Meador Manor

Leisure Time

Posted on September 1, 2025 by Granger Meador

For over twenty years, researchers have collected data on how, where, and with whom our countrymen spend their time via over a quarter-million interviews. I find it interesting to compare my habits to the “average American”, especially since in less than a year mine shall change radically.

Until July 2026, I will remain among the almost half of people ages 15 years and older who work. As our population aged, the proportion of workers has shrunk a bit, from 54% in 2003 to 47% in 2024, with a fairly consistent 8 hours per day on average.

Almost 9 in 10 in the surveys spend an average of over 4.5 hours per day relaxing and doing leisure activities. About 3/4 spend an average of over 3.5 hours per day watching television, and while I have not watched traditional television in years, I’m right in sync by spending about 3.25 hours per day watching YouTube, and our television set does get used for a half hour each weekday morning for my aerobics exercise to the Everyday Workout episodes I recorded in the 1990s.

Over the past two decades, the proportion playing games has doubled from 8% to over 15%, and participants typically spend over two hours on that. As a child, I enjoyed board games, but the only card game I played was Kings in the Corner with my paternal grandmother. People often assumed via stereotyping that I played chess, but in fact I never cared to learn chess or even checkers. When video games came along, I played a few on my home computers, but I almost never played them in arcades and never developed a gaming habit.

About 1 in 5 participate in sports, exercise, and recreation on a given day, with those who do spending about 1.5 hours on it. I do my half-hour of aerobics on weekdays and walk on Bartlesville’s Pathfinder Parkway some weekend mornings. Walking has increased in popularity from about 1 in 20 on a typical day to 1 in 12, with the walkers spending an average of about 50 minutes on their perambulations.

However, what prompted this post was a news article about the decline in reading. Over the past two decades, the share of readers has declined by 40%, from over 1 in 4 in 2003 to less than 1 in 6, with reading defined to include books, magazines, and newspapers in print, electronic, or audio form. As the number of readers has declined, the average time spent reading has increased from 84 to 104 minutes, although one suspects that shift is more statistical than showing an increased devotion to reading among the remainder.

The researchers point out that the decline in reading correlates with an increase in the use of other digital media, including social media, and I already mentioned a rise in gaming. I only read 12 books in 2015, but that rose fairly steadily to peak at 46 amidst the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020, declining back to 32 for the last couple of years. The median number of books read per year in the USA is about five, with an average of a dozen, the latter statistically inflated by a small number of voracious readers.

In about 300 days, I’ll have eight hours each weekday freed up from work. It will be interesting to see how that impacts my reading, walking, and viewing habits. Retirees enjoy almost seven hours of leisure time each day, which they often spend on reading, games, creative ventures, and spending time outdoors. They savor their meals more and spend more time on home repairs and gardening.

I’ve a list of things I’m interested in after retirement, including Tulsa Town Hall lectures, Osher Lifelong Learning Institute classes, completing my downtown history project, and spending more time at Woolaroc, Philbrook, and the Gilcrease once it reopens. It will be fun to connect more with friends and acquaintances, and I will no doubt do more dayhikes, updating my map of the trails at Osage Hills and revisiting trails I haven’t walked in a decade or more. I’ve also accumulated a pile of books and several optical video discs of movies and old television shows that await my attention.

But, Mousie, thou art no thy lane,
In proving foresight may be vain;
The best-laid schemes o’ mice an’ men
Gang aft agley,
An’ lea’e us nought but grief an’ pain,
For promis’d joy!

Still thou art blest, compar’d wi’ me
The present only toucheth thee:
But, Och! I backward cast my e’e.
On prospects drear!
An’ forward, tho’ I canna see,
I guess an’ fear!

–Robert Burns

Posted in books, random, technology, video | Leave a comment

Wilder’s Bridge of Love

Posted on August 22, 2025 by Granger Meador

Thanks to Thornton Wilder, I have now read 1/5 of the 100 novels that Modern Library proclaimed to be the best of the 20th century. Before picking it from the list, I questioned whether or not I had ever heard of The Bridge of San Luis Rey, although I immediately recognized Wilder as the playwright of Our Town.

