Boston! Globe!

I've been reading newspapers since I was six - since, in fact, the third day of Dick and Jane (dude! that story is booooring!) when I decided to look at the newspaper at home that evening (we subscribed to two, a morning and an evening paper, like a lot of other people did in the mid-40s) just to see if there were any words there I knew. Turned out, there were. There were lots of words there I knew or could figure out pretty easily and what's more, there was a story there that was a whole lot more interesting than Dick and Jane. It was called World War II. And it had pictures and maps and went on for years. 

So it came as a shock to me to notice the other day that at the iTunes store, the iPhone app for the New York friggin' Times is rated 12+ for, among other things, "Infrequent/Mild Mature/Suggestive Themes," (a description that makes Infrequent/No Sense At All, but WTF). That means, children, somebody thinks you have to be 12 years old or better before you should be allowed to read the news.

But the Boston Globe app is rated 4+. Seriously, I don't know whether to laugh or cry.