Could the "Times" I Spend in Bed be Better Spent?

Chuckle #438 | January 19th, 2011
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My favorite thing to do on Sunday morning is to have coffee in bed while reading the New York Times. Pure self-indulgence always makes me feel like I’m 25 again – back when the most difficult task of my day was to figure out where to have brunch. Ah, youth…

But lately my Sunday ritual has become a little too intellectually challenging. I blame The Times of course, since it couldn’t possibly be me.

Here’s the thing. The articles in The Times have gotten too long; they are hard to decipher and even harder to finish. The Times is the serpent in my Garden of Eden. It offers knowledge, but only after it makes me eat a dozen rotten apples. That's intellectual hazing.

I know The Times is sacred, but someone needs to remind certain revered journalists that they are not penning War & Peace. Someone needs to point out that these precious “oeuvres” will be recycled precisely two hours after they are skimmed and barely understood by yours truly.

I’m not proud that I have a hard time wading through a weighty two page spread on Darfur. It’s not that don’t care about Darfur. I’ve simply succumbed to intellectual fatigue brought on by age and a really, really comfy bed. If it weren’t for those convenient blurbs on page two I’d have very little idea of what was going on in the world.

You’d think that Sunday would be the perfect time to get myself up to speed on chaos in Africa. But it’s not. Think about it, I’m lying in my cozy bed with my home-foamed latte at my fingertips and my heated mattress pad turned up to “high.” My environment makes it hard to focus.

I can’t deny that under the twin influences of age and warmth, the mind will wander.

Don’t get me wrong, The Times is a great publication. Why else would I capitalize “The”? The writers are top-notch…real deep thinkers who, more often than not, have too much to say. Their mission? To single handedly reduce the number of idiots in America using nothing but the quill in their hand and power of the written word.

I find this to be an admirable (and possibly futile) goal. But might I suggest that sometimes less is more?

Lucky for me the Sunday Times has some lighter sections that don’t require much thought at all: Metro; Real Estate; the Target insert.

Call me intellectually lame and/or apathetic, but hey, this is the age of EMAIL, and the New York Times should make some adjustments, however small. The Times needs to remember that it is not an academic journal; it is a newspaper (that happens to lean to the left.) And as such it has a responsibility to shorten up the treatises it calls “articles” and save some trees.

Don’t misunderstand. I’m still a greedy quasi intellectual. I still want thought provoking analysis and depth, but I want the Cliff note equivalent.
Or maybe I should just appreciate The Times for what it is, one of the few papers “left”, and save the more challenging articles for a day when I’m NOT lying in bed trying to remember what it was like being 25.

On second thought, perhaps I shouldn’t blame this ALL on The Times…
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