Not long ago, in an ill-advised moment of levity, I posted, on the website of The New Criterion, a brief but less than somber account of the latest from the doom-sayers who are predicting the imminent demise of the newspaper business in this country. In doing so, I regret any impression I may have given of not being so respectfully grief-stricken as I might have been at the prospective loss of so many distinguished journalistic citizens. In retrospect, I can see that it was highly insensitive to take as my title what Paul Starr, one of the viewers-with-alarm, warned those of us who, like me, were “angry with the mainstream media” not to say: namely, “Let the bastards suffer.” It was also probably unacceptably flippant on my part to have suggested, as I did, that one reason for the parlous state of American newspapers was that they were so boring.

As it happened, none of this insensitivity on my part seems to have raised any hackles, most likely because the media are well-practiced at tuning out criticism. But I did get into trouble by calling readers’ attention to a story in The Daily Telegraphof London about a young Briton who apparently dropped dead of excitement as his train pulled into Bangkok. That, I said, was a story that instantly made one want to read it, and it was made even more interesting by the fact that its opening lines, with their hint of the absurd,