I don’t know how many of you are feeling the same way, but when I tried to wade through some coverage of President Trump’s first 100 days, I had to stop.
I could barely make it through the first couple of paragraphs of the New York Times’ front page analysis, by Peter Baker, as well as a few other stories I tried to read. No shade on Baker’s piece, which was strong and full of what the bigs call “sweep” — writing that conveys a sense of scale and loftiness.
It’s just that there’s a certain limit to how much I can take in these days about politics, especially if the information isn’t new. There used to be a pleasure that came from reading recaps and analysis that smartly pulled the big picture together. Being informed wasn’t always a joyride, but there was a certain excitement and satisfaction to it.
But these days? It can punch you in the gut. I’ve been trying to come up with a formula to guide my news consumption. And one thing I’ve worked to eliminate is news that doesn’t really tell me anything new in a bigger sense. Politically, any of us paying attention knows the score at this point. The overall story is clear.
What also caused me to walk away from the 100 days coverage was the sense of surrealism. We are in a world that still feels alien and foreign — a reality that it doesn’t make sense to exist in, one that was unfathomable just a few years ago. A testament to the stability and privilege many of us experienced to grow up in the U.S., sure. But a real feeling nonetheless.
The way I sometimes cope these days is by avoiding a lot of news when it feels redundant. The interesting storylines are the ones that have the potential to change the dynamic or be surprising. Everything else is just sort of a hybrid between mindless sports chatter and horror/ruin porn. And yeah, many days, it feels healthier to not watch the building burning. Studies, many of them done before our current era of round-the-clock, off-the-Richter-scale bad news, back this up.
On the flip side, reading positive news has been shown to increase feelings of well-being and self-esteem. And stories that focus on solutions, not the intractability of problems, have also been shown to be more positive. So I’m keeping the note short this week.
Here’s what other off-news items I’m reading this:
I liked this piece from Bloomberg breaking down how tariffs affect the cost of goods in one single container ship. That kind of cross-sectional coverage takes a lot of effort. The economy feels like one of the most interesting story lines right now, for its complexity, but also because it seems like one of the few things to act as a potential check and balance in Washington.
It’s been interesting to see union salting — the time-honed practice of organizers getting jobs at facilities with the specific purpose of organizing them — having a second life. In this excerpt of her new book in Teen Vogue, Jaz Brisack, who helped kickstart the wave of unionizing at Starbucks stores across the country, shares her account of salting at the store in Buffalo, which started the whole thing.
A new report from The International Alliance of App-Based Transport Workers draws on over 150 driver testimonies from India, Nepal, Bangladesh, and Sri Lanka, to describe how companies like Uber, Ola, and PickMe “exploit algorithmic management, skirt labor laws, and systematically deny workers basic rights.”
Some more media criticism in this excellent excerpt of civil rights lawyer Alec Karakatsanis’ new book Copaganda.
My former WaPo colleague Drew Harwell has a good piece about the people who have lost money as Trump’s meme coin has tanked, losing some 85 percent of its value from its peak around the inauguration.
Former employees of Palantir, the data-mining firm co-founded by Peter Thiel, are speaking out after the company made a major deal with ICE, according to this piece in NPR. The company’s stock has surged more than 200 percent since Trump’s election, bringing its valuation roughly on par with Bank of America.
And for those sharing the feelings of news fatigue, this piece from the New York Times Magazine really hits. It’s about a reporter’s visit to Finland in the depths of winter, to understand why the country consistently ranks at the top of the global happiness index. Fittingly, no one really knows what happiness is or how to measure it exactly, of course. But they’ve figured something out in Finland, including a funny scene at a public library in Helsinki where a mother leaves a 9-month-old baby alone for 20 minutes (!) while she browses for books.
See you next week!