Newspapers – Auxiliary Memory

Reading With a Purpose

by James Wallace Harris, 11/12/25

I used to keep up with the world by watching NBC Nightly News with Lester Holt, reading The New York Times on my iPhone, and bingeing YouTube videos. I felt well-informed. That was an illusion.

I then switched to reading The Atlantic, New York Magazine, The New Yorker, and Harper’s Magazine. I focused on the longer articles and developed the habit of reading one significant essay a day. That has taught me how superficial my previous methods were at informing me about what’s going on around the world. Television, the internet, and newspapers were giving me soundbites, while articles provide an education.

However, I still tend to forget this deeper knowledge just as quickly. I don’t like that. I feel like I learn something significant every day. What I’m learning feels heavy and philosophical. However, it drives me nuts that I forget everything so quickly. And I’m not talking about dementia. I think we all forget quickly. Just remember how hard it was to prepare for tests back in school.

I’ve watched dozens of YouTube videos about study methods, and they all show that if you don’t put information to use, it goes away. Use it or lose it. I’ve decided to start reading with a purpose.

At first, I thought I would just save the best articles and refer to them when I wanted to remember. That didn’t work. I quickly forget where I read something. Besides, that approach doesn’t apply any reinforcing methods.

I then thought about writing a blog post for each article. It turns out it takes about a day to do that. And I still forget. I needed something simpler.

I then found Recall AI.

It reads and analyzes whatever webpage you’re on. Providing something like this for today’s article by Vann R. Newkirk II, “What Climate Change Will Do to America by Mid-Century:”

Recall allows me to save this into a structure. But again, this is a lot of work and takes a lot of time. If I were writing an essay or book, this would be a great tool for gathering research.

Recall is also great for understanding what I read. Helpful with quick rereading.

This morning, I got a new idea to try. What if I’m trying to remember too much? What if I narrowed down what I wanted to remember to something specific?

Within today’s article, the author used the term “climate gentrification” referring to neighborhoods being bought up because they were safer from climate change, and thus displacing poor people. The article mentions Liberty City, a poor neighborhood in Miami, with a slightly higher elevation, bought up by developers moving away from low-lying beachfront development.

I think I can remember that concept, climate gentrification. What if I only worked on remembering specific concepts? This got me thinking. I could collect concepts. As my collection grew, I could develop a classification system. A taxonomy of problems that humanity faces. Maybe a Dewey Decimal system of things to know.

I use a note-taking system called Obsidian. It uses hyperlinks to connect your notes, creating relationships between ideas. I could create a vault for collecting concepts. Each time I come across a new concept, I’d enter it into Obsidian, along with a citation where I found it. That might not be too much work.

I picked several phrases I want to remember and study:

Climate gentrification
Heat islands
Climate dead zones
Insurance market collapse
Climate change acceleration
Economic no-go zones
Corporate takeover of public services
Climate change inequality
Histofuturism
Sacrifice zones
Corporate feudalism

Contemplating this list made me realize that remembering where I read about each concept will take too much work. I have a browser extension, Readwell Reader, that lets me save the content of a web page. I could save every article I want to remember into a folder and then use a program to search for the concept words I remember to find them.

I just did a web search on “climate gentrification” and found it’s already in wide use. I then searched for “corporate feudalism,” and found quite a bit on it too. This suggests I’m onto something. That instead of trying to remember specifically what I read and where, I focus on specific emerging concepts.

Searching on “histofuturism” brought up another article at The Atlantic that references Octavia Butler: “How Octavia Butler Told the Future.” Today’s article by Vann R. Newkirk II is also built around Octavia Butler. This complicates my plan. It makes me want to research the evolution of the concept, which could be very time-consuming.

The point of focusing on key concepts from my reading is to give my reading purpose that will help me remember. But there might be more to it. Concepts are being identified all the time. And they spread. They really don’t become useful until they enter the vernacular. Until a majority of people use a phrase like “climate gentrification,” the reality it points to isn’t visible.

That realization reinforces my hunch to focus on concepts rather than details in my reading. Maybe reading isn’t about specific facts, but about spreading concepts?

