I stopped reading the news. Here's what happened

Spoiler: I still write a daily newsletter

*Places dictaphone to mouth*

“Idea for a sitcom: daily newsletter writer with a strong background in politics and public policy who, for reasons of self-preservation, no longer reads the news. Also, he’s a ninja.”

For roughly a decade, my weekdays looked something like this: walk to the office, park myself in front of what was then called Twitter, and scroll. This, it turned out, made me ideally suited to write a daily newsletter. Though the practice was rather more frowned upon at the Treasury.

To write a daily newsletter, even a bad one, you need ideas. And Twitter was the home of ideas. I would wake up every morning knowing I’d have to write about something, ideally a subject on which I could genuinely add value. But I rarely worried — I had subcontracted the hard bit to the virtual commons.

OG Twitter (Credit: See-ming Lee)

Perhaps Torsten Bell, then chief executive of the Resolution Foundation, had shared a nifty chart. Or Paul Johnson, then Director of the Institute for Fiscal Studies, had posted a clip of him wearing a silly tie while bemoaning the government’s spending plans. Maybe Matthew Yglesias had said something trolly but broadly correct, or Phil Neville was sharing his astonishment that the Americans had killed bin Laden.

I was very online.

Bluesky Scrolling

But then a few things happened. In October 2022. Elon Musk completed his purchase of Twitter, and soon the user experience began to atrophy. Which is an oddly coy way of saying it descended into something of a Nazi bar. Then a year later, October 7 happened, and multiple corners of the internet, not least algorithmic social media, became an even more hostile place to be Jewish.

I had by this time migrated to Bluesky. It was not exactly a like-for-like replacement. For one thing, there was hardly anyone around. The best way to describe the site in late 2023 was that it was essentially a Financial Times journalists’ Slack channel. I was so starved of content I ended up following a bunch of US NIMBY types. Now, I think we should build stuff as much as the next millennial but Christ alive, planning discourse is dull.

Bluesky on my cracked iPhone (Credit: Jack Kessler)

Bluesky is superior to X in a few concrete ways. It does not throttle links, a rather handy benefit for someone who writes stuff and then shares it online. Nor does it boost the output of far-right political entrepreneurs. But as alluded to above, Bluesky exists on the internet in 2026 and is therefore heaving with conspiratorial antisemitism.

I learned to mute — not just people, but keywords — though it only helped so much. There are still days when I stay away entirely, even if it is to my professional detriment.

What would Billie do?

In addition to being a pioneer of women’s sport and female empowerment, Billie Jean King is one hell of a quote machine. You may have heard her most celebrated axiom, “Pressure is a privilege”. But my favourite is even pithier: “Champions adjust”. Top performers (of which I absolutely do not suggest I am one) don’t simply rely on a fixed plan — they adapt to whatever the situation demands. And they do it in real time.

To that end, I concluded that if I wanted to continue writing a daily newsletter, I would have to adjust.