Urbane Sprawl

A couple of months ago, during the late-lamented summer, my parents and I found ourselves driving from Shelter Island’s Heights back to the Center, from the pharmacy and Stars Café to the post office and George’s IGA.

Turning into Dering Harbor village (population: 13), we were treated to a unusual sight for our small, modest island community: two young women in bikinis skipped down the street arm-in-arm, Laverne-and-Shirley-style, with their bikini bottoms pulled down beneath their pert-but-untanned buttocks. My father later recounted that day as his favorite of the summer.

We also later discovered that this semi-nude jaunting had been a summer-long habit of the two women, likely a fun way to get a rise out of the more staid and sheltered residents of the island.

Unfortunately for one of the women, who had been working as a hostess at one of the island’s inns, her reputation got back to dining room. When it did, she was fired.

While my parents thought it was ridiculous that the woman should be dismissed just for having a little fun, my grandmother and I agreed that the inn’s owners were right — or at least had the right — to dissociate their business from their hostess’s indecent public displays.

It surprised me, though, to see an institution actually exercising a desire to uphold somewhat stuck-up standards of “decency”; the idea of a small-town community collectively looking down their noses at an impetuous young woman — and actually ostracizing her in some real way — seemed to belong more to the age of Ellen Olenska or even Hester Prynne than the age of Lindsay Lohan and Lady Gaga.

I thought about the incident again last month after reading an article in the New York Times “Vows” section about a couple that met and fell in love while performing together in La Bohème:

…When he kissed her, she momentarily lost her footing. “I was thinking, ‘What was that?’ ” she said. “There was definitely something there.”

After the rehearsal, Mr. Miller decided he had to see Ms. Kabanuck outside of work and invented a reason to call. A question about their schedule quickly turned into an invitation to a movie. That evening they went to see “50 First Dates.”

“I was so drawn to him immediately and tried to talk myself out of it,” Ms. Kabanuck said. Theirs was a clash of outlooks, if not cultures. He wore red cowboy boots, had earrings in both ears and spiked hair. She had been raised as a Baptist fundamentalist and said she remained devout, describing herself as “a little church girl.”

A sweet story so far, an opposites attract rom-com plot against the backdrop of a classic love story. Very Kate Hudson/Matthew McConaughey. Just one problem:

The date led to a few other encounters, but he was about to depart for Piacenza, Italy, for what he expected to be a triumph as the Duke of Mantua in a new production of “Rigoletto.” She drove him to the airport. Neither of them knew what would happen next. She was still married, but very much wanted to be close to him. He later described the experience of looking into her eyes on the first date as “that thunderstruck moment.”

“I was in love,” he said, “not just in my heart but in head, my body, my soul. That was it.”

…Holed up in a hotel in the Latin Quarter for two weeks, they reveled in their own vie bohème. Only in this version, the two lovers began planning his next career move, an audition for the pop-opera quartet, Il Divo, then being put together by Simon Cowell. She scraped together the last of her money to buy him an MP3 player so he could rehearse.

The player turned out to be a solid investment. He became a member of Il Divo and now tours the world with the group.

Ms. Kabanuck, when she returned from Paris, moved out of the home in New Jersey that she shared with her husband and found an apartment in Manhattan. The decision to leave her marriage and devote herself to Mr. Miller was extraordinarily difficult, she conceded. Still, she added, “from the moment our eyes met through those two weeks of being in Paris and the pain of going through a divorce, I knew that I loved him.”

Emphasis mine. Call me old-fashioned, but I was a little thrown to be reading this in the Times.

Sure, love doesn’t always happen neatly, but should adulterers be rewarded with a profile in the Sunday Styles section? The Times chooses whom to include in their highly competitive Weddings pages — isn’t the inclusion of the cheating coloratura and her Divo an implicit (bordering on explicit) endorsement of flouting marital bonds?

The devout “little church girl” shouldn’t have to be marked with a scarlet A, but shouldn’t cheating on her spouse disqualify her from being celebrated in a national newspaper?

