I Cancelled My Daily Newspaper Subscription

My Acer R11 Chromebook has been fixed and is due back to me today. Until then, I’m blogging on the Toshiba Chromebook II, which was my daily before *somebody spilled apple juice on the keyboard making the spacebarstick.

I cancelled my daily newspaper subscription this weekend. Since November I have been reading the Washington Post on my Kindle every day and experiencing a creeping malaise as a result.The news is mostly bad, sure, but that’s no problem; the Post’s writers are fantastic, and reading any one piece (like this one by Joel Achenback profiling a community in Ohio reeling from the opioid epidemic) is an enlightening and beneficial.

It’s more that my investment in better educating myself as a citizen by paying for daily, high quality, news reporting ( I also have digital subscriptions to the Wall Street Journal and the New York Times and a Kindle subscription to the Chicago Tribune) was not increasing satisfactory dividends. I expected daily paper reading to make me more fluent in the pressing issues of our day, like the Russian hack of our election and the fights for Aleppo and Mosul. It did that, I think. But it also made me write less, and I don’t like that.

I’ve felt this tension between intake and output repeatedly, enough that it now feels like a rule: the more I’m reading/watching/listening, the less I’m writing/connecting/creating.

I want to choose the back end of that equation every time.