JWH

12 Reasons Why I’ve Stopped Watching the NBC Nightly News

by James Wallace Harris, 7/29/25

I developed the habit of watching the CBS Evening News with Walter Cronkite when JFK was assassinated in 1963. I had just turned thirteen. Cronkite had been the first to switch to a half-hour evening news format that September. I only had a vague sense of what the news was before that. I stuck with CBS until the 1980s, into the Dan Rather years. For some reason, my wife and I then switched to ABC for a couple of decades before finally switching to NBC. When Lester Holt retired, I decided to stop getting my news from television.

Since then, I’ve been thinking about what it means to follow the news. Does it require a daily habit of studying current affairs? Should we consider the news to be any reporting of significant events that have recently happened? How much information can be crammed into twenty-two minutes of television? Who decides what is worth knowing? Recently, NBC chose to make the deaths of two celebrities the lead story two nights running. Were the careers of Ozzy Osbourne and Hulk Hogan the most important information I needed to know on those two days? Think about it. Of all these events happening around the world on those two days, were their deaths the most essential for me to learn about?

Reason 1

I’m not picking on NBC. All the broadcast networks and the cable news networks decided what their audiences want to watch based on ratings. It’s not that Ozzy and Hulk’s deaths are more newsworthy than famine in Gaza, but NBC knows its audience is tired of hearing about starving Palestinians, and more people would watch their show if it opened with Osbourne and Hogan.

Decision 1: I need to decide what’s newsworthy.

Reason 2

Is twenty-two minutes enough time to learn about the critical world events that happened in the last twenty-four hours? Just how much time should I devote to being well-informed? If it is as little as twenty-two minutes, then television is the wrong medium. Reading just the headings of all the news stories from a quality newspaper app on my phone serves me far better.

Television news spends most of its time on visual news. Often, NBC repeats exciting film clips several times. That’s not an efficient use of time. Airplane crashes and flooding rivers grab our attention, but is it really news we need?

Decision 2: I need to decide how much time I want to spend on the news. Additionally, I need to decide on the best medium that maximizes that time.

Reason 3

Too much of television news is taken up by reporters and anchors. Often, reporters take more time asking a question than the time given to the eyewitness’s reply. I’m not interested in reporters or anchors.

Decision 3: I need to look for news sources where the journalist is in the background. That excludes television and most podcasts. Generally, good print reporting only includes the reporter’s byline.

Reason 4

Television news offers low-quality information. A major article in The Atlantic might have taken months to research and write. Such articles are information-dense. TV news is written and edited quickly. There’s not much time for fact gathering or checking. It’s often based on eye-witnesses who mainly add emotional impact rather than inform. Television news relies on soundbites, which are mostly opinions. Experts interviewed on TV news are often selected by convenience rather than their authority.

There have been over 22,500 days since I started watching nightly news programs on TV. There is an incredible sameness to the kind of content TV news presents. I should have abandoned it long ago, but it gave the illusion I was being informed, and it was convenient.

Decision 4: Pick another medium for consuming news.

Reason 5

Television news is narrow in scope. It focuses on catastrophes, tragedies, and political conflict. Over a lifetime of seeing thousands of news reports on wildfires, they all look and feel the same. That’s also true for wars, airplane crashes, riots, elections, famines, hurricanes, floods, and tornadoes. Television news mainly focuses on the types of stories we’ve seen repeated throughout our lives.

Television makes it seem like there is nothing new under the sun. I’ve learned from reading quality magazine articles and newspaper journalism that that old bit of wisdom is completely untrue. Magazine and newspaper articles constantly amaze me with news that surprises me because it’s about people, places, concepts, ideas, and events I’ve never heard of before.

Decision 5: Find more news sources that teach me about reality, inspire my curiosity, and better inform.

Reason 6

TV news is seldom memorable. If John F. Kennedy’s assassination was only reported once on the CBS Evening News on November 22, 1963, I doubt I would even remember the event. I remember it because of constant coverage over several days, including all the documentaries, movies, and books that have been produced since that day. I remember Project Mercury, Gemini, and Apollo missions because of the around-the-clock television coverage, as well as the documentaries, movies, and books that have been produced since those events. That’s why I don’t remember all the space missions since. They didn’t get such coverage.

