Stop the Presses

Or at least stop me from reading them all day long.

A few weeks ago, I waxed lyrical here about my nostalgia for the 1990s. Glossy magazines! Dial-up modems! Media that wasn’t social! Since then, I’ve specifically been thinking about how much more written information I now consume on a daily basis than I ever did before the birth of the smartphone. I often wonder whether it’s healthy or desirable to read article after article all day long. But I can’t seem to stop.

So many books, so little time… (Maine, 2021)

Before the pandemic, I always used to carry a paperback book in my bag to read on the subway. But the extra vigilance required during the first two years of COVID, when the subway was often empty, sometimes sketchy, and occasionally dangerous, caused me to leave my reading habit behind in favor of keeping my eyes on my surroundings. Then I noticed how much lighter my handbag was without the weight of a book, and how abundant with reading material my phone could be, and my transit paperback habit fell by the wayside.

One of the world’s coolest libraries. (Dublin, 2017)

I’ve been picking up that habit again lately, mostly on long subway rides (hello, Brooklyn) or train trips (oy, Amtrak). But as a naturally curious person, the temptation posed by the various ‘content’ apps on my phone is hard to resist. Between the New York Times, the Atlantic, the New Yorker, and Substack, there are literally thousands of articles I could read at any given time, most of which are brilliantly written and/or fascinating and/or entertaining. Yet this overabundance of reading material often yields one of two responses: decision fatigue (continually scrolling to figure out what I should read next without ever making a choice) or article-hopping (reading a few paragraphs, getting bored, and moving on to another piece). And just in the past few days, I’ve noticed my brain responding in another way:

Do I really need to know this?

A giant book tree: what a dream. (London, 2023)

Do I need to know that there’s a man who is so anti-vaccination he actually wants his kids to get polio? That an evil billionaire built a power plant in rural Mississippi whose constant noise is driving people nuts? That college professors and high school teachers are assigning fewer books because their students refuse to read them?

Am I becoming part of the problem by reading bits of articles on the subway instead of books??

Tolkien in italiano. (Rome, 2024)

To be fair, I do still read books. A lot of them. I do it for a living and I do it for joy. But unless a book is so absorbing I positively sink into the prose, I’ve noticed I have a harder time focusing than I once did. Between chapters, my phone beckons. The news apps with their loud headlines and snappy op-eds clamor to be opened. Substack with its charming essays and weekly roundups lures me in. Instagram stories plead for me to read the articles they quote.

I want to learn, to understand, to know things. The internet has a bottomless menu to feed that appetite. But my brain simply cannot hold it all. Sometimes on the subway I reach for my phone and open an app and start reading and then suddenly realize I’ve done all of that reflexively, without noticing. My paperback habit has turned into a news app addiction.

Another library full of infinite possibility. (Amsterdam, 2024)

I have to remind myself that the Atlantic is a monthly, the New Yorker a weekly, the New York Times a daily. None of them were meant to be all-day-every-day. In fact, our nervous systems weren’t designed to take in this much information all at once. Is it any wonder that anxiety and depression rates are through the roof? It’s not that there’s more to be anxious and depressed about—it’s that now we know how much there is. It’s force-fed to us every time we pick up our phones.

Part of my problem is that I feel a moral imperative to stay informed. Wouldn’t it be bad to put my head in the sand and focus only on my own little life? Don’t I have an obligation to know what’s happening in the world? To be aware of injustice so I can resist it? To remain intellectually engaged and civically responsible?

Organized chaos: a book-lover’s paradise. (Paris, 2025)

I’d like to end with a pithy solution, or at least a plan of action. Less screen time! More page time! The return of the glossy magazine! (Sadly, all my favorites are now out of print.) But I don’t have an answer to the question of how to stay sufficiently informed while also staying sane. For now, I’m simply putting a new paperback into my bag to crack open on the subway this weekend.

Happy reading.

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