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A few days ago I talked to Ava, an Indiana fifth-grader, on the phone.

I mean the phone phone — Ava’s dad recently installed a landline for her, and she chatted with me using the handset, sitting in her family’s upstairs hallway. “I’m holding it in my hand up to my ear and it’s connected to a base,” she told me, an explanation that would have seemed unnecessary a few decades ago but that is needed now.

Unlike on a FaceTime call, “I’m just hearing audio instead of a person that I can look at,” Ava said. The audio quality was noticeably good.

Ava’s dad, newspaper publisher Chris Hardie, decided to get the phone this spring as an alternative to a mobile device. “Acces

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