About the book

Ten years ago I stopped following the news, and almost nothing I had been warned about came true. I did not fall behind. I did not stop caring. I grew calmer, I read more, and I understood the world better than I ever had while checking the headlines five times a day. Skip the News is the book I wrote to explain why.

The short version is uncomfortable. We are running Stone-Age brains on a global, around-the-clock news feed, and the two were never meant to meet. The feed is not broken. It is doing exactly what it was built to do, and that is the problem. The book takes the machine apart, piece by piece, and the picture that emerges is hard to unsee.

It begins with biology. Your brain was shaped in a village of a hundred or so people, where knowing the latest gossip and flinching at every snapped twig genuinely kept you alive. The feed reaches straight into those old instincts. It hands you a small, unpredictable reward for every refresh, the same trick that keeps a gambler at the slot machine, and it keeps your inner sentry, the anxious part that scans for danger, shouting loudly enough to drown out the calmer voice that would rather think things through.

Then it distorts. The news gets described as a mirror held up to the world. It is closer to a magnifying glass held over whatever is dramatic, while the rest of reality sits in the dark. To make the cut, a story has to be happening right now, it has to be strange enough to surprise you, and it has to fit a tidy tale with a villain and a victim. Almost everything that matters fails at least one of those tests. Slow progress, quiet recovery, a world that is steadily getting better, none of it is news. So we walk around certain the world is poorer, sicker, and more dangerous than it is, and we are genuinely surprised when the numbers say otherwise.

And it sells. A newsroom has bills, and outrage pays them. The surest way to hold your attention is to stage a fight, so the loudest and angriest voices get the microphone while the rest of us are sorted into teams. That is how a difference of opinion curdles into contempt, how the public square starts to feel like a bar brawl, and how the ground gets prepared for the strongmen who feed on all of it.

The book’s answer is almost embarrassingly simple. You cannot rewrite your biology, but you can reach for the one part of this whole arrangement that comes with an off switch. Turning the feed off does not make you ignorant. It is closer to self-defence, a way of refusing to be actively misinformed. What you get back is your attention, your time for real books and real conversations, a quieter hum of dread, and a view of the world clear and hopeful enough to be worth handing to your children.

Skip the News first appeared in Swedish as Skippa nyheterna. The English edition is fuller, sharper, and more carefully worked through. Want to read it?