Daily newspaper circulation

American babies named Maverick climbing the charts. American daily-newspaper circulation falling off a cliff. The kid named for breakaway optimism arrives in a country where the paper that would have covered the optimism has, in many towns, stopped printing. The graph reads what it reads.

Maverick climbed Social Security baby-name charts steadily across this window, lifted further by Top Gun: Maverick (2022). US daily newspaper circulation fell from about 53 million in 2005 to under 21 million by 2022 as digital displacement, classified-ad collapse, and ownership consolidation gutted the industry. Two completely unrelated cultural and economic trajectories sharing a window because the same eighteen years inflated one and emptied another. Different forms of American voice.

The country named hopefully and stopped subscribing. Two unrelated decisions of the same era.