The Five Easy Pieces model for newspaper subscriptions

We have the New York Times delivered to us on Sunday morning. It’s a nice tradition, letting us pick at the major sections, including the magazine, book reviews, and opinion pages. With that subscription, I also get All Digital Access that includes web, tablet, and phone access for the whole week.
Increasingly, though, I find that I’m reading the stuff online a day or two before the paper arrives. The Times online editions start showing on Thursday. Something might be posted on Twitter or someone else’s blog includes a link to a story that’s destined for print on Sunday.
As a result, there are weeks when I’ve already read the pieces of interest and the paper goes straight to the recycling bin.
Maybe, I thought, I could save a tree and just get the digital editions.
The digital editions cost $8.75 per week. Home delivery of the Sunday paper, which includes the digital access, costs $8.10 per week.
I save 65ยข by throwing the paper away.


Full disclosure: I am a contracted employee of the Worcester Telegram and Gazette, a company formerly owned by the New York Times. A most wonderful benefactor, John Henry, recently purchased the T&G along with the Boston Globe. The Globe has a more sensible policy, allowing me to pay a lower price for digital-only.

Rethinking school size

In our efforts to reduce class sizes in schools, we are missing a more important metric.
Son Adam noted years ago in his school safety findings that there’s correlation between school size and school safety. A smaller school is more likely to be a safer school, irrespective of other factors in the community.
Researchers have published a working paper that shows this and other benefits of smaller schools in New York City.
Regionalization has been in use in Massachusetts for nearly 60 years. The goals was to save on administrative costs and make programs available to students who would not have had access in small-town schools. We’re now seeing that the benefits of this consolidation weren’t quite as grand as we’d hoped.

h/t Freakonomics

Lysistrata in the modern age

The Aristophanes play, Lysistrata, noted how women ended the Peloponnesian War by denying intimacy to their husbands and/or lovers until the war was ended.
Now, however, it’s getting really serious. Global Post reports that a group of women in Colombia are refusing to have sex until the roads near their homes are repaired.