A thirty-second spot on the nightly news, or even a big event stretched to four minutes of reporting, just isn’t remembered. I don’t need to waste time on ephemeral news stories. I’ve discovered it’s far better to spend thirty minutes on one topic than two minutes on fifteen topics.

Decision 6: Focus on one news topic for most of my daily time spent on the news. Then quickly go over the headlines.

Reason 7

Television news isn’t educational because it focuses on the same topics. Shouldn’t news enlighten us about reality? Shouldn’t we always expand our awareness of what’s going on in the world?

How can short videos and soundbites be truly informative? I want news that adds to my personal growth. News that adds wisdom, not ephemeral data.

Decision 7: Make lists of what I want to learn about and then find news reports that bring me up to date on those topics.

Reason 8

Television news is biased. Knowing the truth is impossible. Content produced for money-making ratings or to promote a political agenda will always be questionable. I even suspect the kind of long-form journalism that goes out of its way to appear unbiased. I expect all writing to have some bias. It’s my job to spot it.

Decision 8: Start analyzing prose for bias. Think about word choices in each sentence. Always wonder if information is left out.

Reason 9

Real knowledge is statistical. Science is our only cognitive tool that consistently explains reality. News is too close to word-of-mouth. We need news to be closer to peer-reviewed science journals. That’s probably impossible, but we need to think about it. Ground News attempts to apply statistics to the news by comparing political bias and the amount of coverage a story receives. Can’t we find other statistical methods to measure the news?

Decision: Don’t trust any news unless it comes from multiple sources.

Reason 10

Replying on a single network for news is dangerous.

Decision 10: Seek out different gatekeepers. Every group or organization has an agenda. Learn what that agenda is before interpreting what they are saying.

I’ve discovered that reading/listening to one well-reported article a day is much more informative and educational than a package of video clips and soundbites. I’ve been achieving this with Apple News+, which offers content from over 400 magazines and newspapers. Each morning, I listen to a single long-form article from magazines such as The Atlantic, New York Magazine, The New Yorker, and New Scientist, while I do my physical therapy and morning walk.

Reason 11

Television news can be misleading. It’s not as dangerous as AI-generated fake news on YouTube, but television news is easily corrupted by money, marketing, and politics.

Decision 11: Always consider the source of the news. I need to decide which news sources I will trust.

Reason 12

Most television news gives the United States’ perspective of world events.

Decision 12: Find news sources from around the world.

Conclusion

This is just the beginning of changing a lifelong habit of watching the nightly news on television. I should have made these changes long ago. We all get into ruts that are hard to escape. I believe getting old is making me regret not trying other approaches to understanding reality. However, all the political turmoil since 2016 is making me question everything I know. Human-created and computer-created fake news is disturbing. In recent years, I’ve decided that all of us suffer from multiple delusions.

You shouldn’t ask yourself if you’re delusional, but how delusional. Anyone who feels they know the truth is crazy. We can only guess what might be true by using statistics. Television has always depended on the false assumption that seeing is believing. I have doubts about believing anything.

Television, politics, artificial intelligence, and the Internet have corrupted our perception of reality. I want to rethink everything. I’m starting with my old habit of watching the nightly news.

JWH

Pop Culture vs. Social Media

by James Wallace Harris, 1/1/25

I began pondering the differences between generations that grew up with pop culture versus generations that grew up with social media when playing Trivia Pursuit. I then noticed the same differences while watching Jeopardy. Pop culture is about what most people know, while social media is about knowing the details of subcultures.

I’m often surprised by how much young contestants on Jeopardy know about the 1960s and older pop culture, but old and young players are very selective in their knowledge of 21st-century trivia. For years, I thought people my age just couldn’t keep up with popular music after 1990 because of changing mental conditions. But now I wonder if it’s because popular music shattered into countless genres appealing to various subcultures. In other words, there became too many art forms to remember their trivia.