I wasn’t the only one surprised: a post on New York Magazine’s “Daily Intel” blog slammed the couple — and others who end up in Vows after cheating on their spouses — for wanting the world to applaud their disregard for their first husbands and wives:

We at Daily Intel are not naïve. We understand that sometimes people in relationships fall in love with other people, and that they sometimes want to marry those people, which necessitates ending their current relationship. The heart wants what the heart wants, and all of that. We get it. We’ve even applauded it, bizarrely. But what we do not understand, what we cannot abide, is when said people, in the throes of connubial bliss, lobby to have themselves included in the New York Times “Vows” column, and then proceed to tell the reporter about how they cheated on their previous partner in a way that suggests they think of it not as something crap they have done to another person but instead like it is a part of their personal love story…

We actually just find it kind of distracting as a reader of Vows, because it raises all kinds of questions that then go unanswered, such as: Do the people who tell these stories really realize this stuff is going to end up in the Times, really? Do they worry that it’s going to ruin their wedding announcement by making them sound awful? And what do the exes think? What’s their version of events?

The authors fault the Times for lazy reporting in not getting the story of the disbanded husbands and wives, but, really, it’s a question of values. Why offer your institution’s extremely well-respected stamp of approval to clearly distasteful if not unethical behavior?

In Edith Wharton’s world, one whiff-of-a-hint of an adultery scandal that coalesced into an acknowledged item of society gossip could push someone out of social life forever.

That end of the spectrum seems too extreme. One mistake doesn’t define a person; there should be room for rehabilitation — of one’s reputation if not of his character.

A few weeks ago, after Joe Wilson shouted “You lie!” during Obama’s address to Congress; after Serena Williams told a line judge at the U.S. Open that she’d shove the f-ing tennis ball down her f-ing throat; and after Kanye West assured Taylor Swift he was really happy for her and he was gonna let her finish, but Beyoncé’s video was one of the best of all time, the blogosphere punditocracy’s take-away message was that civility was dead.

But my take-away was slightly different and more reassuring: ostracism was alive, if not totally well.

Joe Wilson was “rebuked” by the House of Representatives, Serena Williams was fined by the tournament, and Kanye West was called a jackass by none other than Barack Obama.

The institutions which these individuals represent — Congress, professional tennis, the United States of America — made clear that their constituents’ actions were not in line with their institutional values.

Like the inn on Shelter Island, unlike the New York Times Vows section, these institutions (metaphorically) fired their flashing hostesses.

But we have a short societal memory and a shorter cultural attention span. These events will remain wrinkles on their perpetrators’ reputations forever, but they won’t bar all reputational rehabilitation.

Case in point: Eliot Spitzer. Eighteen months after resigning in a prostitution scandal, he has a column in Slate and may even run for office again.

This is a kind of provisional ostracism that we now generally practice. Serena can earn back the respect of her fans and become a model sportsman. The flashing hostess can be hired by another Shelter Island restaurant next summer. Institutions can censure those who show disregard for their values while still leaving the door open for redress.

If we want to keep civility alive, though, we must keep ostracism working. We must sometimes retain collective scowls at distasteful behavior. Let’s congratulate former adulterers on their weddings but keep them out of the Weddings sections. Let’s let Michael Vick play football but not give him endorsement deals. Let’s let Joe Wilson keep his seat but not make him minority leader.

And let’s get the flashing hostess a job at the Gardiner’s Bay Country Club so my dad can see her more often.

Yom Kippur is always an introspective time for me, however lacking I may be in observance. (Most Jews go to services and fast; I generally do one or the other, figuring either way I’ve got my atonement covered.)
 
As I ruminate on my moral failings from the preceding year, I’m always fascinated by how much more inclusive of sin is my religious moral sense than is my secular moral sense: behaviors that I wouldn’t normally think of as wrongdoing still set off my religious alarm as atonement-worthy.
 
Take gossip. During the year, my borderline-unhealthy obsession with ethics and etiquette keep me pretty primed to speech and actions I find objectionable. Still, I generally don’t have any qualms about talking about people behind their backs.
 
I’m of course more comfortable gossiping about people I don’t like than people I do, and I don’t like rumor-mongering or judging people too harshly without thinking deeply about their perspectives and circumstances. But, I think trading insights with friends about other friends and acquaintances is anthropologically interesting, socially bonding (and entertaining), and important for staying apprised of our friends’ emotional states and for strategizing collectively about how to help each other out.
 
At Yom Kippur, though, palpable guilt washes over me. Judaism strictly forbids gossip — in a prohibition called lashon hara — and though my secular ethics alarms aren’t set off by gossip, I’m always sure during atonement that G-d doesn’t want me to be talking about anyone behind their backs.
 
This dissonance raises an interesting point: is it morally okay to gossip? If not, why not?
 

