There are probably a few. But not to the degree it used to be true. A newspaper has always been an uncertain place to grow old. Hecht was reminiscing near the end of his life, but he'd left Chicago's newspapers behind decades early, when he was still in his early 30s. The show, given a detailed introduction last Wednesday by Steve Johnson in Tempo, isolates housemates who, like the castaways in Survivor , have instructions to periodically turn on their own, identifying and casting out the weakest or most irritating.
Cameras are everywhere, and as the numbers diminish they keep rolling.
A couple of pages on in the same Tempo was a piece on the dramatic cutback in network coverage of this summer's political conventions. NBC and CBS might skip the first two nights altogether. The conventions must be either too real or not real enough. To reclaim public interest, the parties could drop the primaries, put a camera in every corridor and caucus room, and eliminate one candidate a night until only the nominee survives. To keep the wrong kind of people from coming in and vexing the right kind of neighborhoods, basketball courts have been disappearing from Chicago playgrounds.