I was born in 1951 and my personality was shaped by the pop culture of the 1950s and 1960s. Pop culture was primarily television, AM radio, movies, books, newspapers, magazines, and comics. People watched the same three television networks, CBS, NBC, and ABC. They often saw the same hit films and listened to the same Top 40 songs. They usually read a single daily paper. Some people read books, usually, paperbacks bought off twirling racks which sold in the hundreds of thousands, if not millions. The most common magazines seen in people’s homes were National Geographic, Reader’s Digest, Saturday Evening Post, Life, and Time.

The by-product of that limited array of pop culture was people within a generation shared a common awareness of what each other liked. You might not watch Leave It to Beaver or Perry Mason, but you knew what those shows were about.

People growing up since the Internet, especially since the explosion of social media, didn’t have popular culture, they had social media that focused on subcultures. Social media might be all about sharing, but people’s shared interests have broken down into thousands of special interests. People on the internet crave contact with others who share their interests, but no one group, not even Swifties, makes up a popular culture.

There are songs on Spotify with billions of plays that are completely unknown to the average American. The Academy Awards now nominate ten pictures for the Best Picture category, but most Americans have seldom seen them before they were announced. Hundreds of scripted TV shows are produced yearly yet it’s quite easy for all your friends and family to have a different favorite. My wife and I struggle to find shows we’re willing to watch together.

Mass media has broken down into specialized media devoted to subcultures.

Pop culture was a product of mass media. It inspired group identity through common knowledge. I’m not sure it exists anymore.

Social media is a byproduct of individuals trying to find others sharing similar interests. It isolates people into smaller groups. It promotes individual interests that limit people’s ability to overlap with other people’s interests. It makes people specialize. You become obsessed with one subculture.

I wonder if the MAGA movement is unconsciously countering that trend. They think they want to return to the past, but what they want is to be part of a large group. Their delusion is believing that if everyone looked alike and thought alike, it would create a happier society. I’m not sure that’s the case. The 1950s were not Happy Days, and the 1960s wasn’t The Age of Aquarius.

I’m not sure that happiness comes from the size of the group you join. Some happiness does come from interacting with others and sharing a common interest. I also think people might be happier knowing less about subcultures, and more about pop culture. But that’s just a theory.

Could people withdraw some from the internet to become more physically social? I don’t think we can give up on the internet, but do we need to use it as much as we do?

I liked it when my friends watched the same TV shows or movies. I also loved that my friends knew about the same albums, and would play them together, or go to the same concerts. Pop culture was popular culture. Will we ever see that again? And is that a delusion on my part. Am I only remembering a more social time from youth that naturally disappears after we marry?

JWH

Reading History Books About Events I Originally Watched on Television

by James Wallace Harris, 12/8/24

The 1960 U.S. presidential election is the first one I remember, but just barely. I was eight years old. My father was for Nixon and my mother for Kennedy. I decided I liked Kennedy because he was younger, more dynamic and had a good-looking wife. Even at eight, good looking women were often a deciding factor. I remember getting in a fight in the school playground because I was for Kennedy and the other kid was for Nixon. Neither of us got to decide the issue because a teacher pulled us apart.

During the Kennedy years I didn’t watch TV news. I would sometimes stay home from school to watch the Mercury space launches. Back then the TV news departments of each network would take over all broadcasting. In the first half of the 1960s, the space program was about the only real-world activity I paid any attention to.

I did pay some attention during the Cuban Missile Crisis in 1962, mainly because I lived on Homestead Air Force Base, and everyone talked about it constantly. I remember having duck and cover drills at Homestead Air Force Base Elementary, but I was disappointed when there were no real A-bombs dropped. (I was very immature for my age.)

I didn’t become a news watcher until Kennedy’s death. I remember that weekend, my family watched the news constantly, and the following week too. That’s when I started following Walter Cronkite. I turned twelve three days after Kennedy was shot.

The news also became exciting in February of 1964 when The Beatles came to America. It was during 1965 that older boys I knew began worrying about being drafted, and I started paying attention to news about Vietnam.

The CBS Evening News was my main source of information about life beyond my own little world during the 1960s. I sometimes got to see The Today Show on NBC because my mother watched it while making breakfast. I liked that show because I found Barbara Walters hot. (Okay, I’ve already said I was a weird kid.) Sometimes I would watch news specials or documentaries. While in the ninth grade (1965-66) I had a civics course. But for the most part I just wasn’t that aware of what was going on in the world except for Top 40 AM music.

