An altar to reading<\/h2>\n
To save time, though, others have constructed what might charitably<\/span> be called an altar to literacy<\/span> in one corner of the Spotlight kitchen. The books that have accumulated<\/span> there are not someone’s old friends. They are more like old, mangy<\/span> dogs that their owners no longer wish to keep and that the rest of us can’t bear to see put to sleep.<\/p>\n The most recent addition to this, um, compost heap<\/span> was a small pile<\/span> of Time<\/i> and Newsweek<\/i> magazines from earlier this year. Although it is the job of these magazines to be up to date, it is shocking to see just how quickly they go out<\/i> of date. Their topics included “The Remarkable Rise of Rick Santorum” (remember him?<\/a>), Vladimir Putin’s allegedly<\/span> tenuous<\/span> grip on power (disproven by his re-election a couple of weeks later), and the life and death of singer and drug addict<\/span> Whitney Houston. One headline asked: “What Would Steve [Jobs]<\/a> Do?” while another simply read: “Arab Spring Not Over Yet”.<\/p>\n I did read these magazines when they came out, and I’m sure they made me better informed in that week or that month. But five months later, am I still better informed, or is my head full of useless, outdated information?<\/p>\n As the leading<\/span> print sources of international news in the United States, Time<\/i> and Newsweek<\/i> are at one end of the scale. At the other end are the daily newspapers.<\/p>\n With shrinking circulations<\/span> caused by more and more free news content, American newspapers are struggling to remain viable<\/span>. The once-venerable<\/span> Seattle Post-Intelligencer<\/i> \u2014 now reduced to an online-only version<\/a> \u2014 has stayed above water by focusing on local stories and practical information, such as TV and movie schedules. Look at the headlines<\/span>, though, and you’ll find mainly photos of celebrities<\/a> and a roster<\/span> of who was killed the day before. Is it news? I suppose. Is it relevant? Not to me.<\/p>\n Television news, too, has become monotonous. Shrinking budgets have left news teams with no alternative but to cover the same stories again and again and to interview spokespersons<\/span> and other journalists instead of experts.<\/p>\n But where depth<\/span> is lacking, breadth<\/span> has appeared. All of us now have access<\/span> to many more news sources than we ever dreamed existed \u2014 and they are different. American TV news focuses on crime, disaster and missing white women<\/a>, while German TV news focuses on meetings of bureaucrats and the crisis in Lampukistan<\/a>.<\/p>\n With a variety of sources, you can piece together what’s going on and decide what’s important. Then, at some point, forget the details. There are only so many of them, or so many jokes about Germany’s unpopular foreign minister<\/a>, that are worth remembering.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Can you throw away books? Many of us can’t. Good books are like old friends. We appreciate the amount of time someone took to write these stories and set them on paper. We want to make sure our books are taken care of. If there’s no more room on our shelves (because we’ve made new friends), we go looking for … >><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_mi_skip_tracking":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_active":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_note":"","_exactmetrics_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[44],"tags":[13,63,33],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/fascinating-america.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/375"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/fascinating-america.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/fascinating-america.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/fascinating-america.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/fascinating-america.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=375"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"http:\/\/fascinating-america.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/375\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1636,"href":"http:\/\/fascinating-america.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/375\/revisions\/1636"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/fascinating-america.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=375"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/fascinating-america.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=375"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/fascinating-america.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=375"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}![\"Guido](\"http:\/\/fascinating-america.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/westerwelle_buch.jpg\" "\\"Guido")
<\/a>The classic for many months running<\/span> was a book called Endlich \u00fcber vierzig!<\/i>, about all the things women can look forward to when they’re finally past the age of 40. The “featured title” of the past year or so has been Guido Westerwelle’s<\/a> \u201cpolitische Biografie<\/i>\u201d, the title of which someone has crossed out and replaced with \u201cein Witzbuch<\/i>\u201d.<\/p>\nWhat makes it news?<\/h2>\n