Lying and Our Negative View of Gossip
 
The knee-jerk reaction is to say that, though we all do it all the time, gossip’s a vice we should try to curb — something to make resolutions about come New Year’s. For support of this position, we can see religious proscriptions like lashon hara.
 
The proscription is supported by our sensible distaste for lying, often tied up in gossip that entails propagating rumors we’re not sure are true. We are commanded religiously against bearing false witness; lying ranks as a top-ten sin, showing its select place as a more blameworthy subset of gossip more generally.
 
It’s clear even from a secularly ethical standpoint that slander is blameworthy. One’s good name is an essential part of his social identity — to sully someone’s name without giving him the opportunity to defend himself could be a violation of his sovereignty, just as scarring as a physical violation of his person. Both will cause pain and impair the victim’s ability to function successfully in the world.
 
We’ve institutionalized this idea in the law by requiring that defendants in civil and criminal trials be able to face their accusers (or, as the sixth amendment reads, the right
“to be confronted with the witnesses against him”). And we see it in reality shows every day when Hannah or Sheena demand that if you have something to say about them, you should say it to their face.
 
From an evolutionary standpoint, scientists have highlighted the importance of reputation for group cooperation. From a Times article describing Harvard studies of cooperation:
 
“People who gain a reputation for not cooperating tend to be shunned or punished by other players. Cooperative players get rewarded.”
 
We’ve evolved to help each other out rather than to only fend for ourselves — cooperation is essential to building complex societies; we can achieve more collectively than we ever could each on his own. And when working collectively, we need mechanisms to demonstrate to the community that we will not screw others over for personal gain when given the opportunity. It’s dangerous to have bad things said about you behind your back.

 
The Instrumental Importance of Gossip
 
 So, slandering someone’s reputation, lying about them, or generally charging them with fault without giving them the opportunity for rebuttal is bad — atonement-worthy. But, as I said above, slander is just a small slice of gossip. When my friends and I talk about a third party, we’re not spreading lies — we’re doing analysis. What do we think of this person? Are our judgments just? Why does he behave in a certain way? How should he behave?
 
In a sense, exchanging ideas about a person is the way we determine whether our personal conceptions about him or her hold up to scrutiny. It makes me think of a wonderful Louise Glück poem called “Birthday.” The key stanza reads:

That is the problem of silence:
one cannot test one’s ideas.
Because they are not ideas, they are the truth.

When we don’t share our ideas about people with others, when we keep our conceptions and judgments to ourselves, they are untested — we have to gossip to know whether or not to revise our opinions and to reach better ones.
 
Think of Elizabeth Bennet in Pride and Prejudice. Gossip is instrumental in Elizabeth’s learning more about why Darcy behaves with such stoic coldness, and in her discovering why Wickham’s ostensible charm is not proof of an unblemished character.
 
Think also of Jürgen Habermas’s theory of communicative action. Habermas argues that the public sphere — where we discuss ideas and challenge each other’s ethical and political views — is essential to the maintenance of a successful society, because the testing of one paradigm against others (through communication) is how those paradigms are refined and brought closer to the truth.
 
If I have one opinion about X based on my interactions with her, and my friends A, B, an C have other opinions about X — each, of course, influenced by A, B, and C’s own prejudices and epistemological immodesties — coming together around a coffee shop table and talking about X is how we realize that our individual opinions are not monolithic.
 
Discussing this question earlier today with my good friend Kara, I was struck by a good point she made: usually, when we’re talking about X, we’re not just talking about X — we’re talking about our relationships with X. Whether X is a friend, family member, or significant other, we are implicated in this relationship ourselves. Isn’t it unreasonable to expect us not to openly discuss relationships of which we are a part? Are we violating X’s right to privacy in doing so?

And this begs the question, is talking about X a violation of his or her right to privacy? Or some other right? Let’s say John is talking to his friend Tom about his other friend Mary. Mary overhears and becomes offended — does she have grounding to be? Yes, Mary is being discussed behind her back, but in essence John is seeking advice from Tom about his own life, and naturally his life is bound up in his relationships with people like Mary.
 

 Gossip and Etiquette
 
Let’s step back from ethics. Is it rude to talk about someone, i.e. Mary, behind her back?
 
Etiquette, like religion, is more inclusive of wrongdoing than is a humanist ethics. It’s rude to ask an acquaintance his salary, but it’s not a moral wrong. It might be rude not to send a thank-you note after receiving a gift, but it’s not grounds for sanction.
 