I don’t remember reading the paper, The Miami Herald, until 1968. I did start to read magazines in 1965, but that was haphazard. People would give my parents copies of Life, Time, Newsweek, Look, Saturday Evening Post, and National Geographic from time to time, and I found them fascinating. On my own, after 1965, I would buy Popular Science, Popular Mechanics, and MAD Magazine. During twelfth grade (1968-69) my English teacher got me interested in literary fiction, and I subscribed to Saturday Review with money I made from working in a grocery store. I really didn’t understand it though. In late 1968 or early 1969, I got hooked on Rolling Stone magazine and sometimes bought Creem when it started publishing.

A whole lot of what I knew about the counterculture came from Life Magazine.

If you think about it one way, television and magazines offered a fairly diverse view on what was happening in the world, but squinted at it another way, it was a rather limited view.

In December 2024, I’ve been reading three books about the 1960s that explore events I encountered in two minute stories on TV, or read about in a few pages in a magazine when they first happened. Some of those short snippets of current events made huge impressions on me as a kid. They shaped who I thought I was. The history books makes me realize I was mostly uninformed.

The reality of the 1960s is I was a kid going to school every day except for long summer vacations. I started 1960 in New Jersey but moved to Mississippi then to Florida then to South Carolina back to Florida, then Mississippi again, and back to Florida. I went to thirteen different schools during the 1960s. The only newsworthy event I saw live was the launch of Apollo 8. I had a chance to see Kennedy in 1962 when he came to Homestead Air Force Base. They let us out of school to see him, but me and my friends went fishing instead. My sister was at Dinner Key Auditorium when Jim Morrison flashed the crowd. I got to meet an astronaut in 1968, but I’ve forgotten which one. And this is hardly newsworthy. I got to see Cream play during their farewell tour in 1968. Oh, and I attended one SDS rally.

In other words, I experienced the legendary Sixties mostly via AM radio, television, and magazines. I did have long hair sometimes, and I sometimes messed around with drugs, but I was hardly a hippie or a radical. I did get into the counterculture more in the 1970s, but that’s another story.

The point of this long-winded essay is I’m now reading history books about years I lived through. I can contrast my memories to behind the scenes accounts of things I got from soundbites. That’s quite enlightening.

We live with the illusion that we think we understand what is real and true. We delude ourselves that we make decisions on relevant information. But we don’t. If I could have read the history books about the sixties I’m reading in old age when I was young, I could have gotten closer to seeing reality.

Timothy Leary and Aldous Huxley, two heroes of my youth, claimed that LSD opened the doors of perception, and that might be true on a nonverbal level, but a deep reading of history books is far greater at revealing reality that we can comprehend on a verbal level.

Lately, I’ve been reading that reading is going out of fashion with young people. That’s a shame. Even back when I was a teen, and only got superficial understandings about the events around me from superficial news sources, it did make me more aware.

The three books above are filling in details on things happening around me as I was growing up. I’m reminded of Bob Dylan’s “Ballad of the Thin Man.”

I realize I’ve been Mr. Jones my whole life, and I’m still trying to figure out what happened.

JWH

If Ignorance is Bliss, is Knowing Suffering?

by James Wallace Harris, 6/27/24

This essay is about how keeping up with current events is hard on our mental health. Is there a point in becoming informed that turns self-destructive? Happiness seems to be a balance between knowing and not knowing, between learning and ignoring.

I’ve always been amazed by the amount of fiction we consume in our lives — the books, movies, television shows, plays, video games, role playing, comics, fantasizing, bullshitting, and so on. Is fiction our way of regulating our awareness of reality?

I’m trying to decide in this essay just how much news I should consume. I believe I have three basic choices:

Ignorance really is bliss.
Learn enough to maximize my own survival.
Learn everything I can to answer why and maybe know what can be changed.

I also consider the first three lines of the Serenity Prayer practical advice:

God grant me the Serenity to accept the things I cannot change,
Courage to change the things I can, and
Wisdom to know the difference.

