Material media can go down as well as up. This week we learnt about the demise of a British newspaper–The Independent–that is ‘going online’, having proved unsustainable in print. This is meant to be the future but it feels like a vanishing, the discipline of rectilinear newsprint disappearing in the sprawl of the digital interface. Reading a newspaper online is a video game in which you have to zap the pop-up ad before it flickers into hideous life.

Meanwhile as paper recedes, vellum has been saved as the medium on which English laws will be written, reversing a threatened cost-cutting move to ‘higher-quality archival paper’. Many have been surprised to learn that we are still writing our laws on the skins of dead calves. Perhaps the laws will be better now that this is widely known?