Richard Rodriguez for Harper’s, “Twilight of the American Newspaper”

I was in the airport and really wanted to read this essay so I took the magazine to the counter and the lady said 7 dollars and I about DIED. And then I read this wonderful, wonderful essay that I adore and want all my blogfriends to read but YOU CAN’T ACCESS IT ONLINE. I know this a complicated choice which I have hardly even considered so who am i to whine but: UGH. Anyway, don’t worry, harper’s already sassed me about this.

Anyway I edited out the mean parts of this paragraph because 1. they are too close to home and 2. i think it diminishes the nuance and truth of which he is saying which I agree with wholeheartedly!

But isn’t that what everybody wants? That stuff? Why does that have to change? So we want to be in Vanity Fair or say, Harper’s!, but we also want to link to it on our blogs; we want to stay at that hotel but we want to find it online after reading a buttload of recommendations and asking our Internet friends where to get the best croissant. I want my iPhone to navigate me to the 19th century bookshop and I want to take pictures of it and squeal about it on Twitter. I want my five star brick and mortar to have free wifi and I want it to be good.

But a felucca? I don’t know what the fuck that is.

— meaghano

Yup. I can’t quite tell the tone from the excerpt, but it sounds like Rodriguez is saying that futurists, online-ists, cut-out-the-middle-man-ists, Davos-ists and deconstructionists either have said they don’t want these things, in the past, or are somehow hypocritical for wanting these things. But of course we want these things. In fact I think my generation* wants these things more than any generation in living memory. Look at our shoes, for god’s sakes; look at our weddings. Look at our books.

*With all the necessary qualifications for education, social status, country, blah blah.