Book suggestions for David:
Fiction
Kid Lawyer by John Grisham - he is still writing about lawyers but young adult fiction
Mr. Midshipman Hornblower by C. S. Forester. - thinking man’s hero in the age of sail
The Case of the Canterfell Codicil by P. J. Fitzsimmons - laugh-out-loud mystery
The Thursday Murder Club by Richard Osman - and another one
Non-Fiction
When Breath Becomes Air by Paul Kalanithi
Keep Sharp by Sanjay Gupta
“Remember, we have a choice not to be aware of every piece of negative news in the world at all times.” (Haemin Sunim and Charles La Shure, When Things Don’t Go Your Way)
I stopped watching the news about 25 years ago. I realized its focus on negatives affected my overall attitude and mood, and gave me a false, fearful view of the world.
When something important happens, I find out and can choose to learn more. But it’s my choice.
Where did this idea come from that as responsible citizens we have a duty to constantly feed ourselves a diet of negativity?
It’s an inevitable by-product of how most of the media is funded: advertising. That requires reader/viewer engagement, or at least attention. Editors have always known how to get that: “if it bleeds, it leads”. It’s human to be engaged with tales of woe, or worse, befalling our fellow humans and to scope out what might do us or our loved ones harm.
We do have more control and choice than we often think in how we engage with media, but all this stuff (24 hour news cycle, negative reporting etc) works because it understands very deeply what will capture attention and keep it.
I kind of agree. I stopped watching the news in the last decade and I don’t feel it’s made me a worse citizen in either country I call home. If something major happened (and of course it has over the years), I would hear about it one way or another. I get feeds and newsletters of news that’s important to me (e.g. scientific news) and am actively engaged in political issues that are important to me. But I’m also aware that I work in a politically active “arena” so I have colleagues who are tracking things and get a lot of information that way.
I don’t really feel watching the news actually makes you a better citizen, because it rarely goes into the depth that is needed to understand an issue. The same is true of most print news nowadays, although there are newspapers that are the exception to this. Reading the news in the olden days would’ve given you a good overview of political happenings in a country, a reader might spot how things might relate to each other, and it accompanied thinking time. Of course, it also took several hours, the news would’ve been significantly biased, and you got ink all over your fingers. It would also have been the only way you knew what was happening in your capital city, so was kind of essential if you moved in those sort of circles.
[There’s a whole separate point here that I don’t think I want to unpack right now, about how newspapers also helped solidify the concept of “your country” and “one nation”, with a unified narrative around what was happening. It worked in a central government’s favour to say being informed of the happenings of your capital city made you a good citizen. This has only really developed in the last 200 years or so. I think I’d argue that this dynamic isn’t so relevant now - newspapers aren’t the only narrative about what is happening in a country, we tend to recognise many different ways of being good citizens, and arguably not everyone wants to be a “good citizen” as defined by their central government anyway 
]
This article from The Conversation about how we need to teach students the skill of critical ignoring helped cement a lot of observations I’d made about how my colleagues assess and filter news and articles in my field. I can’t say I’m very good at practicing it, but I definitely agree that critical ignoring is an essential life skill these days. We cannot possibly read/watch everything that we come across.