This post gets easier to write every year.  As I’ve reported many times in the past, a truckload of yellow pages has been dropped off at my apartment building. This year, there seems to be a new technique – actually putting the individual bags at each apartment’s door instead of just dumping them in the foyer.   [...]

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Last Thursday California joined a unique book club, which already includes 16 other states. This book club doesn’t celebrate the release of new books, but actually promotes the disappearance of one. This is still a celebration because we’re talking about a book that is redundant and wasteful, and yet about 6 million Californians receive a [...]

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Everyone here knows how much I hate the Yellow Pages. Not the company, per se; believe it or not, they have a growing and reasonably sophisticated online service which is very much what you’d expect from a modern directory service. Still, if you’re like most people these days, you almost never use a physical phone [...]

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The dumping of phone books onto humanity is one of my favorite topics. I’ve lamented the arrival of the yellow pages for three years running (2009, 2008, 2007). Now, a breath of fresh air: The New York Times reports that Verizon wants to pull the plug on white pages for New York City in a [...]

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This post series is starting to sound like a broken record. As it did about this time in 2007 and 2008, AT&T has once again dumped a huge pile of useless paper and plastic bags in my foyer. If the pattern I observed the last two years continues, two or three of them will be [...]

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Last year about this time I wrote about the insane waste that phone books represent in an age where almost everyone has a decent internet connection. I mentioned that, as a longtime shareholder of AT&T, I was particularly outraged to see the company spending money printing these useless tomes and dumping them in my building, [...]

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Take a look at this pile of waste. This is my foyer last week piled high with brand new yellow pages wrapped in plastic bags. It almost makes me sad, in a nostalgic sort of way to witness the demise of such a venerable icon as the phone book, but let’s be realistic here – [...]

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