NPR’s All Things Considered earlier this week considered—among all things—the decline of the Wisconsin paper industry due to the “twin threats” of competition from China and the rise of the iPad. It was based on a series from the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel. It’s worth reading/listening in toto, but here’s how I like my irony:
There is a beautiful old, 120-year-old mill on the Wisconsin River in a town called Nekoosa. It has to work extra shifts to make the paper for the recent biography of Steve Jobs by Walter Isaacson. The irony, of course, is that no industrialist has done more than Steve Jobs to create the touch screens that are putting the pressure on these paper mills."