A friend recently posted that 42% of people in the US and 46% in the UK sometimes or often avoid the news, according to the 2025 Digital News Report.
Meanwhile, another friend told me to limit my news consumption to preclude going crazy. (I think this was a misunderstanding of what I had been trying to say, that I felt melancholy. But it wasn’t because it was reading the news, but physical pain and mourning.)
Anyway, they read The Guardian and the New York Times, as do I. However, as I’ve noted previously, it is essential to look at many different news sources and understand the context of what is happening.
Don’t care
This is not to say that every story in every source is significant. My wife and I do the New York Times news quiz every week, and we usually get nine or 10 out of the 11 questions correct. But I’m convinced that at least one weekly question is of the “Who cares?” variety.
One was about the workout that Pete Hagseth and Robert F Kennedy, Jr. are touting; I didn’t know they were doing that. It asked what the components of the Pete and Bobby fitness regime were. My response was a shrug. As it turns out, we guessed correctly, but I would not have felt unworthy as a news consumer if I didn’t know.
There was the thing at a baseball game about a home run ball that a guy gave to his son. Then a woman scolded the man, claiming she had the ball first, and the guy gave her the ball. The team gave the boy some swag, as the woman was labelled a “Karen.” I saw this on CBS Mornings. I didn’t care.
If I look back five years, I won’t remember the workout or the baseball kerfluffle. I might remember the earthquake in Afghanistan because it had consequences for those people and geopolitical implications.
Remember the so-called Coldplay Kiss Cam story? Can I remember the name of the company those two people worked for? No, I’ve seen it cited several times, but my brain seems to have this weird filtering-out thing that says what I need to know and what I can let go of.
Conversely
Here’s some information I really did like. I was on Facebook, which is sometimes helpful and sometimes crap. Somebody I knew had written that they had gotten a COVID shot in my area on Sunday. I had gone to the CVS portal several times, including that morning, unsuccessfully trying to get an appointment.
I tried again Sunday night, and behold! There was only one location in my area where I could get a shot: Delmar, a suburb south of Albany. That was OK, as it turns out, I had a medical appointment very near there on Tuesday anyway. There were no side effects except a muscle ache for a few hours at the injection site.
Incidentally, I had gotten my flu shot four days earlier, at a different CVS, when I thought I wouldn’t be getting a COVID shot. So this was COVID shot #8, all at various CVS pharmacies, at least four different ones.
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- September 9, 2025
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August 28, 2024
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October 13, 2023
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December 5, 2022
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April 12, 2022
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September 30, 2021
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March 24, 2021
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March 3, 2021
