You can't follow a better writer than E.B. White. I have written about his piece "Irtnog" (1938) before.
https://fearfunandfiloz.blogspot.com/search?q=irtnog
Things have gotten much more chaotic than they were in 1938. Now, we not only have more magazines and still many, many newspapers, including those from outside the US, but we have online this and online that. Elwyn Brooks White, known as E.B. White, is the author of "Charlotte's Web" and 50 years of essays and columns. He wrote in 1938 about the oversupply of writing, but outlined efforts to provide tools that readers could use to keep up. There were digests and summaries of books. They were and are commercial successes, but they became too numerous, too. So, digests of digests were introduced. Keep in mind, we are back in the days when European, Asian, African, South American and Pacific newspapers were not online. But even so, digests of digests became too much and eventually artificial intelligence found a way to reduce all the writing to a single word for the day. The first word produced was "Irtnog". The next day's single-word summary of everything written was "Efsitz". In White's words:
People accepted these mathematical distillations; and strangely enough, or perhaps not strangely at all, people were thoroughly satisfied, which would lead one to believe that what readers really craved was not so much the contents of books, magazines, and papers as the assurance that they were not missing anything.
I am sorry to have to admit that in today's world, these single distillations are inadequate. The only thing to do, I fear, is to pick and choose what we want to read and skip the rest. See? It's up to you and me to guide ourselves. Yes, vast ignorance stares us in the face!
