So, back in the U.S. with a chance to peruse what is left of American daily print journalism. It is a melancholy activity, indeed. Measured against the sweep of history, the nosedive of U.S. print was an accelerated affair. A decade ago, American newspapers were still making a lot of money and, collectively, were probably […]

[Read more →]

A well-done Sunday crossword — the big ones, preferably those from the New York Times, the Cadillacs of American English crosswords — are often not fun. You sit and stare at the page and, if you work in ink, as I do, you do not guess at answers before filling in letters. So you find […]

[Read more →]

The origins of fandom are elusive. Perhaps the most common notion is a kid, hand in hand with his or her father, going to a ball game. It wasn’t quite like that for me in the mid-1960s. My father was not much of a sports fan and I wasn’t pointed at this or that team, […]

[Read more →]

A lot of us in the first half of the Baby Boom generation are having some trouble with all this new-fangled technology stuff that is swamping the developed world. Certainly, it is playing hob with my brain. The inspiration for this was casting my eyes on a stick of what we once called Wite-Out — […]

[Read more →]

Have I written about this? Or just hinted at it? You may have heard that Brits have a different word for about half of all concepts Americans would express in “English” (boot instead of trunk, bonnet instead of hood, tip instead of Dumpster, rubbish instead of trash, lift instead of elevator, ad nauseum) — which […]

[Read more →]

  A new acquaintance of ours arrived in Abu Dhabi just ahead of her 30th birthday, tomorrow. She didn’t seem to mind the idea of turning 30. In fact, she said she was tired of being in her 20s. Which set me off on reverie about how “30” was once a far more significant number, […]

[Read more →]

In yesterday’s post, I noted how difficult it is, in the Western world, to have good newspapers in the final week of the year. Parliaments are not in session, stock exchanges take days off, sources are out of town, fewer games are scheduled. At newspapers, one of the bits of enterprise often used to fill […]

[Read more →]

Why the British (and many of their former colonies) celebrate Boxing Day … well, it’s just odd. Apparently, they don’t even know themselves. They have guesses, but … Maybe it was one of the earliest successful pushes to extend a holiday — a notion that has led to so many modern three-day weekends in the […]

[Read more →]

Bringing in new people, expats, to work at The National is not a simple process. Which is understandable. The logistics are daunting. A security check. Negotiations over pay. Explanations of policies and benefits. The prospective employees needing time to make an important decision, doing their due diligence on the paper, the company, the country. Then […]

[Read more →]

What does a newspaper do when it has a big story on Day 1? It looks for ways to carry forward the narrative on Day 2. While your competitors are scrambling to catch up, or trying to knock down your story, you push it even further along. So, for this morning’s newspaper, we had David […]

[Read more →]