Excerpts from The News, Alain de Botton:
- "Properly told, stories are able to operate on two levels. On the surface, they deal with particulars involving a range of facts related to a given time and place, a local culture and a social group - and it is these specifics that tend to bore us whenever they lie outside our own experience. But then, a layer beneath the particulars, the universals are hidden: the psychological, social and political themes that transcend the stories' temporal and geographical settings and are founded on unvarying fundamentals of human nature."
- "The problem is that the reporting methodologies developed by the modern news media - which privilege factually accurate, technologically speedy, impersonal, crisis-focused coverage to the near exclusion of any other kind - have by error led to a sort of globalized provincialism, whereby we at once know a good deal and don't care very much."
- "This, Auden wants to tell us, is what artists do: they notice stuff; the small and unobtrusive stuff that other people - ploughmen and shepherds, you and me, and journalists in a hurry - miss and yet that is essential to halting our usual indifference and callousness."
- "A contented resignation to a modest condition has come to seem not only a grave error, but possibly a sign of mental illness."
- "This is part of the reason we must keep checking the news in the first place: we might at any moment be informed of some extraordinary development that will fundamentally alter reality."
- "The news hub has the institutional amnesia of a hospital's accident and emergency department: nightly the bloodstains are wiped away and the memories of the dead erased."
- "But we will have nothing substantial to offer anyone else so long as we have not first mastered the art of being patient midwives to our own thoughts."
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