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Following the impeachment

Following this impeachment process from the outside is like a microcosm of living in the Trump administration: a constant barrage of information, none of which I can meaningfully act on, but which I feel compelled to absorb and try to process.

So far, I’ve found two daily newsletters to help digest the news, each reassuring in its own way.

The New York Times’s Impeachment Briefing

The voice of this newsletter is that of the Times itself: an attempt at an authoritative, neutral perspective1. Curated by Noah Weiland (of the Times’s Washington bureau), its basic format is a few bullet points of “What Happened Today”, one or two brief interviews with a Times reporter or editor, and a few bullet points of related stories or followups. Links to Times articles.

The lawmakers said they were protesting the private nature of the proceedings, which have been closed to the public but open to members of both parties who sit on the three committees conducting the inquiry.

The New York Times’s Impeachment Briefing

Impeachment.fyi

This newsletter is more irreverent and has a distinct (though not extreme) point of view. Dan Sinker writes with a bit more verve, but also with a basic format: what happened yesterday, what happened today, and what’s expected tomorrow. Links to articles from major news sources (New York Times, Washington Post, Politico [spit], etc.).

Chaos reigned at the impeachment proceedings today, as House Republicans stormed the secure room House investigative committees were using for depositions. No, really.

Impeachment.fyi


And, okay, how about a bonus newsletter. Just for you.

Nonzero

This is Robert Wright’s2 successor to his Mindful Resistance newsletter. It’s weekly, and doesn’t try to follow the news per se, but rather to offer ways of framing and coping with the news and the world. It’s something of a counterbalance to the daily barrage, with a strong voice and perspective.

My speculations about the Times’s institutional psychology aside, there’s no doubt that a Times story saying Trump has delivered a victory to our enemies, like a Fox News story saying he has vanquished our enemies, will draw a bigger audience than a story saying the truth is more complicated than either of those narratives. Yet complicated is what the truth often is.

Nonzero


  1. I no longer subscribe (so to speak) to the theory that this is possible, by the way. ↩︎

  2. He also wrote (among other things) Why Buddhism is True, which I’ve started but put aside↩︎