What The Papers Say

I miss hunting down the International Herald Tribune, or spending most of Sunday reading the Observer. News and culture as tactile things. Also, the illusion that you can get to the end of the news. Finish the paper and you know everything you need to know about today. By which we meant yesterday.

Now the news has no bottom. You can’t reach the end of the internet, after all. So these are my newspapers, and I read as much of them as I can first thing in the morning. If I had the extra cash, I’d read the FT, Le Monde and the WSJ too. I sit outside with my two morning coffees and my two cigarettes and listen to ambient music and read the newspapers on this little screen and I learn as much about the last twelve hours as I can.

It’s the only way to triage a world with too much news that I can find. But the alternative is to not read the news at all. And that is unacceptable.