Mental health depends on knowing what can be changed and what cannot. I believe the old saying, “ignorance is bliss” is merely advising people not to try to change things. Eastern religion and philosophy are all about acceptance, and that might be one path to happiness, or at least contentment. Western religion and philosophy have always been about control, which often leads to frustration and unhappiness. However, Western religion and politics have always been delusional because they don’t know enough to wisely make changes. Too many people think they know, but don’t. And too many people pursuing ignorance follow the people who don’t know. In other words, even if you learn everything you probably won’t be able to do anything.

For most of my life I hoped humanity would evolve into a global humanistic society that was ecologically sustainable, maximizing freedom, and minimizing inequality. That’s obviously not going to happen. Instead, we’re returning to nationalism, xenophobia, and fascism. The growing consensus advocates: get all you can, protect what you have, and let the losers lose. Even Christians have become Darwinians.

The main message in the movies and television shows we consume is the good life is eating, screwing, buying, and travel. But hasn’t that made us the most invasive and destructive species on the planet?

I believe the fiction we consume, and the fantasies we chase, is our way of self-medicating a deep depression caused by seeing too much of reality. If I read or watch too many news programs, documentaries, or nonfiction books about what’s happening around the world I get bummed out and need to retreat. Is that the best thing to do? Or the only thing to do?

How much of learning about reality is educational, soul strengthening, and enlightening? Billions of people are suffering. How important is it to know that the majority of people on this planet spend a good deal of their lives in misery?

If you only watch NBC Nightly News, Fox News, MSNBC, or CNN, you’ll only end up worrying about problems in the United States. And that’s enough to depress most people. But if you take in news from around the world, it can deeply threaten your mental health.

I watch a lot of news from all over, and I’m convinced that our civilization is in decline. The number of failed nations grows every year. The number of weather catastrophes increases every year. Wars and famines are increasing. Life expectancies are declining. Economies are breaking down, and people are dying, becoming homeless or refugees, and suffering in ever-growing numbers. We’re lucky in the United States that we don’t suffer as much, but that’s why millions want to come here.

Decades ago, I stopped watching local news so I wouldn’t be depressed about crime. Even though I live in a high crime city, I seldom hear about it, and thus seldom worry. I could do the same thing with national and international news. That would be good for my mental wellbeing, but shouldn’t I do something?

Liberals believe society should alleviate suffering through laws. Conservatives want to solve the same problems by convincing everyone to pull themselves up by their bootstraps. The reality is liberals want to solve society’s problems by spending the conservative’s money, and the conservatives just want to ignore the problems and keep their money. And it seems the only problem politicians really want to solve is how to get reelected and feed their egos.

Civilization is coming undone. That’s all too obvious if you watch a lot of news and study local, state, federal, international, and world events. However, knowing, and even understanding the problems we face doesn’t empower us to solve them. We either solve them together, or not at all, and if you’re an ardent news watcher, you’ll know we’re living in an age where we don’t work together.

Here’s where I’d love to list and catalog all our problems and assess their chances of being solved. But that would take a book length bit of writing. I’m sure you see enough of the news to know about all the problems we face — or do you? Would knowing more help or hurt you?

I could construct a detailed taxonomy of all the problems we face. I could stop reading novels and watching television and study the heck out of current events. But other than finding enlightenment about why civilization is collapsing, are there any mental, spiritual, or psychological benefits to learning how and why we’re self-destructing?

The real question is: Can we do anything to stop our self-destruction if we all agreed to work together and knew the right solutions? Even if we banned all airplane travel, reduced car travel to a minimum, rebuilt the energy grid that maximized renewable energy, and we all became vegetarians, we’ve already put enough CO2 in the atmosphere to radically change the climate. We may have already destabilized the climate so it can’t be reversed.

And we don’t have to wait until the seas rise above New York and London before climate change will do us in. We’re about to see the collapse of the home insurance industry which will completely destabilize the economy around home ownership. Just that might bring about economic chaos.

I could go on. Aren’t we like cattle in a stockyard? Would knowing about the captive bolt pistol offer any personal benefit in our lives? Or is there a kind enlightenment to be achieved by figuring out how the system works?

JWH