The Salon blurb for Garrison Keillor's commentary: Newspapers are portable, disposable and convey a certain savoir faire. Follow these easy steps, and you'll be leaving your laptop behind.

An excerpt: (free with a day pass)

Jan. 10, 2007 | It seems to me, observing the young in coffee shops, that something is missing from their lives: the fine art of holding a newspaper. They sit staring at computer screens, sometimes with wires coming out of their ears, life passing them by as they drift through MySpace, that encyclopedia of the pathetic, and check out a video of a dog dancing the Macarena. It is so lumpen, so sad that nobody has shown them that opening up a newspaper is the key to looking classy and smart. Never mind the bronze-plated stuff about the role of the press in a democracy -- a newspaper, kiddo, is about Style.

Whether you're sitting or standing, indoors or out, leaning against a hitching post or with your brogans on a desk, a newspaper gives you a whole rich vocabulary of gesture. You open it with a flourish and a ripple of newsprint, your buoyant self-confidence evident in the way you turn the pages with a snap of the wrist, taking in the gray matter swiftly, your eyes dancing over the world's sorrows and moving on, crinkling the page, snapping it, rolling it, folding the paper in halves and quarters, tucking it under the arm or tapping it against the palm. Cary Grant, Spencer Tracy, Jimmy Stewart, all the greats, used the newspaper to demonstrate cool. Sitting and staring at the profile of Kerri ("Dreamer of dreams") Jodhpur, 18, of Muncie, Ind., and her cat Snowball is not cool.

A man at a laptop is a man at a desk, a stiff, a drone. Where is the nobility here? He hunches forward, his eyes glaze, and beads of saliva glitter in the corners of his mouth and make their way down his chin as he becomes engrossed in the video of the fisherman falling out of the boat. A newspaper reader, by comparison, is a swordsman, a wrangler, a private eye. Holding a newspaper frees you up to express yourself, sort of like holding a sax did for Coltrane. Just observe a few simple rules.