City of Light, part 1

My wife and I recently vacationed in Paris, France. And while I took along my laptop, a 2011 MacBook Air, I only powered it up at the end our day, at night, when we were done with our tourist/sightseeing adventures, and then mostly to check my emails. The rest of the time, especially when we were lounging in Parisian cafes enjoying the good weather, the baguette sandwiches and the people watching, I perused a couple of hard copy English-language newspapers, mostly notably, the daily International Herald Tribune. But I also purchased and read The Weekly Guardian, the weekend edition of The Observer, and on occasion The Financial Times. At home, in the US, we subscribe to The San Francisco Chronicle. There is something tactile and soothing about the printed page which is entirely different from the frenetic feel to news provided by the internet. Don’t get me wrong, I regularly frequent Huffington Post and Politico. But when I was in Paris, I abstained from my internet addictions and rediscovered the joys of reading old-school newspapers once more. The change of pace, and especially the changes in brain activity, have given me an appreciation of what has been labeled the slow news movement. There is something to be said about taking a step or two away from the craziness of American politics, as served up by the immediacy of the internet. My wife and I will always have Paris. Now, thanks to an appreciation of an admittedly dying industry, newspapers, we also have our brains.