I rather suspect that Wilder’s novel only sounded familiar because of its similar title to The Bridge Over the River Kwai by Pierre Boulle, who also authored Planet of the Apes, although I’ve not read either of them, having merely seen the corresponding movie adaptations of 1957 and 1968. Kwai doesn’t even merit a ranking in The Greatest Books meta-analysis, while Apes ranks 13,716th. San Luis Rey is far more highly regarded, currrently ranked 622nd in the meta-analysis and #37 on Modern Library’s century list.

I’ve seen Our Town performed multiple times by high school students over the years. It was the most popular play for high schools in the 1950s, 1960s, and 1990s, and it was still in the top 6 in the 2010s. Its minimal sets, large number of roles, and prominent roles for females were key features bolstering its popularity.

I was always struck by its use of a stage manager character as narrator. That meta-narrative and its memorable third act feel strangely modern despite the play being written in 1938 and depicting the fictional American town of Grover’s Corners between 1901 and 1913.

After finishing Wilder’s novel, I invoked the incredible power of the internet to revisit the 1977 television production of Our Town. It featured the wonder that was Hal Holbrook, joined by Ned Beatty, Barbara Bel Geddes, Sada Thompson, and Ronny Cox. I highly recommend it, even with the distracting video effects they used in the wedding scene.

I watched the play, rather than reading it, since I lack an internal monologue and never enjoy reading plays…for me, they must be performed.

Our Town leans hard into the “typical American town” vibe, and I’ve always enjoyed it, even though I don’t share its characters’ religious beliefs and disagree with some of its philosophy.

The Bridge of San Luis Rey was written a decade earlier than Our Town and is similarly philosophical, but its setting is radically different: Lima, Peru circa 1714. It tells the story of five people who died in the collapse of an Incan rope bridge and the events that led up to their being on the bridge at the fateful moment.

A friar who witnessed the collapse inquired into the lives of the victims, seeking a spiritual answer to the question of why they were killed, an inquiry that ends in fire.

The novel won the 1928 Pulitzer Prize and can be read or downloaded for free at Project Gutenberg. Wilder would go on to win Pulitzers for Our Town in 1938 and his play The Skin of Our Teeth in 1943, as well as the 1968 National Book award for his novel The Eighth Day. He was no slouch.

The novel was far removed in many ways from my own experience, but it was touching in its search for meaning. The final lines are thus:

But soon we shall die and all memory of those five will have left the earth, and we ourselves shall be loved for a while and forgotten. But the love will have been enough; all those impulses of love return to the love that made them. Even memory is not necessary for love. There is a land of the living and a land of the dead and the bridge is love, the only survival, the only meaning.

Reading those lines brought a song into mind, one that inevitably brings the sting of tears. Mark Knopfler wrote it after reading Only Love and Then Oblivion four days after September 11, 2001.

Wilder would share similar sentiments in a much later letter to Montgomery Clift, as recalled by Clift’s onetime romantic partner, Jack Larson, best remembered for his portrayal of Jimmy Olsen in the 1950s Adventures of Superman television series:

In the novel, Wilder was tackling the great conundrums of religious faith: Why do some people die and others don’t? and Why do bad things happen to good people (and vice versa)?

My answers to those questions are not Wilder’s, but despite our philosophical differences I greatly appreciate Our Town and The Bridge of San Luis Rey, mostly for when they challenge orthodoxy and portray — and thus subtly critique — the banality, hypocrisy, cruelty, and irrationality that pervade human affairs.

I highlighted this description of the abbess of a convent who connects each of the doomed:

She was one of those persons who have allowed their lives to be gnawed away because they have fallen in love with an idea several centuries before its appointed appearance in the history of civilization. She hurled herself against the obstinacy of her time in her desire to attach a little dignity to women.

It is apparent to me that Wilder chose a land distant in location and time so as to undermine readers’ preconceptions. Had he written his book a few decades later, I wonder if he might have chosen a distant planet in the far future, crafting a work of science fiction.

So what’s next? Well, I’m going to try for a trilogy of sorts. I’ve purchased Wilder’s The Eighth Day, which he wrote in 1962 and 1963, when he was around retirement age and spent twenty months in hibernation, away from family and friends, in the Mexican border town of Douglas, Arizona. It will be interesting to see how a lifetime of experience affected his work.

