Every morning I walk outside and bring in the morning newspaper. There was a time when every house on both sides of the street had a newspaper in the driveway. There was also a time when every house had a landline telephone, but not anymore. Not for a long time.

My husband is less willing to accept the downward trend of print-edition newspapers, as he has worked in newspapers since the age of 16. Even before that, he was what you would call an “independent publisher”.

Recently, we were in a Chicago park with our grandchildren. My husband had a newspaper folded under his arm. He sat down and put the paper on the bench beside him. A young girl walked over, looked at the newspaper, picked it up and asked, “What’s this?”

I thought he was going to fall over. The colour faded from his face. His eyes rolled back in his head and his legs were giving out. I rolled up his paper and waved it under his nose. The smells from the ink woke him up.

Some people simply love paper—the feel, the portability, and the pleasure of piling them higher and higher until their wife cries, “Enough!” My husband was happy when he spent time with our youngest daughter and her husband. When they lived with us, they raced to pull the crossword puzzle from the paper every day. It’s hard to do a crossword online. Pencil doesn’t come off a computer screen as easily as you might think.

Now my husband will be very excited that I have found further proof that there may still be hope for the survival of print. I was chatting with a young mother who subscribes to the daily newspaper. I asked why she did something so conservatively. She looked shocked. “Because it’s print!” she said. “I love print! When the paper didn’t come one day, would you believe I called the main number to let them know and the lady said, ‘Why don’t you just subscribe to the online version?’” She shook her head in disbelief.

My husband will be so thrilled that he might write this young woman into his will. I say we leave her all our piles of old newspapers.

A little old couple walked slowly into McDonald’s one cold winter evening. They were so old that they looked out of place among the young families and young couples eating there that night.

Some of the customers looked admiringly at them. You could tell what the admirers were thinking. “Look, there is a couple who has been through a lot together, probably for 60 years or more!”

The little old man walked right up to the cash register (收银台), placed his order with no hesitation and then paid for their meal. The couple took a table near the back wall and started taking food off the tray (托盘). There was one hamburger, one order of French fries and one drink. The little old man unwrapped the plain hamburger and carefully cut it in half. He placed one half in front of his wife. Then he carefully counted out the French fries, divided them in two piles and neatly placed one pile in front of his wife. He took a sip of the drink, his wife took a sip and then set the cup down between them.

As the man began to eat his few bites of hamburger the crowd began to get restless. Again you could tell what they were thinking, “That poor old couple. All they can afford is one meal for the two of them.”

As the man began to eat his French fries one young man stood and came over to the old couple’s table. He politely offered to buy another meal for the old couple to eat. The old man replied that they were just fine. They were used to sharing everything.

Then the crowd noticed that the little old lady hadn’t eaten a bite. She just sat there watching her husband eat and occasionally taking turns sipping the drink.

Again the young man came over and begged them to let him buy them something to eat. This time the lady explained that, no, they were used to sharing everything together.

As the little old man finished eating and was wiping his face neatly with a napkin the young man could stand it no longer. Again he came over to their table and offered to buy some food.

After being politely refused again, he finally asked a question of the little old lady. “Ma’am, why aren’t you eating? You said that you share everything. What is it that you are waiting for?”

She answered, “The teeth”.

Kyle Cassidy and three other members of the Annenberg Running Group were stretching on the grounds of the University of Pennsylvania, waiting for a few slow members to start. The Penn colleagues and other community members meet three days a week for a roughly 30-minute jog and an occasional lecture. It's not your normal exercise chatter—during some runs, one of them delivers a talk; the topics range from the brain to Bitcoin（比特币）.

But on this day last January, it would not be their normal run. The first sign was the man who ran past them very fast. "Probably running a 7:15 pace（per mile）," Cassidy thought admiringly.

Cassidy discovered why the man was so fast at running when another man ran by, yelling "Help! He took my phone!"

Hearing that, the group did what running clubs do: They ran, chasing the suspect down the streets until he quickly hid in a construction site. The runners split up. Cassidy ran around to the far side of the site to cut the thief off while the others wandered the neighborhood hoping he had abandoned the stolen phone in a backyard.

No luck. Then they asked the residents whether they'd seen the guy. When they knocked on the door of one house, they were in for a surprise. They didn't know the thief had already come out of the construction site and was hiding behind a bush by that very house. As the owner opened the door, the suspect suddenly rushed out from behind the bush and right into the arms of the campus police, who had joined the chase shortly behind the runners.

The members of this running group are not passionate（狂热的）runners. But they do understand the benefit of a little exercise. "Running is typically a useless sport where you turn fat cells into heat," Cassidy said. "But occasionally it can be useful, and here was one of those opportunities."