News

I like a lot of stuff no one else does. This list includes, but is not limited to, reading books, buying the newspaper, cooking food, walking, talking and, ideally, doing all of the above in person with people I like.

Maybe you are scratching your head at this point, thinking, what's McLaren on about this week? After all, you probably like those things too. Reading, cooking, walking and conversing are universally pleasant pursuits, enjoyed by the masses for centuries, are they not?

Not if you believe what you read. Everywhere I turn these days, I find myself confronted with another anguished article or book on the demise of a simple pleasure I adore but few others apparently appreciate. From Michael Pollan's In Defense of Food to the recent New Yorker/Harper's literary debate over the supposed Death of Reading, the culture is being taken over by illiterate trans-fat hounds, I tell you. Pass the vintage port!

And last week, another depressing revelation from the pages of The New Yorker: Apparently old-fashioned newspapers like this one are not just in decline but expected to go the way of the dodo within my lifetime. None of this is, of course, exactly front-page news (to use a bad metaphor) for those of us who work in the beleaguered annals of print journalism, but the revelation that just 8 per cent of people under the age of 35 would rely on a paper for news would seem to suggest that I am disturbingly out of step with my own generation.

Not only do I like books and newspapers, I actually make my living writing them. How stupid is that, when all this time I could have been learning how to code HTML or thinking up novelty websites?

I also do a whole bunch of other things that have recently been added to the growing list of dying arts and declining pursuits. Sometimes I buy CDs. I mail handwritten notes (especially if someone dies). I go for long aimless walks. And if something interests me, I touch it before I commit to it - a rule that applies to both shopping and dating.

This sort of behaviour puts me in the 0.0001 percentile of members of my generation, making me a statistical anomaly and social outcast in the elusive and coveted 18-to-35 demographic.

And yet, I feel strangely normal.

It's like I didn't get the memo that my particular model of humanoid is being phased out and discontinued, like an unpopular shade of lipstick at the drugstore counter. I fear it's too late to change (it seems a bit desperate and contrived to suddenly take up Scrabulous, live vicariously through my gaming avatar or start making "friends" on Facebook at this point). There's nothing left to do but give up and donate myself to the Newseum of print journalism, which is about to reopen in multimillion-dollar digs in Washington. They can encase me in glass, under a plaque that reads Female Printosaurus Rex, last known example of the now-extinct species: newspaper columnist.

But maybe the situation is not quite so bad. After all, it seems a bit ironic that all this agonizing about the death of our literary culture has occurred in the pages of newspapers, books and magazines. As Ursula Le Guin pointed out in her Harper's rebuttal to the New Yorker piece, the haute bourgeoisie (also affectionately known, in Web generation parlance, as "white people") have always revelled smugly in the knowledge that only an anointed minority enjoyed the same privileges they did. In fact, the only thing educated upper-middle-class white people seem to enjoy more than reading books and newspapers is discussing the fact that no one else but them appears to enjoy reading books and newspapers.

The suddenly sensational http://www.stuffwhitepeoplelike.com - a website that is taking the haute bourgeoisie's junior set by storm (why, oh, why didn't I think of that first?) - offers a glimpse into this peculiar mindset. In essence, the site reminds us that the things white people love (gentrification, dinner parties, multilingual children, The Wire) are invariably, "critically acclaimed, low-rated," i.e. not likely to be taken up by the masses. While the stuff white people hate (corporations, Vin Diesel movies, fast food, SUVs, white people who vote Republican) is viewed as obvious, accessible and therefore lame.

There are a few exceptions to this rule, including Apple computers and Ikea, but that's a whole other story.

The point is, white people like to like things no one else does because it fills us with an intensely gratifying sense of superiority tempered by self-pity - the ideal white-person emotional state, as it's simultaneously better and beleaguered.

And so, as we wander around our shabby chic apartments in gentrifying neighbourhoods, reading books and newspaper articles on how no one else reads books and newspaper articles and wishing the 7-Eleven carried organic milk and stone-milled flax bread, we can at least take some comfort in the fact that while the world is clearly going to hell in an illiterate corporate handcart, we are special.

I know I am. Because no one else likes the stuff I like.