Posted in books, music, religion | Leave a comment

My Abandonments

Posted on August 16, 2025 by Granger Meador

James Joyce supposedly said, “Life is too short to read a bad book.” I like to think that is true, since I generally have no patience for stream of consciousness writing, and thus I will never read his Ulysses or Finnegans Wake.

Wendy shared this on Facebook a few years ago:

This is my husband in a nutshell. 
Wendy: So whatcha been reading?
Granger: I’ve been reading about the lost pianos of Siberia.
Wendy: Hehehe no really. 
Granger: That’s really what I’ve been reading about. 
He proceeds to tell me about the book...
Wendy: Why would you ever read a book like that?
Granger: I just felt sorry for the book, like maybe nobody would ever read it.

However, when I stumble into a work that I find repulsive, I do stop reading it, adding it to my Abandoned/DNF list on Goodreads to ensure I don’t accidentally try reading it again later.

I’ve abandoned seven books in the last couple of years, almost 1 out of every 10 that I started. The latest rejection was for A House for Mr. Biswas, one of the entries on Modern Library’s list of the 100 Best Novels of the 20th Century.

*A House for Mr. Biswas* became the fifth book on the Modern Library’s list that I rejected

I did give it the ole college try, however. My Kindle reported I read 20% of it, which would be over 41,600 words. Heck, my favorite novel, The Great Gatsby, is only about 47,000 words.

The 1961 novel by V.S. Naipaul offered a glimpse of the harsh life for poor Hindus in the first part of the 20th century on the island of Trinidad in the Caribbean Sea off the coast of Venezuela. I didn’t sympathize with any of the characters, particularly the protagonist, who grows up to become petulant, rude, and abrasive. I enjoyed the start about his childhood, and I recognize why some find the book an amusing satire, but for me it grew tiresome and irritating once he became an adult.

In his positive review of the book, Peter Berard wrote, “The thing with living under various kinds of oppression, Naipaul reminds us, is that it doesn’t make us into saints or superheroes. It more often makes you and those around you a mess.”

The more I read of the book, the more oppressed I felt, so I reluctantly abandoned it. Wanting to cleanse my palate, I decided to pick up a book of John O’Hara’s short stories that I had purchased in May via AbeBooks: The Hat on the Bed.

I had ordered it after reading his novel Hope of Heaven and before I read Appointment in Samarra, which is on the Modern Library list of great novels. I’m told O’Hara was a master of the short story, but I was leery given that his style appears to be that of a keen observer who describes, but does not explain, and offers little in the way of symbolism.

The first story in the collection, “Agatha”, served as confirmation. It was a sharply delineated portrait of a silly society woman, but it had virtually no plot or punch, earning the book a rejection.

Deflated, I decided to go with something short and bound to entertain. I like a plot, but I’m not interested in ones that are overly complicated. Locked-room mysteries like Rim of the Pit by Hake Talbot or intricate whodunits like John Dickson Carr’s Hag’s Nook are a bit much. I prefer something with a bit less plot and seek out splendid dialogue, such as almost anything by Agatha Christie or the characters that populate the Thursday Murder Club series by Richard Osman.

Recently I was reminded of my need for plot when I tried and failed to read To the Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf. Who’s afraid of Virginia Woolf? Me!

So I picked up the hardcover collection of Roald Dahl’s stories for adults which I had bought in 2012. In 13 years, I’d read the first 20 of its almost 50 stories, which are arranged in chronological order of publication.

If you’re only familiar with Dahl via something like Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, the adult tales share his taste for meting out consequences. The children’s book addresses gluttony, greed, pride, and sloth, while the adult tales take on deception, cruelty, infidelity, and yes, greed, often via table-turnings and twists of fate.

The 21st story was just what I needed, and I plan to read a few more before embarking on another novel. Dahl has a sense of humor, but it is more wicked than satirical. In 2023, I tried to read Patrick Dennis’s Auntie Mame: An Irreverent Escapade, but it was not to my liking. I’m reminded of my reading, and actually finishing, A Confederacy of Dunces by John Kennedy Toole back in 2020, which also really wasn’t my cup of tea. If you want to make me chortle, give me books like A Walk in the Woods or In a Sunburned Country by Bill Bryson or have me listen to David Sedaris’s Santaland Diaries.

