The weather is hot but it’s beautiful out nevertheless, a great day to head to the beach or lounge on a shady lawn somewhere and enjoy the gorgeous lack of inertia that often characterizes summer Sundays. It used to be that I’d spend these days — every Sunday — reading the newspaper. Once upon a time, I had the luxury of declaring that Sundays were my time and mine alone, and as such it was therefore my prerogative to spend as much of the day as I liked doing something immensely enjoyable but also good for my brain.
These days I have a young family, and a startup — and, let’s face it, ubiquitous Internet access that makes printed paper seem obsolete — so I can’t recall the last time I indulged myself with the Sunday paper anymore.
But jeez, the Sunday paper is still great, still an amazing product of a long, long tradition of careful editorial packaging and art direction and just general purposefulness. If I could afford to spend a whole day with it again, I would, and for anyone who finds themselves with a Sunday to kill, I recommend picking up the Sunday edition of your local newspaper.
Yes, of course we can get news from so many different outlets now, and we can manipulate the delivery of news so it’s so much more convenient than the huge, intimidating tome that is the Sunday paper. But we can also, from time to time, take out a day to enjoy it. Maybe not every Sunday, but once in a while we can find a day to benefit from this still amazing weekly product that’s designed to reward a few hours of our undivided casual attention. I bet if you do this you’ll come across a story you probably wouldn’t have read otherwise, and spot an ad for something you would’ve missed otherwise, and, maybe best of all, you won’t feel like you’ve wasted your time surfing aimlessly the way you would have had you spent those hours on the Web. Hurry up and give it a shot, because sadly the Sunday paper is not going to be around for much longer.
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