The News: A User’s Manual

The news is the water we swim in — the continuous stream of information about politics, business, crime, disaster, and celebrity that has become the background radiation of contemporary life. But what does the news actually do to us? What picture of the world does it construct, and what does that picture leave out? Alain de Botton’s The News: A User’s Manual is an attempt to read the news as seriously and as critically as we would read a work of philosophy or literature — to understand what it tells us, what it conceals, and what a better relationship with it might look like.

Chapter by chapter, de Botton analyses the major categories of news — political, world, economic, celebrity, disaster, entertainment — asking what each category reveals about our collective psychology and what it would mean to be genuinely informed rather than merely stimulated.

The essential companion for the age of information overload — thoughtful, funny, and genuinely useful. Published by Penguin.