Things You Notice When You Quit the News
I can't really get onboard with this.  A lot of the comments here, and the commentary in the article itself, talk about how depressing the news is, how biased it is, about Gell-Mann amnesia -- and they're all right.  But from my own experience, the people I know who don't follow the news (either at all, or extremely minimally) are spectacularly ill-informed; they get their news either third-hand (which suffers from all of the aforementioned problems plus being re-reported poorly), or not at all, and operate with only the sketchiest understanding of what's happening in the world.  They aren't going to "read three books on a topic" (from the article), they're just going to remain oblivious.  And that's far worse, in my opinion.