It’s a Tab, Tab, Tab, Tab World

New York is a place of surfeits and shortages. Of office space, we have too much; of plain old space, too little. Of fileted fresh lobster meat, at $35 a pound, there is much too much; of basic foodstuffs for the legion of hungry, far too little. Of opinions about the schools crisis, too many; of classroom seats, too few. And of heat, as E.B. White once ruefully observed, there is always either too much or too little.

But there is one commodity, it seems to me, of which New York possesses exactly the right amount: newspapers. True, the number’s gone down over the years. You still read the occasional paean to the days when there were nine or eleven or whatever it was, but the truth is, the thought of nine general-interest newspap...