Ways to stay informed without feeling warmly overwhelmed

My father had a simple ritual. At 6am, he would read the New York Post and Daily Newscovertocover. At6pm, hetunedinto the evening news — an hour of straightforward reporting, not commentary. He formed his own opinions, andthenhe movedon. Thenews didn’t dominate company picnics or poker nights with theneighbours. A staunch Republican, he didn’t shun his Democratic relatives in Scranton, He stayed informed without being consumed. That balance feels almost quaint today.

- Kellie Walenciak, Tribune News Service

Instead of a daily digest, Americans now live inside a 24/7 outrage machine. We spend an average of two hours and 24 minutes on social media every day, check our phones [59 times a day and will collectively log 4 trillion hours online this year. Nearly half of us say we now watch more user-generated content than TV or streaming. Information is available and, quite frankly, unavoidable. The results are corrosive. Every story is framed as existential, and every disagreement is a loyalty test. Unlike my father's poker table, where the stakes were bragging rights and a few bucks, today’s debates play out before an invisible audience of strangers in all caps and fury. Inthe !970sand’8Os, Dad didn’thavetochoose between competing realities. Everyone argued from the same facts. Today, news is no longer a shared resource but a marketplace of outrage: 24-hour cable channels fighting for loyalty and algorithms on Facebook, X and TikTok feeding us headlines designed to reinforce what we already believe. It feels like information, but it’s really affirmation. And the more affirmation we consume, the less empathy we extend. That distortion has r