On a Diet

I'm a week and a half shy of starting my sixth month without checking the news, and no, it has nothing to do with our new president but everything to do with his wife.

It all started on Inauguration Day 2025.

*insert dream sequence harp glissando*

The morning started off like any other: two cups of Starbucks Caffe Verona coffee, French press, followed by a mild-to-moderate bathroom catastrophe. It continued like any other. I wiped the tears from my eyes and the sweat from my brow, and gingerly sat back in bed to play a few minutes of Disney Dreamlight Valley—because I identify as a 9 year old girl from Terra Haute who wants nothing more than to meet, or better yet, be, Belle. When I bored of Disney Dreamlight Valley—DDV for those in the know—I played the News+ Crossword and Sudoku. All three levels, thank you very much.

After the games ended, it was on to the real work: checking the news. I skimmed the headlines on NBC New York and then The Post, to ensure a balanced dose of daily spin. (I know, I know, I said I swore off the Post in a previous, ahem, post, but sometimes you just need a hit of the good stuff.)

On the morning of Inauguration Day, I went to nbcnewyork.com and saw the headline "What did Melania Trump wear to the Inauguration?" Now, I have nothing against Mrs. Trump. One of our household even voted for her husband last year—Bailey started her own far-right group, the Proud Good Girls. Mrs. Trump seems like a nice woman and/or a very well put together robot. But I have no idea what she wears and even less of an idea why it was front page news. Is this why I'm reading the news?

To find out what people wear?

Whenever I tell someone I don’t read the news—and, when you don't read the news, you're required to work it into the conversation within the first five minutes of meeting someone—their response is always the same: "How do you stay informed?"

To which I ask, "Why do you stay informed?"

What are you doing with all the information? I'll tell you what most people do with the information. They complain. They complain about what one politician did what another failed to do. They complain about people complaining about either side of the issue. (At least that's what I did.) They tell you at the bar how the country's going to shit. They tell you that they read on X that illegals are stealing our jobs. Then the recession was stealing our jobs. Now AI is stealing our jobs. [NB: If your job is so easily stolen, maybe you're in the wrong job?] And when they see your eyes glaze over, they tell someone else, usually on X.

But as I started to interrogate my news intake, I found that it didn't sustain me like reading a novel. It wasn't improving my life, like reading non fiction. It was just a quick hit of sugar. I'd get high, vibrate with rage, and then crash. The news is mostly empty calories.

So I removed it from my diet and started to read more. I started reading history, biographies, philosophy. Did you know we've had presidents people didn't like before? With all that's going on in the news, you'd think we were living in unprecedented times. I hear all the time on comedy stages that "we're living in a very divisive time right now." Right now? Did you know that when Truman ran for reelection, a lot of people hated his political platform? He wasn't doing anything radical. He basically took FDR's New Deal platform, which sought to spend a ton of government money to improve the lives of Americans, and he added black people. Nuts, right? But some people that so much they created a new political party. They called it the Dixiecrats, presumably because The Racists was a little too on the nose. Or they couldn't spell it—they were mostly Southerners, after all. And no, obviously the Dixiecrats couldn't put a man in the White House. That'd be preposterous. But they put one in the Senate, where he served for something like 45 years.

Time has a way of removing the prejudices, bias, and falsehoods, like winnowing chaff from grain, so that only the truth remains. Sure, each author introduces his own bias, but the good ones, I think, let data and facts speak for themselves. Plus, unlike news, which exists as an ephemeral flash, we can argue with authors. They take time to research, compile, and argue their point. They give us the opportunity to read, digest, and even refute what they write. You can't do that with news. It's just there, and then it's replaced with whatever's coming next. Have you ever gone back through old news clippings to see what they got wrong?

Now before you think me all high and mighty, taking about how much better I think I am than all of you news readers, let me be clear: I don't think that. [I know it.] And, I have to admit, I still get some news. In fact, I get my news by word of mouth. And I enjoy it. Some mornings Wiff will ask, "do you me to tell you about a thing that happened?" And that's how I learned about a few plane crashes, some freaky weather, and the recent flood that affected Texas. But instead of reading hyperbole on a computer screen, I get a just-the-facts-ma'am version from a human.

Look, I don't care if you read the news or not. I'm not even saying that reading the news is bad. Smart people have said societies need free press and those smart people have also written books so ergo I must agree with them. All I'm saying is that I've enjoyed not having to read poorly written local news articles about what the First Lady wore on Inauguration Day.

What did I do with all that time I saved by not reading the news? I figured out how to stop those mild-to-moderate daily bathroom catastrophes. Turns out the news wasn't the only thing I had to change in my diet.