The function of etiquette is indeed to avoid making other people feel uncomfortable. Though we lack a moral obligation to prevent discomfort — such an obligation would be impossible to uphold and would be unfairly contingent on each person’s idiosyncrasies of sensitivity — it’s nice and socially lubricating to prevent discomfort and to show each other respect, thus not asking about salaries and sending thank-you notes.
 
Indeed, etiquette is not about what forks to use — it’s Hippocratic: First do no harm. A gentleman, as Cardinal Newman said, is one who never inflicts pain. And, as Slate’s review of Laura Claridge’s new Emily Post biography reminds us said, Emily Post “often said etiquette had much more to do with ‘instinctive considerations for the feelings of others’ than with using the right fork, and she herself was famous for putting her elbows on the table.”
  
But talking about a friend behind her back doesn’t inflict pain or hurt anyone’s feelings. Indeed, the problem with John being overheard by Mary is not the speech — it’s the being heard. Being aware of being talked about makes Mary uncomfortable. It’s not ungentlemanly to talk about someone behind her back; it’s ungentlemanly to get caught.
 
Yes, it’s unpleasant to think of your friends or girlfriends/boyfriends talking about you behind your back, but can you blame them? Do you want them to leave their own lives unexamined? The unexamined life, we know, is not worth living.
 
Still, it’s a foggy question that leaves us ambivalent. Kathy Griffin says she’s uncomfortable when the subjects of her comedy tell her to say it to their faces. “I was raised right,” she says. “I talk about people behind their back. It’s called manners.” We laugh because we think she’s copping out, but a deeper analysis suggests that maybe she was raised right after all.

Yesterday evening, I went into my favorite Starbucks for a drink and got to chatting with one of my favorite baristas. She was exhausted; there had been Oktoberfest festivities all day around Harvard Square, and so Starbucks was packed all day. (As my barista put it, the endless alcohol consumption was making people tired, so they’d come in for coffee then go back to their drinking.)

I was a bit puzzled and asked whether increased store activity didn’t have any upside for them — after all, it’s the baristas who have to stay cheerful and diligent while ringing up long lines of customers and making drink after drink.

Nope. Their salary stays the same no matter how busy the store is. And, though at one point an all-day rush would’ve left the baristas flush with tips, these days almost everyone pays with a credit card; there’s little change changing hands — and even less being dropped into the tip jar.

Long gone are the days when “Kristina Doran, who works behind the counter at a Starbucks in SoHo, said she has been known to take home an extra $160 a week in tips.” That was 2002, when the New York Times reported on the rising trend of ubiquitous tip jars.

And Starbucks has been having a lot of tip-related trouble recently. In March, as described by columnist Connie Schultz (no relation to Howard),

A California judge has ordered Starbucks to pay more than $100 million to its low-wage coffee servers, called “baristas,” after ruling that the company violated state law in allowing supervisors to share in the tip pool. The decision applies only to California but could influence tip jar policies across the country….

Starbucks called the decision “fundamentally unfair and beyond all common sense and reason.” Interestingly, many Starbucks employees — including baristas — agree, which is why this is more complicated than the typical management tip-skimming maneuver. Baristas insisted to journalists, including me, that their supervisors often brew coffee and wait on customers just like they do.

“I can’t hire or fire anybody,” one supervisor in the Cleveland area told me. “The only difference between me and a barista is that I count the money and I have keys.” Supervisors also reportedly make $1 to $2 more an hour. I don’t know for sure because no one at Starbucks’ corporate headquarters would talk to me.

My barista and I agreed that without substantial tips, the baristas’ incentives suggest they should want fewer customers: they’ll make the same income and won’t be overwhelmed with long lines and piles of drinks to be made.

As I sipped my mocha, I got to thinking about why this struck me as strange, and about what the possible alternatives are.

First off, it’s plain odd, with Starbucks refocusing its corporate energies on the quality of their coffee and of each drink made — with promises that if your drink isn’t perfect, your barista should gladly make it again — that its payment structure shouldn’t align with this goal.

Think about it: when making a drink, the barista has an incentive to make it satisfactory, so that the customer doesn’t ask him to make it again. But, unless he has an incentive to make sure his location is packed with customers, he doesn’t have any extrinsically-motivated reason to make the drink great enough that the customer will definitely keep coming back.

The same is true for the customer’s general experience. A barista has an incentive not to make the customer have an unpleasant experience, because that could reflect negatively on her job performance and could lead to disciplinary action; but, she doesn’t have an incentive to make the customer experience so positive that people flood the store. (I’m assuming, as my barista suggested, that tips won’t increase markedly enough to justify this extra effort.)

