The News

I've been reading more and better in recent months. There are a few things feeding into this, I suspect, but the main factors are almost certainly:

• I'm exercising regularly, which I previously wasn't
• I've almost totally weaned myself off Twitter
• I read less news than I used to

COVID, plus my improved attention span, has allowed me to really make a dent in my enormous pile of books. Whether I needed to purchase rather than borrow all those books is an open question - I like to make marginalia, which is pretty rude to do in a library book, and I want to support authors, but it does also feel a bit consumerist. But I digress.

The big one I've been kind of putting off reading until now is "Climate Leviathan" by Joel Wainwright and Geoff Mann. I heard about it on the podcast "Against the Grain", and it seemed like something I needed to urgently read. Although it's fewer than 200 pages long, it felt like a "big book" though - so I've been putting off actually reading it until I was in the right headspace. I'm about halfway through now and so far no big insights, but it's refreshingly clear on what the priorities are. This is no time to entertain the arguments of people in deep denial.

I'm also halfway through the "Commons" edition of Logic Magazine. Subscribing to that in hard copy was a great decision. It's beautifully produced, and I'm so much more engaged with the articles reading them in hardcopy than I would be with a digital edition. I'm also appreciating the editorial decisions more because I can see more clearly how each edition fits together, and everything is just such high quality. It was from Logic that I had the reverse experience to Climate Leviathon, discovering a podcast from a print publication rather than the other way around. Margaret Killjoy's "anarchist prepper podcast" was referenced in an article about The Recompiler, and though I'm neither an Anarchist nor a Prepper, I was intrigued enough to listen to a few episodes. It's pretty interesting, and I'm just up to the bit in the most recent episode (on emergent strategy) where they are talking about murmurations, and how social movements can try to emulate them. I lap this stuff up. I laughed when I saw one of Margaret's blog headlines at The Recompiler: "What a boring week with no news" - in the week of the US Capitol insurrection/coup attempt.

My dot point above about not reading the news was kind of a lie, I read a fair bit. But I used to read it a lot more and with more focus. Today I saw an article about News Limited ceasing delivery of hardcopy newspapers to Western Queensland, due to decreased readership. The shipping rates are higher than the potential profit, basically. People in Mount Isa complained that "It's discrimination" but of course it's capitalism, discriminating is how it works. This kind of got me thinking again about news cycles though. A 28-day news cycle, for example, seems a lot more useful than a 24-hour news cycle. What is "news" anyway? I feel like I know a lot more about how the world works, who has power and how I should live by reading and listening to very "old news", and slower media. But we're social animals and dropping out and switching off in the middle of multiple planetary-scale crises seems like not a good solution.

Anyway ,that's today's thoughts.

=> Logic Magazine | The Recompiler | Live like the world is dying (Margart Killjoy podcast) | "News Corp Australia to stop distributing newspapers to much of regional Queensland"