Well, that does it. Up until now I have continued to take in—as people used to say—The Washington Post’s printed edition in spite of the daily annoyance its unacknowledged biases cause me. Like many older people who grew up with newspapers, I still like the experience of reading them in the broadsheet form I have long been accustomed to. That is a mode of information access that is still a pleasure to me, whereas reading them online, as I do with the other papers I consult every day, is work. I shall particularly miss my ten minutes a day spent with the comics, as I have learned to call them, though they were always the funnies when I was a youth. I know you can get them online, and in color (one good thing about the Post is that its two comics pages are still in gritty, old-fashioned monochrome), but I should feel ashamed of myself if I took time out from my daily toil at the computer to click on each of the fifteen or twenty strips that I now read each morning with my coffee.

So bye bye, Blondie and Big Nate. Farewell, too, to the brilliant Richard Thompson’s “Cul de Sac.” At least I shall be glad of the excuse to stop reading its neighbor on the page, “Doonesbury.” But the thing has to be done, even if there is a price to be paid. When I finally decided to stop subscribing to