In case anyone's still wondering whether American newspapers as we know them are on the road to extinction, the answer, implicit in the title of this wistful and rather dolorous new collection of essays edited by recently retired Chicago Tribune newsman Madigan, is yes. The question remains why. Madigan and his contributors grapple gamely with the problem, but the root causes they identify are mostly the usual suspects: the flight of readers (especially the young) to television and the Internet, falling ad revenue and circulation, and the misplaced belief of the blogosphere that it can replace the mainstream media it spends so much time simultaneously ridiculing and stealing from. In a few cases, the culprits are more novel. In his elegantly curmudgeonly essay Trapped in Transition, for example, Joseph Epstein blames newspapers' fall on their being too philistine as chroniclers of the arts (a charge they clearly deserve), too liberal (a canard best left to talk radio), and too adversarial (huh?).