(Sidenote: I’m talking pure economic incentives. I know firsthand that most baristas are wonderful people who want to make each customer thrilled with being at Starbucks even though they don’t necessarily benefit financially from that extra effort.)

The bottom line is that the corporation does nothing to make baristas excited rather than grumbly about a crowded store. That can’t be good for business.

As I reached the middle of my mocha, I started to wonder about how this payment scheme jibed (or didn’t) with similar service industries — a thought experiment that served to highlight how unique the Starbucks barista job description is.

On one hand, we could compare being a barista to being a cashier at a grocery store, perhaps someone who also walks the floor restocking shelves. There’s no incentive for this person to have a busy store, but his actions generally don’t reflect powerfully on the customer experience. And it doesn’t take much skill or training to ring up customers.

At Starbucks, the customer experience is almost completely determined by the baristas: how friendly they are, how well they make the drinks, how much they make you want to come back. This importance is reflected in the training baristas get and in their being called “partners” by the company — I don’t think Food Emporium feels so strongly about its employees.

It makes sense for the former that their pay isn’t tied to store activity, but it doesn’t make sense for Starbucks baristas.

On the other hand, we could compare being a barista to working at a clothing store. They spend some time simply ringing up customers, but they also spend time doing more skill-and-time intensive work: finding clothes for customers, ensuring that sure store is in order, making the customer happy and ready to purchase. This extra effort — akin, it seems, to the skill and time needed to make drinks to customer satisfaction — is rewarded with a commission on clothing sales for which there is no analogue in the Starbucks world.

Moreover, Food Emporium can see when it’s going to be busiest and simply employ more cashiers during those shifts. Same for Banana Republic and its staff. But there’s only so much room behind the counter and at the espresso machines at a Starbucks, and so the variance in employees from shift to shift is necessarily small. When the store is especially busy, then, the brunt of the extra work falls directly on those baristas’ shoulders.

It seems pretty obvious that given the kind of work baristas are doing and the close relationship of that work to customer experience — and thus to store activity — the baristas should be incentivized to want the store busy by more than the skimpy possibility of tips.

As I reached the last few sips of my mocha, I wondered: how can this be done?

Above the base rate salary for baristas, there should be performance bonuses that come with increased store activity. If Starbucks has data on the revenue from each location, it can presumably see when a given location sees its activity increasing (perhaps above predictable seasonal changes in activity) and then reward the baristas accordingly.

And workers on shifts that face especially overwhelming crowds should be compensated for bearing that burden with grace and discipline. This salary bump would show that the corporation really does care about the effort of its partners.

In general, Starbucks is a good employer. As Shultz wrote in March:

Starbucks was the first major U.S. company to offer health care coverage to some part-timers. It also offers tuition reimbursements and a 401(k) program. That’s a high standard I wish more companies would meet.

But Starbucks has its problems with workers, too. Earlier this month, the company agreed to pay an undisclosed benefit to about 350 managers in Texas who claimed they were forced to work off the clock.

And now there’s this business with the tip jars.

Starbucks supervisors work hard, and they should be paid for their efforts. The company should stop relying on customers’ generosity to compensate them adequately. (emphasis mine)

No matter how uniform and involved corporate policies are, the personality of each Starbucks location is resolutely in the hands of its baristas.

As such, baristas should be rewarded financially for making their locations especially fun, welcoming, delicious places to be.

For the third week in a row, Saturday Night Live opened with a sketch featuring the brilliant Tina Fey as the less-than-brilliant Sarah Palin.

It’s getting to the point that we all wait breathlessly for Saturday night to see how they’ll lampoon the events of the week, so we’ll finally know exactly how to feel about them. It can be a difficult wait. Of all the emotions I felt watching the sketch — mostly mirth peppered with pangs of depression — the most palpable emotion was relief.

I was relieved to see the SNL sketch just like I was relieved to read the New York Times editorial waking us up to the reality of Palin’s poor performance — both gave voice to exactly what I was feeling about the debate, showing that not everyone was watching the win/win event the pundits saw.

Before that, I was frustrated by the media’s reflecting a reality that I wasn’t subscribing to, but I had no outlet for that unarticulated frustration until reading the Times editorial and then, come Saturday, watching SNL.

I bet a lot of other people were feeling the same frustration I was. But many more of those people probably saw the SNL sketch than read the Times editorial.