Meanwhile, when the weather cooperates enough for me to walk on the Pathfinder Parkway, I’ve been listening to The Friedkin Connection: A Memoir by William Friedkin, who directed The French Connection, The Exorcist, The Boys in the Band, and other gritty films.

I’d listened to some interviews with Friedkin and his commentary on Citizen Kane, so I knew I wanted to listen to him reading his memoir. It has been excellent thus far, providing a fascinating glimpse of his tough childhood and how he stumbled his way into live television and documentaries.

Friedkin’s formal education ended after high school, but thankfully in the WGN mailroom he was discovered by Francis Coughlin, a radio and television writer, producer, and panelist. Friedkin recalled, “On my bookshelves I still see the books he gave me fifty years ago, all of which I read and we discussed: the bound works of Dickens, Ruskin, The Autobiography of Lincoln Steffens, Sandburg’s Lincoln, Churchill’s History of the English Speaking Peoples and History of the Second World War, the collected essays of Rebecca West, the writings of H. L. Mencken, and Shirer’s Rise and Fall of the Third Reich.”

Fran helped Friedkin invest in improving himself, and I encourage you to do the same. Find something you like, and don’t be afraid to abandon something that doesn’t suit.

You may have tangible wealth untold; caskets of jewels and coffers of gold. Richer than I you can never be. I had a mother who read to me.

-Strickland Gillian

Posted in books, video | Leave a comment

X to Z Shifts in Alcohol, Driving, Sex, and More

Posted on August 16, 2025 by Granger Meador

I am intrigued by societal shifts. Economics is usually one of the largest drivers of change, and the internet and then smartphones and social media and the COVID-19 pandemic have also had significant impacts. Data shows increasing contrasts between my own Generation X (those born from 1965 to 1980), Millennials (1981-1996), and Generation Z (1997-2012).

Alcohol

Gallup has tracked Americans’ drinking behavior since 1939, and this week it released results from its annual Consumption Habits survey. The percentage of U.S. adults who say they consume alcohol is now the lowest they’ve recorded, at 54%.

That is tied to a significant shift in the perceived health effects of moderate drinking:

The World Health Organization stated in 2023 that when it comes to alcohol consumption, there is no safe amount that does not affect health, but in the early 1990s, the media was filled with reports that the French had lower rates of heart disease despite their heavy consumption of saturated fats and their smoking, attributing the discrepancy to their consumption of red wine. That helped fuel a boom in vineyards in the USA, but the evidence that drinking red wine is heart healthy is said to be weak and Michael Girdley says the wine industry has recently been in freefall.

The shift in perception has occurred across all age ranges, but I find it startling that 2/3 of young adults now think drinking in moderation is bad for your health.

Gallup’s full report shows that the percentage of self-reported teetotalers from 1939 to 2025 has ranged from a low of 29% in the late 1970s to a high of 45% in in 1958, nearly matched at 44% in 1989 and 2025. Such self-reporting is a mix of actual behavior and social perceptions.

Marijuana

We have cannabis shops all over town, so I’ve wondered how the increasing legalization of marijuana might be impacting alcohol consumption. Nationwide, the percentage of adults who reported trying marijuana has jumped from about 1/3 to almost 1/2:

Over the past decade, the percentage who report smoking it has more than doubled:

As for the generations, there are about half as many marijuana smokers among my 55+ group than among young adults:

Americans who report smoking marijuana by age group [Source]

Ryan Burge charted significant declines in alcohol, smoking, and marijuana use among high school seniors from 1976 to 2022:

Those declines have been accompanied by shifts in mobility and socialization.

