Warren Ellis on the news —

Dunno about you, but for me this year quickly became The Year Of I’ve Had Enough. I turned off a bunch of news service notifications, unsubbed from a few news provisions entirely, and now I skim the papers on my phone over coffee in the morning and then check out of the news entirely until the evening, when I catch up with newsletters and read some longer articles.

…

Thing is, not only is the news all the bloody same, all about the same country and the same handful of main characters, and every news service reports all the incremental updates to the same bloody stories every sixty seconds: but that constant battering tide of zone-flooding shit compresses time and shrinks space to think. And I want this year to feel like a year and not three bloody weeks.

It’s not about “taking a break from the news,” which various newsletters have suggested is now A Thing. And, you know, if you live in certain places right now, taking a break from the news might feel a luxury at best and a wilful ignoring of alarm bells at worst. On a single evening last week I talked to three people setting plans to bug out of the US..

It’s more about putting the news in its damn place and creating more space to live in.