New York Times, December 8, 1985:  

For the most part, the portable computer is a dream machine for the few… On the whole, people don’t want to lug a computer with them to the beach or on a train to while away hours they would rather spend reading the sports or business section of the newspaper. Somehow, the microcomputer industry has assumed that everyone would love to have a keyboard grafted on as an extension of their fingers. It just is not so.

In 1985, the New York Times claimed a weekday circulation of just over one million copies. Specifically, 1,013,211 on March 31. In 2015, when most Americans have computers in their pockets (and even use them at the beach and on trains), print sales of the New York Times have fallen to around half that figure, and the paper is chiefly read via the kind of devices once dismissed as implausible. Rather than “whiling away the hours reading the sports or business section,” the majority of readers are now “flybys,” their stays lasting for an average of four minutes, generally to read something linked via email and social media. And browsing one article isn’t quite the same thing as reading a newspaper.  

Via Kevin D Williamson. 

What, you didn’t know? 

Remember, Laurie is a fearless feminist warrior, a Wadham College “riot girl,” a communist, a revolutionary, a self-described “rebel” and “troublemaker.” One whose world is “on fire.” She and her radical friends are going to bring the whole patriarchal capitalist system crashing down. 

But life without Facebook isn’t worth living. 

In shocking news, it seems the concerns of Oxbridge PPE graduates living in Islington aren’t the same as an electrician from Essex.

From the comments following this. 

And which perhaps explains why the Guardian, the foremost national organ of the British left, publishes so many articles like this one, in which the author openly sneers at his proletarian inferiors and their “ugly” recreational habits. Specifically, working class barbecues, with their “blokey chat” and “low-grade sausage meat,” and where heteronormativity “really drains the joy from the summer breeze.” Heavens, how ghastly:   

If there is anything… more oppressively penetrating than the conversation of four suburban men discussing how to light and then operate a barbecue, I have yet to hear it.

And as we’ve seen, many times, such lofty thoughts – and the subsequent self-congratulation, in which rebuttals and factual corrections are construed as validation – are not random anomalies but standard fare.

Oh my. The Green Party’s Natalie Bennett has had yet another car crash interview. Your reaction to Ms Bennett’s performance and grasp of the particulars may answer the question asked recently in this Green Party poster campaign.

Previously. And previous to that. 

Roger Kimball on the unacknowledged charms of Swedish multiculturalism: 

In 1975, the Swedish parliament unanimously decided to change the formerly homogeneous Sweden into a multicultural country. Forty years later the dramatic consequences of this experiment emerge: violent crime has increased by 300%. If one looks at the number of rapes, however, the increase is even worse. In 1975, 421 rapes were reported to the police; in 2014, it was 6,620. That is an increase of 1,472%.

Christopher Snowdon on why BBC documentaries aren’t always to be trusted: 

To be clear, nobody is snaffling anybody’s cake. The cake has been getting bigger for all, including those in the rest of the top [income] decile. But whilst inequality has not risen in the nation as a whole, it has risen sharply within the upper echelons. It is not the richest ten per cent who have “pulled away from the pack.” It is the very rich who have pulled away from the rest of the top 10 per cent. It is, then, the upper-middle classes who may feel that they are having their cake scoffed. If so, it may explain why there is currently such a sense of resentment and antipathy from the wealthy (a group that includes politicians, professors, television presenters and BBC editors) towards the very rich.

And Mark Steyn on the blatherings of the Most Clever President Ever: 

“Islam has been woven into the fabric of our country since its founding,” says the President. You might think that Islam has been entirely irrelevant to “the fabric of our country” for its first two centuries, and you might further think that Islam, being self-segregating, tends not to weave itself into anybody’s fabric, but instead tends to unravel it – as it’s doing in, say, Copenhagen, where 500 mourners turned up for the funeral of an ISIS-supporting Jew-hating anti-free-speech murderer.

Feel free to share your own links and snippets in the comments. It’s what these posts are for.