The front page

It’s been a while since I had a daily subscription to the New York Times and a crisp, fresh copy appeared at my door every morning (or landed in the bushes, or didn’t appear at all, or turned into a sodden mass inside its blue plastic bag).

Still, there’s something about the front page of the Times that sums up the day in a way that the online edition doesn’t.

I’ve known for a while that you can take a look at today’s front page from the website, but it was only the other day that I realized you could access old front pages by changing the URL. The front pages appear to go back as far as January 24, 2002 (shown below), and it’s interesting to plug in random dates and see what was going on. (Chilling, too, to read a headline like “Many Ride Out the Recession in a Graduate School Harbor,” and realize how we are still dealing with the problems of eight years ago.)