I Read the Times Today

Wendy, my wife, is trying—again—to persuade me to stop subscribing to the New York Times. (“We could pick up the Sunday paper every week at Starbucks,” she says.) I know that she is mostly thinking of me. She is sure I am suffering from information overload. But also to preserve her own sanity and the harmony of our long union she’d like to reduce, even just a little, the flow of printed matter into our home. Quite apart from what’s going into my head, there’s too much wordstuff, books and magazines and journals and newspapers, always threatening to colonize another flat surface.

You may be thinking that there’s a very satisfactory compromise ready at hand: the Times on the web. I do go to the website a number of times in the course of a week, for one reason or another, but, much as I value that resource, it’s no substitute for holding the paper in my hands. The Times and the Chicago Tribune arrive each day in their blue plastic wrappers as surely as the sun rises. When a good friend and fellow editor told me recently that he’d stopped reading the Times, fed up with the smugness and moral vacuity of the paper’s party line, I was stunned. It was a little like hearing that a friend has sold or given away his possessions and gone to live among the poor.

Of course I understand his exasperation. Perhaps he was afraid that reading the Times was tempting him on a daily basis to feel morally superior. That’s certainly a hazard one must reckon with. Consider this headline from the Tuesday Science section (Nov. 29): “A Pair of Wings Took Evolving Insects on Nonstop Flight to Domination.” Can’t you hear that intoned in the slightly menacing voice of a pbs narrator? The article, by the well-known science writer Carl Zimmer (and illustrated with superb photos), lives up to the headline. Here’s my favorite paragraph:

And insects are also ecologically essential. If all humans decided to leave for Mars, taking all vertebrates with them, the disruption of life on Earth would be incomparably less than the catastrophe that would ensue if insects disappeared. Forests would probably collapse, rivers and oceans would be poisoned, and many other animals would starve.

It’s hard not to sense in this passage the implication that insects are somehow virtuous even as they revel in world domination; as Zimmer puts it, no matter how you slice it, “insects still win.”

We’ll return to this theme in a future issue (right now I am reading a fascinating book by Thomas Eisner, For Love of Insects, published by Harvard University press in 2003). But it would be an impoverished reader who gleaned from the Times only those pieces that come heavy with ideological freight. Last night while Wendy took a bath I read aloud to her from an article by Sarah Lyall, datelined Barry, Wales (Nov. 29). Lyall was reporting on the Mosquito, an ingenious invention of security consultant Howard Stapleton, who drew on an obscure feature of human hearing—”that children can hear sounds at higher frequencies than adults can—to fashion a novel device that he hopes will provide a solution to the eternal problem of obstreperous teenagers who hang around outside stores and cause trouble.”

In its first trial, outside a convenience store in Wales, the device has performed superbly, emitting a “high-frequency pulsing sound” that is extremely irritating to young people but that Lyall herself, she reports, could not hear.

And then there was Howard W. French’s “Kung Pao? No, Gung Bao, And Nix the Nuts,” (Nov. 23), which my daughter Anna read aloud to the whole family on Thanksgiving. French visited the city of Guiyang in China’s Guizhou province, the “ancestral home” of the dish Americans know as kung pao chicken but which in Guizhou is called gong bao jiding, “a dish whose perfume wafts through the air, distinctive even over the smell of tobacco smoke.” A celebrated chef in Guiyang, Wang Xingyun, is quoted at length deploring the manner in which the dish is prepared in Sichuan province—especially the use of peanuts. Accompanying the article is a recipe based on Wang’s own, which we haven’t yet had a chance to try.

Just before Thanksgiving, Wendy and I were in Philadelphia for aar/sbl (the annual meetings of the American Academy of Religion and the Society of Biblical Literature). In a report on the conference for Books & Culture’s website, I described AAR/SBL as a “chaotic marketplace of ideas” and said I found it exhilarating. A friend wondered about that description. Wouldn’t “depressing” be a better word for it, given the high proportion of confusion and sheer untruth?

That was a good question. The convention, like a sprawling city, is both exhilarating and depressing, a site of great energy and variousness—a lively place—and also a place of darkness. Of all the reasons I read the Times, I think the foremost is to taste that variousness, the unpredictable harvest of the day—unpredictable, yes, despite the paper’s ideological grid. “When a man is tired of London,” Dr. Johnson said, “he is tired of life; for there is in London all that life can afford.”

In conjunction with the 50th anniversary of Christianity Today magazine, founded in 1956 by Billy Graham, Christianity Today International, with support from the Pew Charitable Trusts, is embarking in 2006 on what we’re calling the Christian Vision Project. On p. 7 of this issue, Andy Crouch, the project director, outlines this three-year venture and introduces Books & Culture’s first piece under the CVP rubric, an essay by Lauren Winner urging Christians to do something truly countercultural: get more sleep.