Footnote 46 to Chapter 10, "Preface" of Quentin Lauer, S.J.'s A Reading of Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit reads
No one will debate Hegel that a constant effort is required to understand his statements the way he intends them to be understood.
I certainly will not.
The reporter Gene Fowler grew up on Denver, and began his career there. In those days, a city as small as Denver might have five or more newspapers. One that employed Fowler suddenly shut down. The owner, a man who had made his money with a transit system somewhere else, suddenly decided that he had more interesting things to do with his money. That being the early twentieth century, Fowler went on a bender at the Denver Press Club (and caught on with one of the remaining papers before he sobered up).
Jeff Bezos, the owner of The Washington Post, has changed his priorities. This does not so far amount to closing the Post down, though it is hard for me to see how the Post will sustain itself. The cutbacks include laying off 300 of 800 reporters, closing sections including the books and sports sections, and giving less effort and space to local coverage. The publisher who announced this is retiring from the Post. I doubt he made the decisions, but I understand that he might wish to leave.
Whether or not we continue to subscribe, I will miss the book section. It has been a mixed bag at times. Most recently, it has had at least three sound regular reviewers. One of them, Becca Rothfeld, will now be working for The New Yorker. I find it hard to see what savings can be found in a book section: one need not fly reviewers to Paris or New Delhi; one hardly need give them expensive office space; the publishers supply the books reviewed gratis.
And I will miss the sports section. When I moved to this area, and for another twenty years, the Post sports section employed Shirley Povich. He had reported on Babe Ruth, and before that had caddied for Calvin Coolidge. Shirley Povich died in 1998, but a look at the sports section recalls him. And there were plenty of other good sportswriters at the Post: Dave Anderson, Thomas Boswell, Christine Brennan, Ken Denlinger, Sally Jenkins, Tony Kornheiser, Jim Murray, and Michael Wilbon come to mind.
I have seen Earl Warren quoted as saying that he always read the sports section of the newspaper first: the sports section was about humanity's triumphs, the news about humanities failures. Donald Graham, whose family owned and operated the post for about sixty years, has said that he always started with the sports section, though he did not give a reason.
The Post's Metro section has been weak for quite a while. When it was still printed as a separate section, I often found that a large portion of the section was provided by readers, not reporters. This struck me as sloppy and cheap: the effort to edit a half-page of reader comment must be less than is required to attend a city or county council meeting and produce a much smaller account. Much of today's space is given to an account of a wine robbery that occurred in November, and which the Post wrote up then.
Still, the Metro Section (folded in at the moment with Style and Sports) is the main reason we subscribe to the Post. The Metro section strikes me as a bad place to cut back, really as an invitation to drop the Post and keep the New York Times.
The Post of course has suffered from the disappearance of advertising, something that has affected all newspapers. The Post also lost subscribers, I have heard 200 thousand, by deciding not to endorse Kamala Harris in the 2024 election. No doubt this avoided offending Donald Trump, and may since have contributed to the health of Jeff Bezos's other businesses. But it lost the Post subscribers it likely will not get back. Without strong local coverage, why should one prefer the Post to the New York Times?
On Sunday, January 25, we had snow from the small hours of the morning through about noon, then sleet until nearly dark, the sleet briefly interrupted by freezing rain. The forecast predicted this accurately, and I saw no point in shoveling snow at midday to give the harder stuff a chance to grip the walks.
The crust left on the snow Monday morning was not enough to hold my weight without crushing a little. A few days of daytime sun and nighttime cold changed that. After the first day, a plastic snow shovel would not break through the crust, and even on Monday it was only in colder area that it would. Late in the week we saw a shovel discarded by the side of a street, the plastic blade broken in two.
Dealing with the crust made clearing walks and digging out cars that much slower. After other snows in other years, I had smirked at the way people would assert a claim to a shoveled spot--then it was generally traffic cones or garbage cans to hold the space until the car returned. But clearing a spot last week could be two or three hours' work for a grown man. The variety of objects used to hold a spot has expanded: small cones such as soccer teams practice with, chairs, folding chairs, tables, a ladder.
Most of our neighbors cleared their walks promptly. Corners seemed to be no man's lands, though. Between corners and uncleared walks, one makes better progress walking in the street, even with stepping out of the way of a car every few minutes.
When we went shopping on Friday, the roads were not bad, though narrowed by the plowed snow. Intersections with or of side streets could be uncomfortably narrow. This past Sunday, the sidewalks along 16th Street were mostly in good condition, in part because so much of the way they are maintained by the staff of apartment buildings.
