How To Read The News If You Want

25 Mar, 2025

Remember gob? They're back. In blog form.

You may have heard there is a federal election on in Canada so now seems a good time to offer tips for modern living, specifically with regard to how to follow the news.

My first bit of advice about following the news is: DON'T. Let me explain:

As of this writing, I live in a nominal democracy and if you are reading this you probably do to. I say "nominal" because we are asked to vote from time to time but The People don't actually have much say in government.

Some examples of this are pregnant people in the United States losing nation-wide access to safe and legal abortion, and citizens in all but one western country watching our money go to killing kids in Palestine. Yes, still. I feel confident if we, the dēmos, were actually running things, both of those situations would be different than they are. Anyway.

If you are a Canadian citizen aged 18 or older, you are being asked to vote soon. Meanwhile electoral democracy has stark limitations as outlined above. You can still do it if you want. I can really only bring myself to do it if I think of the most vulnerable people I know and think about how various flavours of government would treat them and try to give my nominal support accordingly. It helps me, your experience is your own.

In order to make that determination, I find it unfortunately helps to follow what's going on, knowing I take my mental health in my hands every time I attempt to do so. I think I have found a balance that works for me that might help others, so I will tell you about that now.

At the top I advised you against following the news, and I wasn't really joking. You can't do it all the time. You can try if you like, but it is a land of sadness and despair where I personally dwelt for many years, and I advise against it. Don't forget despair is a tool of your enemies. Stop that.

RSS

So the first thing I would recommend is getting an RSS feed reader on your phone. Almost all news websites, Substacks, YouTube channels and even subreddits have an RSS feed you can stick in there. The RSS feed works like a funnel that takes every post from the site and puts it in one place for you in chronological order. Remember when social media worked that way? You could go on Facebook or Twitter and just read the posts of people you follow, in order? It seems like something from another age.

I use Feedly for the newsiest news. Like, I have a bunch of CBC feeds in there, plus CTV and Global. The TV news sites are good because they're free and typically pretty balanced. I also have the Globe and Mail and Telegraph Journal in there. Most or all of their content is paywalled but I have One Weird Trick for that, and that is archive.is.

I picked these feeds because they're legacy news organizations employing actual journalists who went to school for the jobs they have and who are supposed to adhere to a code of professional ethics and are (again, nominally) interested in telling the truth about a person, situation or event. They don't always because they are human beings and are as fallible as any of us, but it seems to be the best we have.

I use Tapestry for longer form journalism and things I read “when I have time” or really, really feel like scrolling for a while. I have the feeds for my various Substack subscriptions, YouTube channels I like, plus a few subreddits for local gossip or hobbies and video games.

I follow actual news in there too. Which brings me to my next suggestion: find independent journalists, researchers and writers you like and support them. With money, if you can. With attention and shares if you can't. A lot of them are on Substack, which I hear has its issues as a platform, but it's where a lot of people are doing fine work.

Podcasts

And then there are the podcasts. I remember when Trump was elected in 2016 the New York Times launched The Daily, a new daily news podcast. It might have been the first of its kind. Regardless, it seemed glaringly evident that the one thing everyone needed more than anything in that moment was information. How could this have happened, everyone except Michael Moore wondered? We were so deeply confused, SNL saw fit to put Kate McKinnon dressed up as Hilary Clinton singing Leonard Cohen's "Hallelujah" as the cold open and it took a few weeks for anyone to notice how weird that was. No one knew what to do or what was real or anything. The scourge of celebrity deaths, and now this?

I remember wishing there were more options for daily podcasts besides the New York Times, and I especially wanted something Canadian. That was almost a decade ago and now there are approximately 7 billion daily news podcasts to choose from. I recommend subscribing to a few you like and listening to them as much as you want to. I have too many in my podcast app so, usually I read the topic and maybe the summary and I just skip it if I'm not feeling whatever it is that day. I literally say to myself, "I do not have room in my heart today to hear about [migrants at the US/Mexican border or some other undeniably important matter] because my tiny, dumb heart and mind are simply at capacity." You have to pick and choose which man-made horrors to comprehend, I have found.

This is its own problem and I don't know what to do about it. I do know it's possible to care about more than one thing (Palestine should be free, AND it's fucked up that the American military removed information of the Lakota code talkers from their websites, AND people setting Teslas on fire is objectively funny, AND, AND, AND) but I do not know if it is possible to care about Everything.

Social Media

The final thing is that social media is unfortunately the best means available of hearing about stories not being covered well or at all elsewhere. Like, the genocide in Gaza, as one glaring example. I would caution against getting your news from memes, but sometimes it’s apparently unavoidable. For example, yesterday I wasn’t online a lot and I didn’t hear about the United States accidentally leaking its plans for bombing Yemen to the editor in chief at The Atlantic until I decided to check in on Blusky and Instagram before bed. Other stories I learned about initially from social media include Canada's tech industry's call for our very own DOGE in response to being asked to pay slightly more taxes, a lot of people are actually very cool with what Luigi Mangione allegedly did, and the #TeslaTakedown movement. Again, setting Teslas on fire at the dealership is objectively funny. There are no Tesla dealerships near me but I urge everyone else to keep up the amazing work, it appears to be having an effect.

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Thanks for reading. I love you.