Tag: newspapers

• Did we really get mad about this? (September 28, 2026)

  Was just reading the Wikipedia article about Funky Winkerbean, which the cartoonist wrapped up a few years ago, after a 50-year run. It was a rare example of a daily comic strip whose creators allowed the characters to age in more-or-less real time, allowing them to add drama around character growth and change to the daily gags about family life.

• Weird guy makes me miss hyperlocal news (August 1, 2025)

  In June, West Side Rag published a story about a weird guy bothering women at a local cineplex. The Rag is an independent online newspaper that has covered street-level goings-on in my neighborhood of Manhattan’s Upper West Side since 2011. Its story topics range from profiles of fresh political contenders to galleries of historical UWS photographs to rumors about new bagel shops. But something about the movie-pest story really struck me: it’s a good extremely-local news story, of the kind I remember growing up with in the previous century, reading in the local paper or watching on the local evening news, to name two things that don’t really exist any more in much of the country.