Sometime around 2018, I stopped reading the news. This was kind of a big deal, because I was raised in a family where not reading the news is a kind of heresy. Being informed was our version of being godly. I am amazed to remember that not very long ago I had the Sunday New York Times delivered in print (!) to my house.
My father always told me that his father, who is credited with getting the family out of Germany, read the newspaper every day. Being informed about the Nazis gave him insight others didn't have, I was told. Reading the newspaper could save your life.
This is not true, of course. No amount of newspaper reading could have saved my grandfather's life, especially since newspapers in Germany in the late 1930s were not reporting the news. What saved my grandfather's life was that he married my grandmother, and she had a distant cousin living in Ohio. That cousin talked the Fleischmann family (of margarine riches) into sponsoring my grandparents. They left Germany in August 1939, less than a month before the invasion of Poland. No one else on either side of the family survived.
I have no doubt my grandfather enjoyed reading the paper — he had three kids and got up at 4am every day to bake bread. Thirty minutes of quiet reading time every day was probably lovely. (I'm guessing. He died many years before I was born.)
Anyway, while my Opa John may have disapproved, I've been a lot happier since I stopped reading the news. It's been very freeing. The best part is when anyone tries to engage me on some topic of current events or policy, I can quite honestly say that I don't know much about it. People sometimes bloviate past this statement but in general my sheer ignorance on, say, the rate of immigration, takes the wind out of their sails.
I'm surprised at how much I haven't missed, honestly. I read articles people occasionally send me and Josh tells me breaking news, like when Trump got shot. I've never felt embarrassingly uninformed in polite company, though I did only recently learn who was running for Senate in my state.
Though, come to think of it, I do now read the hyper parochial news religiously. I am extremely well informed on the 10th anniversary of a nearby crepe restaurant and the contentious local effort to turn a caution sign at a busy crosswalk into a traffic signal (the township wants it, the borough does not!). I find this kind of news extremely useful. I knew that a Cava was opening near me at least 2 months before anyone else. This is the kind of news I can use.