Driving

I’ve always lived in places where driving was nearly a necessity, and in the early 1980s my peers and I were eager to take Driver’s Education and get our licenses. I had acquaintances who were into fixing up old muscle cars to go cruising on Route 66 in Oklahoma City, and in high school I drove a Toyota Corolla, shifting to a Chevrolet Monte Carlo and then a Toyota Celica Supra during college, amidst oodles of fellow students driving the Datsun 280ZX, Chevrolet Camaro, and the like. My, how things have changed:

Now only 1/4 of 16-year-olds have a driver’s license, versus almost 1/2 in my youth, and licensing similarly dropped from 4/5 of 18-year-olds in 1983 to 3/5 of them in 2023. The decline is attributed to rising expense, increased availability of ride-sharing services, and teens connecting more with friends online than in-person at shopping malls, cinemas, and the like.

Socialization

These trends are accompanied by significant changes in socialization among youngsters. Over the past 30 years, the share of high school seniors who only go on a date once a month or less has more than doubled to 71%:

Those who go out for fun or recreation only once per week or less has also more than doubled to 46%:

The share of seniors who don’t work any hours has risen from about 1/5 to over 1/3:

When I was a high school senior, 87% of my peers were employed, but that eroded to 78% over the following decade and is now about 2/3, with the Great Recession of 2008 being a major inflection point reducing the number of working high school seniors.

Combining those factors, almost 1 in 6 high school seniors rarely date, socialize, or work:

Thinking back over 40 years to when I was a high school senior, I was going on a date at least once every week and going out for fun and recreation a couple of times per week, but I did not go to work until after my freshman year of college.

Religion

Religious services and programs are another way to socialize. Religious attendance among high school seniors has decreased dramatically. When I was in high school, about 1 in 3 attended weekly with only 1 in 7 never attending, but now only 1 in 6 attend weekly and over 1/3 never attend.

Religion wasn’t important to about 1 in 7 seniors when I was in high school, but now that is more than 1 in 4:

Below is a chart documenting the erosion in religious behavior, identity, and belief among American adults. It shows the percentages who never attend religious services, who profess to no religion, and those who either profess they don’t believe in God or don’t know if there is a God while not believing there is any way to find out.

Sex

Let’s see…less alcohol, driving, socialization, and religion, and more marijuana. Care to guess the changes in sexual behavior? Here’s the percentage of sexlessness among young adults over the years:

By 2022-2023, about 1 in 10 adult males ages 22-34 and about 1 in 14 young adult females were virgins, and about 1/3 of the young adult males and almost as many of the females had not had sex in the previous three months.

Here’s a look at the percentages of high school students who have had sexual intercourse over time:

The CDC reports that overall 54% of US high school students had had sex in 1991, but that had declined to 30% by 2021. In Oklahoma, the decline was from 50% in 2003 to 33% in 2021.

Over the past 30 years, the percentages of people having sex at least once per month have declined across all ages:

There are many contributing factors to that, including ready access to online pornography. One site estimated that about 2/3 of men and 2/5 of women view it each year, with 57% of young adults using it at least monthly.

Support for banning pornography access to minors rose from about 50% when I was a kid to almost 68% in 2022, while support for complete bans on porn fell from about 40% to 28%.

In 2024, Oklahoma joined a growing number of states requiring age verification for access to online pornography websites.

Virtual private networks are a workaround to such restrictions, and CNET says about 43% of US adults use one.

Independence

Finally, let’s look at the changing levels of independence among young adults. Here’s a comparison of young adult employment in 1993 and 2023:

College degrees are now much more common:

But that also means more debt:

Today’s young adults are less likely to be married or have kids, especially those in their late 20s, and there have been less dramatic increases in the share of young adults living in a parent’s home:

Living with one’s parents understandably usually helps with finances and parental relationships, but can hamper one’s sense of independence and social life:

All of this highlights for me how many young people live differently than my peers and I did back in the day. Having no children or grandchildren of my own, with my interactions with youngsters dramatically curtailed when I left high school teaching nine years ago, I enjoy these glimpses into changing preferences and lifestyles.

