We have never been more reliant on the internet – yet Pamela Paul still gets DVDs in the post and buys CD players. Why? Because we have lost more to the digital era than we realise, she says
Pamela Paul must be one of the last subscribers to the branch of Netflix that allows its users to see films via the stone-age practice of receiving DVDs in the post. I know this because, two days after we talk, she sends me a blurry photograph of her last hire – The Anniversary Party, a 2001 comedy starring Gwyneth Paltrow, Jennifer Jason Leigh and Alan Cumming – along with a Q&A she did for the New York Times, about the art of what she calls “sliding backward on tech”. Its basic point is summarised in one of Paul’s characteristic bits of aphoristic wisdom: “In general, when I hear the phrase ‘There’s an app for that’, my first question is: ‘Does there need to be?’”
Paul, 50, is the editor of the New York Times Book Review. She does not use any streaming services. As late as 2019, she bought – read this slowly – portable CD players for two of her children. As a matter of principle, she refuses to own or use anything resembling a tablet, except her phone. “I don’t want a tablet,” she says, her face adopting an expression of mild disgust. “People have tried to give me a tablet; I want nothing to do with that tablet. I would probably have to be paid a salary of, like, $250,000 a year to use a Kindle or an iPad to read on. It would be that unpleasant.”
