinnati proper and yet still very much in the middle of the middle (The term “Midwest” is a misnomer, of course. Perhaps MidUSA is better.).

I had moved from a small town to attend a prestigious university, where I was exposed to a much larger universe of ideas and experiences. I had lived and travelled in Europe. Now I was settled in the so-called Queen City. It did not take too long to see what was what here. This was a conservative place, ruled by a rather straight-laced business class whose tastes were well-aligned with one of the reigning corporations in town: Procter and Gamble.

Still, in any town or city one can find things to attach to, people of similar tastes, others who lean more towards a life of exploration, creation, and contemplation, than a straight life-line towards accumulation and retirement.

In that same year my oldest friend Danny got me a subscription to The New York Times for my birthday. Twenty-two years later I still get the Sunday edition. It’s expensive now and the Sunday paper is a gift to myself, something that I am unable to relinquish. I read the paper daily online.

The Sunday paper was once a humongous thing to which readers would refer to in jokes about the futility of trying to read it all. It has shrunk considerably amidst the devastating assault on the viability of newspapers and the news business in general. The Times is not angelic or perfect or without its errors and faults, but for me it has remained a lifeline to the larger world. There are other often better sources for unbiased political reporting. But I read Frank Rich and Bob Herbert to reassure myself that sanity still has a place in the national discourse.