See You Next Tuesday: Vol. II, No. Four

"Fast Car" slays the Grammy's, divorce registries, Super Bowl snacks, finding the right bra, and more.

For decades, I consumed the news like a ravenous lioness. I dined on an inbox full to bursting with morning, afternoon, and evening newsletters. My snacked on “breaking news” alerts. CNN was always on, unless I was in the office, when I was forced to watch Fox. Sunday mornings were spent standing at my counter, eating cold eggs, devouring the roundtables (on DVR, of course, everyone knows I’m not an early riser). Add to this subscriptions to all of the major papers, The Economist, and the Financial Times. I was a heavy eater.

Then, something changed. It was time to go on a diet.

In 2022, I realized that my lifelong love of current events had turned dark. I couldn’t watch the news without getting angry. And, honestly, what news was actually getting? Every hour of cable news had morphed into 10-minutes of headlines, followed by 50-minutes of people’s thoughts about the headlines. And then, the cycle would repeat in the next hour with a different host. Where was Bernard Shaw to tell me what was actually going on in the world? And why does Headline News only show old episodes of Forensic Files now?

From the consolidation and closure of local news outlets, to the prevalence of the five-person opinion panel, to the belief that reading the headline on Twitter is the same as reading the news, all of the tools that were meant to educated and inform are doing neither. And to get that tiny pearl of information from the metric-tonne of sand, you have to ingest so much frustration and anger that the hit to your mental health is hardly worth it.

After Sloane was born, I needed to find new ways to consume news without becoming Rupert Murdoch’s sin eater. And as we enter another presidential election year, likely filled with venom and bile, I thought I would share how I still watch and read the news without being a glutton for punishment.