How to stay sane *AND* informed

“People get drunk on the idea of needing to know every little thing that happened right now: just pull to refresh!” he said. “But I think the single best way to hedge against burning out on the news is to have a more dedicated reading experience.

“We really need to find places to stop and take a break on the internet.”

Kiser’s background is in news products — he previously worked as a product manager for Spin , Forbes and Business Insider — and he’s fascinated by how the way information is packaged shapes our experience of it. He’s been particularly influenced by the writer and photographer Craig Mod, who in a 2012 essay coined the concept of “edges”: the ways ph... See more

Kiser’s big recommendation, to me and other deluged readers: Reintroduce the edges to your media diet . Seek out content with a clear beginning and end, something you can pick up and put down at will. An NPR podcast has edges, for instance; an NPR livestream doesn’t. Kiser’s newsletter has edges, too, though the homepages he tabs through each morni... See more

some self-limiting format, like a newsletter or print edition.

“The paralysis is the point”

If you struggle to stay informed without losing your mind, you’re far from alone. In 2022, the American Psychological Association warned that growing numbers of Americans were suffering from what one therapist termed “media saturation overload” — a specialized sort of stress that results from encountering a steady, ceas... See more