"propaganda (by the seed)"

Friday Seven // 0004

// 1. Not weekend update. Hello, it's Friday. I missed you last week. Was out sick for two days and then gave up my newsletter time to book writing time. (Sorry, you don't get to read that for another year or so.)

// 2. I'm not sure how to read the news in a normal way because my job is the news. What might work for me might not work for anyone else, then, but since reading other people's news-reading habits has kept me a little more on the level this week, I wanted to get into it.

// 3. The whole concept of a "news diet" freaks me out, to be honest, probably because it could also lead to parasocial news consumption. No one needs a new relationship to manage with an ideal news reader in their head. "News diet" should have died with Google Reader died three presidents ago ("the good internet," its "pleasant lazy river of content" era). I miss del.icio.us a little more—a low-key way to follow what someone else was reading by reading what links they were saving, without much getting in the way. Either you used it like a real person, not a brand of a person, or it was useless to use.

// 4. OK but that said—between the problems of "too much to keep track of" and "jerks keep killing the good old ways to keep track of it," I do try to do better by my own habits. The guy who does the "What The Fuck Just Happened Today?" newsletter, itself meant as a way to remedy this problem, shared his method for reading the news and it's honestly upsetting how many tabs it involves! Don't do that to yourself. The advice he gives other people is, consume news with edges—a podcast, not a live stream; a magazine, not a website. I know from having abused the settings I set to discipline myself in Freedom, though, that the most news self-abusing among us can find ways to make reading a website last forever. "News with edges" only works if you respect said edge. (For me that usually means moving away from the internet entirely, but that works better with a stack of long unread NYRB/LRB/your-RB's of choice than what is happening now, or five minutes from now.) Buried in this thread (that showed up in the Today in Tabs about the "that funny feeling" coup that we are in) was a media consumption suggestion that felt more sensible: have a routine and stick to it.

// 5. For me, that's trying to corral certain kinds of reading into specific parts of my day. It's varied over the years, but one thing that has stuck: I don't read the news in bed before going to sleep, ever. (I get my "what the fuck is happening?" news from the AP app, which is pretty self-contained and doesn't do anything but deliver news.) But that's just news as a reader. I also have to deal with news as a writer. The news doesn't respect that distinction. So if I'm not actually at work, I save news stories to read later in my now-massive Notion database (you can one-click share to Notion from within social and news apps). Once I get into my work day, then I open up Notion and start looking over what's unread. And to be honest, I rarely get to read everything—but since it's saved there in a very easy-to-search way, I come back to stories for reference. (When things were slower, I was also more on top of tagging stories, so I could pull up everything on immigration or on policing.) It spares me that nagging, awful feeling of missing something. It lets me also turn off entire topics for later (should I save this story on CPAC? Sure. Do I need to read it now? Or when CPAC is over? Or next year when I forget if Stewart Rhodes was at CPAC this year?). I tried to setup an RSS reader again but already abandoned it. Bluesky is my homepage for better and worse. For the stories I've done since everything started to speed up a month ago, Bluesky has nearly replaced the role Twitter long played as a protest tracker. (Probably nothing to do with why someone might want to run that website into the ground. At least Google Reader got to die with some dignity.)

// 6. These rolling, everywhere, all the time protests—people in small and not so small groups—"Who broke Tom Homan's heart?" (One person in shorts.)—just haunting these assholes wherever they go, wherever they sell their junk? Some of the better news there is out there. At TNR I wrote about how unions have become incubators for hospital workers pushing back on EO's (and is that model portable to other institutions, like higher ed?); about ongoing protests from Stonewall to Tesla; and how reports of the failure of the "resistance" were unconvincing and very premature.

// 7. MUST CREDIT "FRIDAY SEVEN": Seeds for my first spring starting seedlings inside have started showing up in the mail. Among them: my first order to Edgewood Nursery (I got some Spotted Beebalm). Researching what the fuck to do with my garden almost perfectly drowns out the whirring part of my brain that waits for news to arrive. Who needs the news when there is no shortage of plant people with strong opinions (and maybe more of them have heard of FDR than some politics newsletter guys) and they come with better vibes, generally.^[1] Edgewood Nursery also has some cool merch and a podcast, called:

Thanks for reading. You are still here.