A third-hand quote from Alain de Botton:

One of the more embarrassing and self-indulgent challenges of our time is the task of relearning how to concentrate. The past decade has seen an unparalleled assault on our capacity to fix our minds steadily on anything. To sit still and think, without succumbing to an anxious reach for a machine, has become almost impossible.

The obsession with current events is relentless. We are made to feel that at any point, somewhere on the globe, something may occur to sweep away old certainties—something that, if we failed to learn about it instantaneously, could leave us wholly unable to comprehend ourselves or our fellows.

Upon reading that, I decided I'm going to take some time off from reading political blogs. I'm going to hop off the crisis-of-the-hour roller coaster and see what that does for me. Odds are good that three or four earth-shattering scandals will come and go in the next week or so - at least one of them based on something one blogger said to another. Hopefully I'll survive without knowing anything about them. Wish me luck.