I think people are turning on SNL in record numbers not just because the sketches are funny, but because they fulfill an essential social role: The Fey-as-Palin phenomenon — now Palin wants to appear on SNL impersonating Tina Fey! — has me reminded just how powerful pop culture can be as our collective voice — in this case, establishing by Sunday morning the accepted narrative of the preceding week’s events; and, in general, reifying to society as a whole what each of us might be feeling and thinking.

Indeed, SNL was so powerful in shaping the narrative of media’s biased coverage of Obama during the primaries that Hillary Clinton actually started sounding like Amy Poehler’s parody.

I talked about this phenomenon already in one my Crimson columns, here, and identified it — with the help of Steven Pinker — as akin to the boy in the story of the emperor’s new clothes. When he laughs at the naked emperor, he is vocalizing the unarticulated knowledge of everyone too shocked and nervous to speak up about their leader. As Pinker writes in “The Stuff of Thought”:

Crucially, the boy was not telling a single person anything he didn’t already know. But his words still conveyed information. The information was that all the other people now knew the same thing that each one of them did.

SNL is speaking up, laughing, telling the emperor she has no clothes — and telling all of us that it’s okay to laugh along.

In an earlier post I talked about the impending demise of print media and offered a probably not-incredibly-useful proposal for improving the quality of new hires into the industry.

Here’s another idea, which I’m convinced could actually add a revenue stream for circulation-lacking papers like The New York Times. And with the demise of The New York Sun this week just another in a long line of portents, it’s time for them to listen.

During a car ride to the city the other day, my cousin Jarema was talking about how she wished she could read the newspaper every day, but she didn’t have the time. And she described how, in addition to listening to music, she loves using her iPod to listen to audiobooks while she works (as a painter for an art collective). If only she could listen to the newspaper on her iPod!

Well, why can’t she?

The Times needs subscription revenue, but readers are flocking to the website instead. The paper tried a pay-for-view scheme for some web content, but with the abundance of free news online there’s no reason to pay.

Meanwhile, many people (like me) love the content from the Times but just can’t read every article. We like the actual paper for the variety, depth, and quality of its coverage. In contrast, the local and even national TV news and news radio lack this quality and depth, and lack the user-side control of clicking around on the Times Online.

Add to that the efficiency of using iPods for purposes other than music. For instance, I download History Channel documentaries and listen to them while I walk around.

So what’s the prescription? The Times should team up with Apple to offer a daily download of the paper, divided into tracks for each article. It shouldn’t be too difficult to have a few voice artists record the articles every night; use one artist for the dozen or so articles in each section — a Diane Sawyer type for International News; a Ray Romano sound-alike for Sports; for the Metro Section, Fran Drescher (she might be available for this, right?).

I don’t subscribe to the print version of the paper because I move around too much, it’s too bulky, and there’s not enough value added over the online version. But I’d subscribe to the audio downloadable paper for sure. Just as I get an email whenever there’s a new Mad Men episode available for download, I’d have an email in my inbox every morning with a one-click link to the audio of the day’s paper. A minute later, I’d have my iPod earbuds in, on my way to the elevator, hearing the day’s headline article read to me.

Maybe I’d skip articles on telecom mergers or soccer matches, but I’d get a much wider variety of news than when I click around the articles that pop out on me on the website.

Another benefit: people love to dissociate payment from their purchases — it adds utility. It’s why we convert money into chips when we go into a casino: we suffer the expense once and then we don’t have to think about it. Paying for a subscription to the Times on iTunes would be quick and painless, making us more likely to expend money we wouldn’t in increments of $1.50 over 365 days.

Bottom line: with minimal effort and expense, the paper can make a whole new generation into Times subscribers. By making our currently unproductive time productive — letting us hear the Times while walking the streets — they’ll add value to their reporting that makes it worthwhile for us to spend money on the news. New revenue abounds.

Update (10/1/08): So it turns out that a company called Audible, bought by Amazon in January for $300 million, offers an “Audio Digest” version of the Times for like $13/mo. So someone over at the Times is recording an abridged version of the paper every night. They’re just not making it easily available — nor marketing it aggressively — to the iPod generation. To get it, one has to go to audible.com and find it, then create an account, download it, and import to iTunes. And let’s face it: nothing with the word “Digest” in its name is being marketed to millennials. This Digest should be made a lot sexier and be made easily available through the iTunes Store. Of course, it’s also worth noting that you can subscribe to some New York Times podcasts, but nothing akin to what I describe above.