Olivia: The news isn't here to inform you. It's here to make you angry. And according to our book today, that anger is actually a symptom of a deeply touching, but tragically misplaced, hope. We’re about to explain why. Jackson: Wait, hope? My morning doomscroll through headlines feels anything but hopeful. It mostly feels like a cocktail of anxiety and the sudden urge to move to a remote cabin with no Wi-Fi. What book is making this wild claim? Olivia: It’s a fantastic and provocative one. We're diving into The News: A User's Manual by Alain de Botton. And it makes perfect sense coming from him. De Botton is a philosopher, but not the kind who lives in an ivory tower. He actually co-founded an organization called The School of Life. Jackson: Oh, I've heard of them! Their whole thing is applying big philosophical ideas to everyday problems, right? Like love, work, and… apparently, the soul-crushing nature of the 24-hour news cycle. Olivia: Exactly. He’s trying to give us a "user's manual" for one of the most powerful and unexamined forces in our lives. He argues that the news occupies the same space in our culture that religion used to, but we have almost no training in how to consume it without it driving us crazy. Jackson: That hits home. I feel like I have a master's degree in information overload and a Ph.D. in feeling powerless about it. So, where does he start? How does this machine actually work on us?

Olivia: He starts with the raw emotions. De Botton’s first major point is that the news is an emotional engine, and its primary fuels are fear and anger. It’s not necessarily a conscious conspiracy; it’s just that the business model of news thrives on agitation. Calm doesn't get clicks. Jackson: Okay, but hold on. Aren't floods, wars, and political scandals genuinely scary and infuriating things? Isn't it the news's job to report on them? Olivia: It is, but the issue is one of perspective and proportion. De Botton uses the example of a news report about flooding in a small English town, Wallington in Hampshire. The story is filled with dramatic details: submerged cars, a caravan washed away, stranded motorists. It’s presented as a terrifying, immediate crisis. Jackson: Which it probably was for the people living there. Olivia: Absolutely. But de Botton’s point is about the effect on the millions of people not living there. The report creates a generalized sense of vulnerability and fear, but without any sense of scale or historical context. Floods have happened for millennia. This one is tragic for those involved, but the way it's framed makes it feel like a novel and apocalyptic threat to everyone, everywhere. He has this killer quote: "With perspective in mind, we soon realize that – contrary to what the news suggests – hardly anything is totally novel, few things are truly amazing and very little is absolutely terrible." Jackson: Huh. That’s a powerful reframe. It’s true, every storm is now a 'weather bomb,' every political disagreement is an 'unprecedented crisis.' The volume is always turned up to eleven because if it’s not a crisis, it’s not news. Olivia: Precisely. And that constant, low-grade fear is one side of the coin. The other is anger. De Botton points to the comment sections of any political news story. They are boiling over with rage. Jackson: The internet’s eternal tire fire. I know it well. Olivia: He argues this rage stems from a very specific formula. The news presents huge, complex problems—like, say, the EU struggling to agree on a budget—in a way that makes the solution seem obvious and simple. But then it simultaneously shows us the political process, which is full of delays, compromises, and what he calls "maddening evasions." Jackson: Right, so the news says, "The problem is X, and the solution is clearly Y." And then it shows us politicians failing to do Y, so the only possible conclusion is that they must be, in the words of the commenters, "crooks and idiots." Olivia: Exactly! And here is the most brilliant and compassionate part of his argument. He says, "Though anger seems a pessimistic response to a situation, it is at root a symptom of hope: the hope that the world can be better than it is." Our anger comes from the belief that a perfect world is just within reach, if only the fools in charge would just grasp it. Jackson: Wow. I never thought of my outrage as a form of optimism. It feels more like… corrosive despair. But he’s saying that deep down, we’re angry because we believe things could be fixed. The news sets up this expectation and then shows us its constant failure, creating a cycle of disillusionment. Olivia: A cycle of thwarted optimism. The news presents a world of simple problems and then feeds our fury when they aren't solved simply. It rarely admits the deep, structural, and frustratingly human reasons why change is slow and difficult. It doesn't give us the context. Jackson: That word again, context. It feels like the missing ingredient in everything. Olivia: And this idea of missing context gets even more powerful when we look at how the news shows us the world. De Botton argues we've lost faith in photography, and for a very good reason.

