Notes on a Weird Week
Since I joined The Atlantic as a staff writer, I haven’t sent out a legitimate Galaxy Brain newsletter in a while (most have been reposts of articles I’ve published). So I figured I’d do a little weekend freewriting on some stuff that’s been tickling my brain lately.
Newspapers, They’re Good
I spent last week mostly off the grid on a trip and made an unusual, concerted effort to stay away from the news. Because of this, I learned about the Silicon Valley Bank collapse the old-fashioned way: While checking out of my hotel, I glimpsed a discarded copy of Monday’s Wall Street Journal and caught the heavily bolded headline. Learning about things from a newspaper is an exceedingly normal thing that normal people do all the time. But as an internet-poisoned millennial who works in media, I rarely come across a dead-tree copy of the news and learn something stunning from the headlines. I’m not breaking any new ground here with this observation, but I think the newspaper was really onto something, you guys.
Emerging from my news hibernation like a drowsy, uninformed bear, I had an experience straight out of the pre-smartphone era: As far as user experiences go, it was a great one. Turns
