"It must be that holding paper in your hands satisfies a fundamental human need for permanence -- a record of existence, if you will. So when I hear such luminaries as Jacob Weisberg -- a senior-editor salesman for Microsoft-owned Slate Magazine -- prattle on about how infantile it is to cling to wood pulp, I detect an assault on history and psychological continuity itself, a gratuitous upsetting of the apple cart that is deeply childish in its own right. (The sterile Bauhaus school of architecture militated much the same way for minimalist design against traditional ornament.) Indeed, with its phony promise of limitless, easily acquired knowledge, the Internet appeals to the child's fantasy of omnipotence -- the world at your fingertips, unmediated, unsupervised by adults."