Jackson: We've lost faith in photography? What does that mean? My phone is basically a camera that makes calls. We're drowning in images. Olivia: That’s exactly his point. We're drowning in the wrong kind of images. He makes this incredibly sharp distinction between two types of news photos. The first, and most common, he calls "images of corroboration." Jackson: Corroboration. So, like, proving something happened? Olivia: Yes. Think of a photo of a politician cutting a ribbon or standing at a podium. It doesn't teach you anything new. It just confirms a fact stated in the headline: "Yes, this person was here." It’s visual evidence, but it offers zero insight. Jackson: It’s like a visual receipt. "Yep, this event occurred. Here's the proof." It’s boring. Olivia: It’s boring, and it’s a wasted opportunity. The second, much rarer and more valuable type of image, he calls an "image of revelation." These are pictures that advance our understanding, challenge our clichés, and reveal a deeper truth. Jackson: Okay, I need an example. This feels a bit abstract. Olivia: He gives a perfect one from art history. He compares two portraits of the 17th-century French king, Henri IV. The first is a standard, formal portrait. It’s an image of corroboration. It tells you what the king looked like, more or less. Stiff, formal, opaque. Jackson: The kind of painting you walk past in a museum to get to the cafe. Olivia: Totally. But then he shows another painting, by the artist Ingres. It depicts Henri IV on his hands and knees, on the floor, giving his children piggyback rides, just as the Spanish ambassador, a very serious and formal man, walks into the room. Jackson: Whoa. That’s a completely different story. Olivia: It’s a revelation! In that one image, you learn something profound about the king's character, his warmth, his priorities, his soul. It’s not just what he looked like; it’s who he was. De Botton argues that the best news photography should aim for this level of revelation. It should shatter our preconceived notions. Jackson: And most of it just… doesn't. It just shows us the thing. Olivia: It just shows us the thing. But when it works, it’s one of the most powerful tools for empathy we have. He tells the story of seeing a photograph by Stephanie Sinclair of two child brides in Yemen. Before seeing it, he had all the standard, vague ideas about child marriage being a terrible thing done by monstrous men. Jackson: The typical "baddies" narrative we get from the news. Olivia: Right. But the photograph revealed something far more complex and heartbreaking. He describes the young girls, Tahani and Ghada, looking like "diminutive old ladies," their faces etched with a kind of weary resignation. And their much older husbands didn't look like monsters. They looked, in his words, "guileless and confused," as if they had no idea how to comfort these sad children they'd been married to. Jackson: That’s… devastating. It doesn't excuse it, but it completely changes the emotional landscape. It’s not a simple story of good vs. evil anymore. It’s a story of a broken, tragic system. Olivia: It’s a revelation. It replaces a simple, angry judgment with a complex, sorrowful understanding. Another example he gives is a photo by Manu Brabo of a Syrian man, cradling the body of his young son who was just killed. The raw, primal grief in that image communicates the human cost of war in a way no statistic or political analysis ever could. It bypasses the intellect and goes straight to the heart. That is what great news imagery can do. Jackson: So a corroboration photo is just a visual receipt—'yep, this happened.' But a revelation photo is like a short story that changes how you think. It makes the world feel more complicated, but also more human. Olivia: That’s a perfect way to put it. De Botton believes this is where journalism can and should connect with art—to create not just information, but genuine understanding and empathy. Jackson: Okay, so the news makes us angry, the pictures are mostly unhelpful, and the whole system is designed to agitate us. This is feeling a bit bleak, Olivia. Does de Botton offer any way out of this mess? Is there a "user's manual" part of this book, or is it just a "user's warning"?

