Steven Levy, technology columnist for Newsweek, lost his new MacBook Air. One theory is that it got mixed in with the Sunday paper and his wife threw it out.

"When something is thin enough to fit into an envelope, light enough to sit on your lap for a couple of hours without discomfort and so compact that it doesnit even bulge in an airline seat-back pocket, wouldnit it make sense that one could lose track of such a thing? Even if it is a computer?" Mr. Levy wrote.

Mr. Levy lives in a New York city apartment where, with all the books, magazine, and some Sunday clutter, it can be all too easy to misplace a computer that ranges from 0.76 to 0.16 inches thick.

It could have been stolen. However, his charger was still in his living room suggesting that heid used the MacBook over the weekend. Conclusion: it was safe at home, then disappeared.

"So what happened?: Mr. Levy wrote. "... I have developed a theory that I first viewed as remote, but now believe explains the fate of my Air. On Sundays in my apartment, the coffee table where the Air sat becomes the final resting place for the bulky New York Times. It is not unusual for other magazines, and newspapers from previous days, to accumulate there as well.

"My wife, whose clutter tolerance is well below my own, sometimes will swoop in and hastily gather the pulp in a huge stack, going directly to the trash-compactor room just down the hall from our apartment, dumping the pile into a plastic recycling bin. ... Could it be that somewhere in the stack was a Macintosh computer so thin that its manufacturer brags it could fit inside an envelope? I believe so.

"As humiliating as it sounds, let me repeat: the MacBook Air is so thin that it got tossed out with the newspapers," Mr. Levy admitted.