Really enjoyed this piece. And definitely giggled my way through the guide to the newspaper bit :-) and found the AI depolarisation thing genuinely fascinating.
The bit about the overall purpose of news really resonated. Dramatically reducing my phone use and replacing it with meditation has hard the slightly weird effect that I've completely lost interest in the news, whether online or offline. I didn't intend it but have become completely clueless, and am now thinking hard about the morality of ignorance. Don't mean to sound pious, but have ended up doubling down on volunteering... Kind of buying my right not to care.
For most of my life, I was a news addict, and would have said that was crucial.
Then this year, radical pivot to believing informing myself is a bit of a lie, it’s just a doomscroll. Don’t kid yourself, it’s just the phone doing its thing, making you check something which is way beyond your control. Volunteer and do active good rather than imaginary passive good.
But I’m definitely not unshakeable on that. It really got me when you quoted the Washington Post about democracy dying in darkness… I’ve been total darkness for a few weeks. Am I a baddie now?
I love your writing! Your _Esquire_ piece on taste is splendid, too. Thank you so much. Going to subscribe on June 1. The satisfactions of a printed newspaper are hard to beat.
(One piece of constructively-intended criticism: the word you want is "regimen," not "regiment" in this essay near the top of the section entitled "It's Impossible to keep up." Former editor; can't help it.) All right vs. alright is under recent debate, but the former is, ahem, indubitably tasteful... I hope you chuckled at that; intended with a smile.
Thank you! Please, I desperately need an editor hahah. I re-read my drafts so many times I get typo-blindness. Very curious about the All right vs. alright debate...
If you're serious about needing an editor, DM me! "All right" is the correct, traditional form. "Alright" arose in the 70s as a little piece of sarcasm but then caught on, and now some (many?) people use it, thinking it is correct. And of course, this IS how things actually become "correct." "Correct," in my view, is a momentary snapshot of convention, but it's real and valuable in most cases because conventions allow us to agree on meaning. We need more of that, not less.
The "all right" vs. "alright" debate is between the descriptive and prescriptive camps: descriptive folks just want to record what happens as the language changes, without judgement, which sounds preferable but actually isn't. They go for "alright," and are probably 100 years early. Prescriptive folks prefer "all right," because many of them just want to enforce rules, correct people's spelling, grammar, usage, and probably their table manners too, which sounds horrible, and often is. Prescriptive folks can be, at their worst, judgy and annoying. But descriptive folks, at their worst, can be ignorant and slovenly. One hopes for the best in both camps, but one rarely gets it. Alas.
Me? I'm in the middle, or rather, I try to keep one foot in the reasonable side of each camp [ouch, sometimes that's a painful stretch]. I try to do this because I see a real need for shared conventions of language, and because I see meaning, clarity, and precision collapsing every day in cyberspace for want of a properly placed comma or apostrophe, or for want of a decent dictionary, evidently. Yet I also love to watch language change in real time, and I am a huge fan of good neologisms, if they add something to what's already available. Besides, I know that over the long term, today's conventions are rightly doomed to their natural fate--obsolescence--as they are overtaken by new and ever-changing conventions. (Please excuse the incorrect two-hyphen em-dash; it's all I've got on this machine.)
Really enjoyed this piece. And definitely giggled my way through the guide to the newspaper bit :-) and found the AI depolarisation thing genuinely fascinating.
The bit about the overall purpose of news really resonated. Dramatically reducing my phone use and replacing it with meditation has hard the slightly weird effect that I've completely lost interest in the news, whether online or offline. I didn't intend it but have become completely clueless, and am now thinking hard about the morality of ignorance. Don't mean to sound pious, but have ended up doubling down on volunteering... Kind of buying my right not to care.
totally! I feel this moral need to stay informed, but I need to remind myself to what end... why... otherwise it's no different from a doomscroll...
I’m really caught on this one.
For most of my life, I was a news addict, and would have said that was crucial.
Then this year, radical pivot to believing informing myself is a bit of a lie, it’s just a doomscroll. Don’t kid yourself, it’s just the phone doing its thing, making you check something which is way beyond your control. Volunteer and do active good rather than imaginary passive good.
But I’m definitely not unshakeable on that. It really got me when you quoted the Washington Post about democracy dying in darkness… I’ve been total darkness for a few weeks. Am I a baddie now?
Really hard.
I love your writing! Your _Esquire_ piece on taste is splendid, too. Thank you so much. Going to subscribe on June 1. The satisfactions of a printed newspaper are hard to beat.
(One piece of constructively-intended criticism: the word you want is "regimen," not "regiment" in this essay near the top of the section entitled "It's Impossible to keep up." Former editor; can't help it.) All right vs. alright is under recent debate, but the former is, ahem, indubitably tasteful... I hope you chuckled at that; intended with a smile.
Thank you! Please, I desperately need an editor hahah. I re-read my drafts so many times I get typo-blindness. Very curious about the All right vs. alright debate...
If you're serious about needing an editor, DM me! "All right" is the correct, traditional form. "Alright" arose in the 70s as a little piece of sarcasm but then caught on, and now some (many?) people use it, thinking it is correct. And of course, this IS how things actually become "correct." "Correct," in my view, is a momentary snapshot of convention, but it's real and valuable in most cases because conventions allow us to agree on meaning. We need more of that, not less.
The "all right" vs. "alright" debate is between the descriptive and prescriptive camps: descriptive folks just want to record what happens as the language changes, without judgement, which sounds preferable but actually isn't. They go for "alright," and are probably 100 years early. Prescriptive folks prefer "all right," because many of them just want to enforce rules, correct people's spelling, grammar, usage, and probably their table manners too, which sounds horrible, and often is. Prescriptive folks can be, at their worst, judgy and annoying. But descriptive folks, at their worst, can be ignorant and slovenly. One hopes for the best in both camps, but one rarely gets it. Alas.
Me? I'm in the middle, or rather, I try to keep one foot in the reasonable side of each camp [ouch, sometimes that's a painful stretch]. I try to do this because I see a real need for shared conventions of language, and because I see meaning, clarity, and precision collapsing every day in cyberspace for want of a properly placed comma or apostrophe, or for want of a decent dictionary, evidently. Yet I also love to watch language change in real time, and I am a huge fan of good neologisms, if they add something to what's already available. Besides, I know that over the long term, today's conventions are rightly doomed to their natural fate--obsolescence--as they are overtaken by new and ever-changing conventions. (Please excuse the incorrect two-hyphen em-dash; it's all I've got on this machine.)