Olivia: He absolutely does, and this is where the book becomes truly radical and hopeful. He proposes we stop thinking of the news as a source of information and start thinking of it as a potential pharmacy for the mind. Jackson: A pharmacy? Like, I can get a prescription for… less political outrage? Sign me up. Olivia: (laughs) Sort of! His idea is that we consume things not just for their material properties, but for the psychological qualities we hope to absorb from them. For example, we don't just go to a restaurant for calories; we go to a specific restaurant to absorb its atmosphere of, say, conviviality, or calm, or sophistication. Jackson: I can see that. You go to a sleek, minimalist cafe to feel more organized and focused, or a cozy pub to feel more connected and communal. Olivia: Exactly. So, de Botton asks, what if consumer news was organized that way? Instead of sections for "Dining," "Travel," and "Technology," what if the sections were organized by the psychological needs they serve? Sections on "Calm," "Resilience," "Perspective," "Conviviality." A review wouldn't just tell you if a hotel was expensive; it would analyze how well it delivered on its promise of tranquility. Jackson: A 'Calm' section in my news app? That sounds amazing, but also completely utopian. Can you imagine a major news outlet actually doing that? Olivia: It is a bit utopian, and that’s a fair critique. The book got a pretty mixed reception. Some readers and critics found his ideas brilliant and necessary, while others found them a bit patronizing or impractical. But I think the power of the idea isn't necessarily for news organizations to change, but for us to change how we approach the news. We can become our own "pharmacists." Jackson: How so? Olivia: By asking ourselves: what psychological "nutrient" am I actually seeking right now? When I feel overwhelmed, maybe I don't need more breaking news. Maybe I need a story that offers perspective. This even applies to disaster reporting. Jackson: How can a disaster story possibly be therapeutic? Olivia: He brings in Aristotle's theory of tragedy. The ancient Greeks believed that watching a play about a good person who makes a terrible mistake wasn't for entertainment; it was for moral education. The goal was for the audience to think, "How easily I, too, might have done the same." It fosters compassion and self-reflection. De Botton suggests that if news stories about tragedies—like the man who commits a murder-suicide after a painful divorce—were told with more psychological depth and context, they could serve the same function. They could remind us of our shared human fragility and encourage kindness rather than just horror. Jackson: So instead of just being a spectacle of suffering, it becomes a lesson in empathy. A reminder of the thin line we all walk. Olivia: A reminder that we are all vulnerable. The news of an accident, a sudden death, can be a brutal but effective reminder to appreciate our own lives, to rearrange our priorities away from petty anxieties and towards what truly matters. It’s a bitter medicine, but it can be a powerful one if we know how to take it.

Olivia: So we've really gone on a journey here. We started by seeing the news as this external force, an emotional engine making us feel anxious and angry. Then we looked under the hood at the mechanics of its images, seeing how they often fail to reveal anything meaningful. And we've ended with this radical, hopeful idea of the news as a potential pharmacy for the soul. Jackson: It’s a huge shift in perspective. It moves from being a passive, frustrated consumer of news to an active, intentional user. The title really is perfect. It’s not "A Critique of the News," it's "A User's Manual." Olivia: Exactly. De Botton's ultimate message is that we are not helpless victims of the news cycle. We are users. And like any powerful tool, whether it's a chainsaw or the internet, we need a manual to operate it wisely. The goal is to learn how to filter for wisdom, not just for information. Jackson: It makes you wonder, what 'prescription' do you need from the news today? Is it a dose of hope, a shot of perspective, or maybe just a quiet moment of calm? It’s a question I’ve never thought to ask myself before opening my news app. Olivia: And it’s a question that could change everything about how we engage with the world. We'd love to hear your thoughts on this. What's one small change you might make to how you consume the news after hearing these ideas? Let us know. We're always curious to see how these concepts land with you all. Jackson: It’s a big one to chew on. A really fascinating and, I think, necessary book for our times. Olivia: This is Aibrary, signing off.