Marjory Collins, Newsroom of the New York Times newspaper, Sept. 1942, Farm Security Administration, Library of Congress.

My first fix

Every addiction starts somewhere: The hot rush from a heroin injection; the elation after cherries line up on a slot machine; the long, first pull of whisky at a dive bar; the after-sex cigarette. For me, it was my father teaching me how to read The New York Times on a crowded subway car.

First, you fold it in half lengthwise, then over. To advance pages, you open it up, fold it back on itself, and then fold it over again, and so on. I was all of ten years old and hooked. At first, I mostly read the sports pages: Red Smith and Robert Lipsyte were my favorite columnists. The latter – 60 years later – writes for Counterpunch!

Starting in college, I had a succession of dealers. A kid named Hendrick rode the elevator 22 floors to deliver the paper to my dorm room in a tower at SUNY Albany. A few years later, Marge drove an old Jeep Wrangler down a twisting, dirt road in Cherry Plain, New York to bring the Times each morning to the crumbling cottage I rented. In Altadena, CA – at our midcentury house that burned down in January — José left a Christmas card and empty envelope every year; I returned the latter with 50 bucks inside. In Chicago, it was Charles the doorman who transported the paper the last hundred yards from the lobby of the Art Deco Aquitania to my co-op on the 12th floor. There, on post-election morning, November 7, 2008, I read the paper, intoxicated by hope. The buzz didn’t last long.

Then came the digital age – a woozy blur of phone apps, home pages and subscription details. For five years, from 2019-24, I scored in remote swamps and dry prairies in rural Florida, among mosquitos, alligators, and gopher tortoises. Now, in Norwich, England, I can cop the Times wherever I want –– in a pub with a beer chaser; stealthily in the Cathedral during evensong; in bed in the middle of the night beside Harriet, who kicked her habit soon after Trump’s election last year. I’ve tried to quit. The Guardian was my methadone but that didn’t last. If I’m gonna mainline, it might as well be “the newspaper of record.”

A really bad week of reporting

Last week’s papers were so bad, I decided to go cold turkey. It wasn’t because of the Times’ dutiful repetition of Israel’s mendacious claim that Anas-al-Sharif, murdered by the IDF along with three other Al-Jazeera journalists, was operating as a Hamas agent; or its fitful reporting of the ongoing massacres and famine. The Times sees the........

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