The News: A User's Manual, Alain de Botton, c. 2014.

Today: The News: A User's Manual, Alain de Botton, c. 2014.

A gift from our younger daughter many years ago.

We are addicted to the news, and governed by the news cycle:

• 0400: check the overnight headlines on Fox News, x
• 0600: check Oilprice; occasionally check pre-market
• 0800: ten to thirty minutes of Jim Cramer
• 1700: ten minutes, check the weather on network television

From Botton, p. 11:

Societies become modern, the philosopher Hegel suggested, when news replaces religion as our central source of guidance and our touchstone of authority. In the developed economies, the news now occupies a position of power at least equal to that formerly enjoyed by the faiths. 

Dispatches track the canonical hours with uncanny precision: matins have been transubstantiated into the breakfast bulletin, vespers into the evening report.  

 It is clear, the author needs to write a sequel: Agentic AI: The New Writers.

Gustave Flaubert:

The noblest promise of the news is that it will be able to alleviate ignorance, overcome prejudice and raise the intelligence of individuals and nations.

But from some quarters it has intermittently been accused of a contrary capacity, that of making us completely stupid. One of the most uncompromising versions of this charge was levelled in the mid-nineteenth century by Gustave Flaubert. Flaubert belonged to a generation that had experienced the rise of mass-circulation newspapers at first hand. 

Flaubert was appalled by what, in his estimation, these newspapers were doing to the intelligence and curiosity of his countrymen. 

Quick: what novel was Flaubert best known for? 

And then there's John Hanning Speke (1827 - 1864). Remember him? I didn't think so. 

Before our time, the only way to get to Uganda was to travel for two months by sea around the perilous Cape of Good Hope bound for Dar es Salaam, then inland for another few months through bush and desert, with every likelihood that one would never return. 

In 1859, on the eve of the US Civil War, John Hanning Speke, the first European ever to enter Uganda and the man who gave Lake Inyansha its new name, Lake Victoria, made it back to Britain and gave a lecture on his travels to an almost hysterical 800-strong crowd in the Royal Geographical Society in Kensington.  

And that's just a start.