Op-Ed: The Case for Unboxing Your Old DVD Player

The latest "new" gadget in Radhika Jones' living room is one a lot of people probably boxed up years ago. In a New York Times opinion piece, the former Vanity Fair editor explains why resurrecting a dusty DVD player has restored something she felt streaming had quietly taken away: control, simplicity, and real curation. Fed up with juggling passwords, QR codes, outages, and algorithmic suggestions that don't quite land, Jones argues that watching TV via streamers has morphed into being a pain much of the time:

• "I like that our DVD player is neither smart nor intelligent," she writes. "You put in the disc, and the movie appears. Instead of searching for Wes Anderson's Rushmore—and finding it on Prime, only to learn that I have to pay to rent it, and even that would require reinstating my lapsed Prime account, which would require reckoning with my many feelings about Amazon—I can put on the Criterion Collection DVD of Rushmore I acquired two decades ago and spend my mental energy on Bill Murray rather than Jeff Bezos."

Read the full column, in which Jones makes the case that owning DVDs isn't about nostalgia for obsolete tech. It's about reclaiming how, and what, we watch.