In an attempt to get my mind off the things that are currently on my mind, the things that have been on my mind for the entire last year and some time before that, the things that have driven this blog towards terminal dormancy, with just about a post a week in 2012, the things that, as this exhausting circumlocution shows, mostly remain unsaid, I went to the newsagent this morning and bought an Observer.
It might be an anachronism and on its way out, but I like printed paper. I like that I can unfold, separate and spread it until it covers the entire coffee table, burying everything else of lesser importance. I also like that it doesn't glow at me with the eyes of hungry wolf like the computer screen I stare at all day at work.
Paper is comfortable but also obsolescent in many ways. No one needs a daily newspaper, for example. Those addicted enough to news that they crave a shot every day will not stop there. The web updates constantly. Why wait until the morning? Why wait indeed when the Standard is handed out every evening for free?
The Observer is not exactly a newspaper; it's a bit of a weekly. It's technically the Sunday Guardian, because it shares offices, layout, editorial leanings and web space with its daily sister, but it has astutely remained a brand apart. I predict that there will be a time, not too long in coming, when the illustrious legacy of the Guardian will be ditched and the Observer flourish on its own, maybe published a couple days earlier to leave the whole weekend for its perusal.
The weekend is the best time to catch up on news, which, in my opinion but against my deplorable habits, best remains unconsumed the rest of the week. No one needs general news on a daily basis; no one benefits, to put it less kindly, from factoids of dubious relevance and a short half-life that the news industry produces relentlessly. The false sense of being informed comes at the cost of a tremendous waste of time.
Infrequent news consumption in the appropriate media preserves the important news, while the irrelevant or already superseded bits have been purged. Getting a monthly summary of economic and political developments is probably enough (imagine you had never polluted your brain with the fiscal cliff), but I prefer weekly news, rotating through the Economist, the New Yorker and Die Zeit as inspiration strikes me.
For the purpose of this discussion, a distinction should be made between acute and chronic news. Acute news is reported live on the web, fluffed up by twitter feeds and What's hot boxes. Acute news goes straight to the bin. Chronic news is analysis, commentary, intellectual rumination on what goes on. Chronic news is what's important.
This week's Zeit, for example, has a wonderful, substantial piece – a dossier, as they call it – on the war in Syria. Syria becomes acute news when a gas station is bombarded or a general defects or a village is wiped out, but the war is continuous. The three-page article doesn't tell anything that would make the news but a lot of what's going on. Reading about Aleppo as a war zone, seeing this wonderful city in ruins, learning about idealists with dreams of a better future – the images will stay with me.
This week's Observer didn't contain anything of similar heft or interest, nothing that I could possible regurgitate and publish here, intermingled with my own irrelevant thoughts. As a consequence, there will be no post today.
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