Posted in history, random, religion | Leave a comment

New Journalism is now quite old

Posted on July 23, 2025 by Granger Meador

I found on my Kindle a sample I had downloaded long ago of Joan Didion’s first essay collection, Slouching Toward Bethlehem. The first essay in the collection, Some Dreamers of the Golden Dream, was fantastic. Here’s the opening paragraph:

THIS IS A STORY about love and death in the golden land, and begins with the country. The San Bernardino Valley lies only an hour east of Los Angeles by the San Bernardino Freeway but is in certain ways an alien place: not the coastal California of the subtropical twilights and the soft westerlies off the Pacific but a harsher California, haunted by the Mojave just beyond the mountains, devastated by the hot dry Santa Ana wind that comes down through the passes at 100 miles an hour and whines through the eucalyptus windbreaks and works on the nerves. October is the bad month for the wind, the month when breathing is difficult and the hills blaze up spontaneously. There has been no rain since April. Every voice seems a scream. It is the season of suicide and divorce and prickly dread, wherever the wind blows.

I also loved this part of the next paragraph:

This is the California where it is easy to Dial-A-Devotion, but hard to buy a book. This is the country in which a belief in the literal interpretation of Genesis has slipped imperceptibly into a belief in the literal interpretation of Double Indemnity, the country of the teased hair and the Capris and the girls for whom all life’s promise comes down to a waltz-length white wedding dress and the birth of a Kimberly or a Sherry or a Debbi and a Tijuana divorce and a return to hairdressers’ school.

It wasn’t long before I was purchasing the entire book. The title is from William Butler Yeats’ 1919 poem The Second Coming, which you might recognize:

Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.

Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi
Troubles my sight: somewhere in sands of the desert
A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.
The darkness drops again; but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?

I was pleased to “get it” when Didion made a reference to “Julian English” in one of the essays in her book, as he was the protagonist of Appointment in Samarra, which I had been listening to on my Audible app. What a happy coincidence…although my use of that expression is questionable given Julian’s inevitable fate. Her reference to O’Hara’s novel isn’t that much of a surprise, given that he was as resistant to explicit meaning as she was in his fictional, and her creatively factual, slices of life.

Didion, like Tom Wolfe, was part of the New Journalism movement. Her writing was egocentric, sharply detailed, and stringent. Like O’Hara in his early novels, she avoided being too explicit in what meanings or conclusions the reader might draw from her work. However, that elliptical approach included abrupt endings to most of her essays in Slouching Toward Bethlehem. Their lack of conclusions thus violates the structural principles of The Lively Art of Writing which I learned in high school.

New Journalism, which usually found a home in magazines instead of newspapers, is said to have died by the early 1980s. Of course, these days all forms of journalism are struggling economically. Newspapers, magazines, and television news programs have been dying out for years. Some have survived in digital form.

Percentage Who Regularly…	1991	2024
Get news from television	68%	33%
Get news from a newspaper	56%	6%
Get news from radio	54%	11%
Get news online	<1%	57%

[1991 Source; 2024 Source]

The implosion of television and radio news audiences is one of several reasons why the Republicans finally succeeded in their decades-long quest to defund the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, which helped support public television and radio stations.

I haven’t watched any television, including public television, in many years. However, I have long listened to NPR news when commuting to and from work, and listening to its three-minute hourly news segment is a bedtime ritual. I’ve donated to KWGS, the National Public Radio affiliate in Tulsa, for years, and my response to the GOP’s gutting of its federal funding was to double my monthly donation to $25 per month.

Currently I’m spending almost $150 per month for news. Here are my subscriptions and donations, ranked by monthly cost:

Tulsa World, $39
Apple One, $38 [bundle of news, music, and media services]
KWGS NPR, $25
Oklahoma Watch, $15
Bartlesville Examiner-Enterprise, $11
The Oklahoman, $6
NonDoc, $5
Tangle, $5
New York Times, $4

After I retire, I’ll re-assess my various subscriptions. I could cancel the E-E and still access it with my subscription with The Oklahoman since they are both now owned by Gannett, I could cancel the New York Times and still access it via Apple News, and I figure the Tulsa World would offer me a better deal if I called their circulation department and threatened to cancel, a gambit I’ve used for years to keep the New York Times down to $1/week. However, I like investing in journalism, and even now I’m spending less than $5/day for news, and to me that’s quite a bargain.

Another post-retirement project might be to read more of Didion. I’d like to have more of my own writing display the scalpel-like precision of her slices while invoking a distinct mood and atmosphere. Her journalism is far from New anymore, but it, like the many news sources I continue to invest in, has value.