How to Break Up With The News

Why I'm trying to change my relationship to politics—and why you should too.

There are few pieces I feel more strongly about than my recent Atlantic essay on why ignorance can (sometimes) be bliss. As I write in the opening paragraph:

For many Americans, these claims sound self-evidently true: Information is good; knowledge is power; awareness of social ills is the mark of the responsible citizen. But what if they aren’t correct?

If these things that we’ve taken for granted without a second thought turn out to be untrue (or at least not fully true), then presumably this would have major implications on not just our own lives but on the structure of American politics more broadly.