“Smith and Gordon load their minivan and deliver all 233 papers in about ninety minutes. "Nothing like the cold to make you do it faster," says Smith, who's wearing a leopard-skin sweater and navy-blue beanie. On some blocks she and Gordon walk opposite sides of a street, tossing papers onto stoops, while on others they split up—Gordon carries an Ikea bag stuffed with papers as he walks down blocks with a high density of subscribers, while Smith drives sparser streets nearby. The longest stop is the five minutes it takes Smith to deliver six papers to individual apartments in a nursing home. One customer has asked her to hit his door with the paper so he knows it has arrived. Another customer's dog waits on the step and barks when the paper lands. At this moment, hundreds of thousands of copies of The New York Times are flying out of people's hands, a little action that starts a simultaneous morning ritual: A newspaper lands with a soft thud, and eventually someone opens the door and picks it up, reads it, and knows what is happening in the world.” - urbansheep@gmail.com