SEYTON
The queen, my lord, is dead.

MACBETH
She should have died hereafter;
There would have been a time for such a word.
To-morrow, and to-morrow, and to-morrow,
Creeps in this petty pace from day to day
To the last syllable of recorded time,
And all our yesterdays have lighted fools
The way to dusty death. Out, out, brief candle!
Life's but a walking shadow, a poor player
That struts and frets his hour upon the stage
And then is heard no more: it is a tale
Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,
Signifying nothing.

*Enter a Messenger*

Thou comest to use thy tongue; thy story quickly.

---

Thoughts from last week:
Alan shared this beautiful meditation on polo:

I bring Sophie to the dog park every morning. There are two practicing Buddhists who go to the park that I often talk with. One of them often tells me about how our true nature lies not in our bodies but our minds. I like this thought and I see it's appeal but I often push back. Part of the main reason I do is bike polo. For me polo (and riding bikes in general) satisfies a kind of atavism that makes me feel truly human. It it so rewarding to use my body in this way and to feel connected to others who are doing the same. I am truly grateful to the sport for this.
 

Another reason I am grateful to the sport is the women I've met through it. I grew up surrounded by women who occupied very traditional gender roles. Through polo I've meet so many women that defy those expectations in the most amazing ways and I think over the years it has improved my ability to form meaningful relationships with women.
 

Something from last weekend sums this up pretty well: During the final match on Sunday I am sitting next to Nico under a tarp so soaked that water is dripping through it. Shelley rolls up to Nico who is timing the game and says "You know, this game should really be an hour long not 45 minutes." Nico responds "It's miserable out here, don't you want to go home?" Shelley starts to rolls away and looks back, hair dripping with cold rain, and says "hell no I love bike polo."

Melissa thinks there's a lot of similarity between bike polo and her underground-wheel-based-sport-of-choice, roller derby. And Anna counts ultimate frisbee among the sports that are most fun when everyone is following the "don't be a dick" rule.

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Tunes:
I've been jamming often to Young Fathers, Cocoa Sugar. The hit single has an excellent video.
For those who want more music from the UK with beautiful weird noises and great beats, but fewer words, Alex (who is in a real band that plays real gigs so you should probably pay attention to his recommendations) recommends Engravings by Forest Swords. And, fun fact, Forest Swords made the top comment on the Young Father's video. (His "yes" got 468 likes.)
Alan recommends Girlpool. It's got the whole twee voices thing we all loved in the mid-2000s, but it's not twee.Bryce and James independently recommended Hop Along's Bark Your Head Off, Dog. It took me 3 listens, but now I'm into it too. I can tell I like it because I started it on low volume while writing this and keep making it louder. And it usually takes me a few listens to like the music that I end up liking for more than 3 months, so that bodes well.

---

Drop the news:
Because this causes some confusion, here's what not following the news looks like to me:

• ​I don't subscribe to any newspaper or visit any news websites or twitter. 
• I try to avoid in-person conversations about the news, which makes DC much more interesting, but I still get a lot of news ambiently. 
• I was also getting news passively via facebook, but that's not happening any more. My gym's locker room plays CNN all the time and I can't look away it's so silly. I also have trouble not looking at TVs in bars. I wish public screens were banned especially billboards and those awful tablets in airport restaurants. 
• I don't read academic articles.
• I still follow a handful blogs and newsletters that post interesting and thoughtful things, but none that are news-focused. This sometimes leads me to read high-quality news articles.
• I read books, especially older books, all the time. And I try to take notes.

Josh shares a similar diagnosis:

The news is the daily cycle of information provided by a network of institutions, many of them for-profit, that is supposed to tell us what's happening in the world. It is probably important to know what is happening, at least some of it. The news version of happenings includes non-crises (the death of a war criminal's mother, perhaps), fake crises (does the debt matter?  ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ ), and real crises (Flint). Daily news, even when it reports on true crises, struggles to make crucial connections between our current emergencies: Nazi rallies, failing bridges, homelessness, environmental collapse, the various forms of gun violence, etc. It is in history and long-form journalism that we get a better sense, not only of what is happening, but what has already happened and why.

The news discourages us by under-informing us. Reading the news teaches us that the world is out of control: full of random violence, an impossible to manage economy, and powerful people who are either much smarter than us (and thus able to make the hard choices we're not capable of even understanding) or dangerous idiots who should be replaced by others (who we will soon find to also be bums). By showing us only this version of the world, the news plants seeds of powerlessness and nourishes them with daily doses of horrible facts.

Almost a century ago, John Dewey diagnosed the problem with modern media as too much sensational knowledge, meaning knowledge of events in isolation, and too little intellectual knowledge, meaning knowledge of the relations between events. Sensationalist coverage is easier to make, sell, and consume. As a result,

The average person is surrounded today by readymade intellectual goods as he is by readymade foods, articles, and all kinds of gadgets. He has not the personal share in making either intellectual or material goods that his pioneer ancestors had.

The news makes us passive consumers; it does not make us engaged citizens. The important part of journalism isn't the truth, but the finding. Journalism should be a model that encourages everyone to adopt a habit of investigation, instead it tends to deaden curiosity by providing pat answers. Consider three examples:

1. Vox and their condescending "explainers" implicitly promise that if you just listen to them you'll be Right and Good. This is nonsense. The news doesn't merely reflect Truth; it's a powerful institution that produces truth.
2. A classmates dad can most often be found Foxin', meaning he just absolutely vegetates in front of the TV absorbing repugnant political opinions by osmosis. Is our relationship with the news so different? Or are the opinions we absorb just less evil?
3. ESPN is a constant barrage of idle speculation by well-informed and badly-dressed men about tiny details of shit that simply doesn't matter. Most other news sources are different only in genre.

Not only do ESPN, Fox and Vox's prognosticators pacify us while creating the illusion of engagement, they are often simply wrong. In Antifragile, Nassim Nicholas Taleb points out that the more we read the news, the more likely we are to be duped.

Assume further that for what you are observing, at a yearly frequency, the ratio of signal to noise is about one to one (half noise, half signal)--this means that about half the changes are real improvements or degradations, the other half comes from randomness. This ratio is what you get from yearly observations. But if you look at the very same data on a daily basis, the composition would change to 95 percent noise, 5 percent signal. And if you observe data on an hourly basis, as people immersed in the news and market price variations do, the split becomes 99x.5 percent noise to 0.5 percent signal. That is... why anyone who listens to news (except when very, very significant events take place) is one step below sucker.

 

Related Thoughts and Links:

• Nathan wrote about how the news convinced all of us that Trump could never be elected, in part because it made few honest attempts to understand the people who voted for him. Top quote: "Trump was a bomb being thrown at the elite, which meant that (in some sense) the worse he was, the more people liked him." I subscribe to Current Affairs because Nathan is trying to do something really ambitious and valuable and needs support. Unlike other publications with "overhead costs" your subscription money appears to literally feed Nathan and his writers (still mostly beignets, I hope).
• N+1 is publishing some of the most thoughtful writing on the web, if you're looking for something additional to subscribe to.
• ​If you prefer halfway measures, Oliver Burkeman recommends reading the headlines a day or three late. Echoing Taleb, he points out "The passage of time is the best filter for determining what matters." I really enjoyed his book, The Antidote: Happiness for People Who Can't Stand Positive Thinking.