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sterlingisreading's review
informative
reflective
medium-paced
4.5
There were some really great pieces in here. I’d read a few of them when they were initially published last year, but most of them completely missed me somehow. I love starting the day with a cup of coffee and a collection like this. I’ve gone so cold on reading “the news” on my phone and the recent drop-off in the way we value quality reporting makes me sad. I don’t even care if the stories are current. I really just love the form. I have collections like this that go back decades and they’re still fantastic. We still read Didion and Hunter S. Thompson for a reason: good journalism is timeless.
Just to be clear, the drop-off I’m talking about is not about the writers themselves, who are struggling to get by and are somehow still able to churn out phenomenal stories. I mean the millionaire media owners gutting newsrooms, invoking the future of AI (as if artificial intelligence will have anything to aggregate and mimic once the actual reporters doing the hands-on work are gone), papers and magazines folding left and right, and the overall decline in our country’s investment in real journalism. I hate the clickbait. I loathe the doom scroll. My google chrome “news” page is a clusterfuck of utter apocalyptic randomness and celebrity trash. I’m lucky to be in a position where I can spend a little of my money on supporting outlets that I care about and are doing good work.
Just to be clear, the drop-off I’m talking about is not about the writers themselves, who are struggling to get by and are somehow still able to churn out phenomenal stories. I mean the millionaire media owners gutting newsrooms, invoking the future of AI (as if artificial intelligence will have anything to aggregate and mimic once the actual reporters doing the hands-on work are gone), papers and magazines folding left and right, and the overall decline in our country’s investment in real journalism. I hate the clickbait. I loathe the doom scroll. My google chrome “news” page is a clusterfuck of utter apocalyptic randomness and celebrity trash. I’m lucky to be in a position where I can spend a little of my money on supporting outlets that I care about and are doing good work.
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