Miles's blog

Everyone knows that I love reading books. I have over a thousand of them. (Which I thought was a lot until I read about Larry McMurty.  The famous author runs a used book store for which he just held a sale.  After the sale he was holding on to 150,000 books.  Wow.)  There is something special about holding a book in your hands, turning the pages, reveling in the printed word sitting there, unaltered and unchangeable.  Books are forever, in a sense.

One of my favorite places in New York is the Morgan Library, about which I have blogged before.  Seeing all those thousands of antique and rare books is a truly awesome sight.  (Awesome in the original sense of the word, meaning awe-inspiring, not as currently used to mean anything cool.)  The thought that someone hundreds of years ago hand-drew every letter on a book 500 pages long makes the Morgan collection something special.

Along the same line, I have always liked reading magazines and newspapers.  These periodicals are convenient to hold, easy to carry, and quick to read.  You can get a lot of information in small bites, often with very informative and entertaining features.  I have read the daily newspaper all my life. 

However these traditional publications are facing almost-certain extinction.  Electronic media has overwhelmed reading things printed on paper.  I read books, magazines, and newspaper on my iPad, and while I regret the loss of traditional media, it is easy to see why electronic publication will inevitably crowd it out. 

For example, I have subscribed to Entertainment Weekly for many years.  This week’s edition is a preview of the movies coming out this fall.  Reading the magazine you can see a nice photo of the stars, along with a concise description of the film.  Electronically, however, you only have to touch the screen to see the trailer for the movie, a completely different experience.  Should I be curious about the actors (you know, when you see someone and you wonder “who is that and where have I seen him before”), I need only quickly open my IMDB app and I can determine who is in the film, what else they have been in, and what else they have coming up.  Even finding this information, much less without having to exert my gluteus muscles, prior to the internet would have been almost impossible. 

The New York Times is available to me every day through an app that, while not cheap, brings the news and a lot more.  The Times now creates an interactive feature that presents information in ways unavailable in print.  I have been looking at a lot of them surrounding the Olympics.  They have a fascinating study of how Usain Bolt’s winning 100 meter dash compares to all other Olympic medalists in history.  You can see Bolt sprinting across the finish line 20 meters ahead of the 1896 gold medalist, and almost four meters ahead of “Bullet” Bob Hayes, the fastest man alive, circa 1960.  Heck, Bolt even beats himself from four years ago by a couple of feet (although 2008 Bolt beats this year’s silver medalist).  (All these interactive features are free online.)

I enjoyed the interactive on the evolution of world records in various sports.  The track graph was particularly fascinating, as virtually every record, especially for women, was set in the 1980s.  I mean, really, a track record standing for 20 years?  You have any doubts that Florence Griffith-Joyner was taking some sort of performance-enhancing drugs?

These features are not restricted to sports.  They have graphed out all the IPOs for tech stocks since 1980 to compare to Facebook.  There is a fascinating one on droughts throughout the 20^th and 21^st centuries, and another on wellness in America.  The Times’s website also has multimedia presentations, slide shows, and videos.  In addition, there are links in articles to older articles to provide background and additional information.  In short, reading online or on an app allows for access to a great deal more information presented in a very entertaining format.  Newspapers, I am afraid, will be increasingly irrelevant.

So another artifact of my youth, indeed much of my adult life, is fading into oblivion, joining record albums, dial telephones, and rolodexes.  Pretty soon I am going to feel old.