As soon as I get in my office, I have The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal on my desk. One of the things I’ve always tried to avoid is the endless scroll that is the news. What I love about a physical newspaper is that there’s a finite amount of news. I love turning to the Opinion page and being like: These are the eight opinions. That’s it. Whereas with Twitter, the opinions never end.

I read “Digital Minimalism” by Cal Newport and that really changed a lot of things for me. My cellphone is in black and white and has super low lighting, so it’s very ugly and I look at it less. And there are no social media apps. I use the screen only when it’s absolutely necessary. I t’s about my own head space. We’ve become a sea of screen babies. I try to minimize that noise for my own humanity.

When I found out that the heads of all these [tech] companies — Sundar Pichai, Satya Nadella, Steve Jobs — don’t let their kids use screens, I’m like, No way [am I letting my daughter]. It’s like finding out the CEO of McDonald’s never had French fries.

Tuesday Afternoon

The Buzzfeed article “How Millennials Became the Burnout Generation” has been making the rounds within the office because we’re doing a big episode on mental health this week. Mental health has been something that we’ve been tracking for a long time because it’s finally something we’re talking about in the cultural zeitgeist. Our show, I think, is at its best when we talk about things that actually affect people’s day-to-day lives, and then we talk about the mechanisms that are put in place to make it hard for people.

I scroll through Twitter and read Jess Dweck and Mike Drucker. Jess and Mike will always have a new angle to think about something that’s happening topically. Jess had this tweet the other day: “When Stephen Miller proposed, do you think he got down on one knee or all six knees.” Mike had this tweet on Halloween: “Just took 20 mgs of melatonin. let’s get this Halloween party started with some [expletive] nightmares.” I love how at the end of both of those jokes it just takes a hard left turn into absurdity.