Bounded, Not Broken

Reclaiming the Issue in an Age of Endless Media

Jun 28, 2025

Note: Writing this piece took me down paths of integration I didn’t anticipate. What began as a reflection on how I consume media unfolded into something broader about attention, belief, leadership, and what it means to be formed rather than informed. I hope the layers resonate, even if you enter from a different starting point.

Since September 15, 2024, I’ve been filling the pages of a journal with reflections on the foundational texts of political philosophy. This wasn’t for a course, a publication, or professional credit. It was personal. I wanted to read critical sections deeply and slowly: Plato’s Republic, Aristotle’s Politics, Hobbes’s Leviathan, Thomas More’s Utopia, Rousseau’s Social Contract, Mill’s On Liberty, Marx, Weber, Rawls. Some I’d read before, others I had only heard about. I had never read them together and considered them as a history of ideas related to societies struggle to govern and be governed. But this time I read with a pen in hand and ready to learn.1

That journal is now full, and I’m convinced that being “informed” is a necessary, but not sufficient, condition for meaningful engagement in civic, institutional, and professional life. But formation takes time, coherence, and being bounded. It requires a way of interpreting reality that is not always reactive, fragmented, or performative.

This reflection, and the small but significant shifts I’ve made in how I engage with media, are part of that same desire: to become someone capable of discernment, not just someone caught up in information.

A few months ago, I made a quiet change.

I’d grown dismayed not just with social media, but with what social media had done to journalism. The New York Times, The New Yorker, and The Atlantic, all once bastions of carefully edited storytelling, now pushed content through apps designed more like dopamine dispensers than periodicals. Infinite scroll. Trending tabs. Algorithm-curated “must-reads.” It didn’t matter that the content was high quality; the delivery system degraded it.

I unsubscribed from the feeds.

I now get The New Yorker and The Atlantic in print. I still use the Times app, but only through its “Today” tab, which restores a kind of editorial voice and beginning-middle-end rhythm. And when my subscription ends, I’m switching to the Wall Street Journal because it offers the “Wall Street Journal Digital Print Edition.” It’s a digital replica of the actual paper: edited, designed, and bounded as an issue. No clickbait masquerading as journalism. The Washington Post offers the same sort of electronic print edition format, but I won’t support Jeff Bezos’s vision of journalism as another arm of surveillance capitalism. There are limits.

This shift has changed how I feel—not just about news, but about time, agency, and attention. I no longer feel like a bystander caught in a data storm. I feel like a reader again.

And that distinction matters.

The Case for Bounded Media

How Form Shapes Understanding

Marshall McLuhan said, “The medium is the message.” Neil Postman sharpened the point: the form in which information is delivered determines how (or whether) it is understood. What matters is not just what we consume, but how that content arrives. Its rhythm, boundaries, and demands on our attention.

Bounded media has a beginning and an end. A daily newspaper, weekly magazine, or monthly journal arrive periodically, not constantly. They are edited with intent. This structure does something crucial: it lets the reader step into a shared mental space that is temporally coherent, anchored, and epistemically sane.

Contrast that with the infinite scroll.

Feeds don’t end. They are not curated by editors accountable to public standards, but by algorithms optimized to keep you inside. You’re not reading a paper, you’re metabolizing a flow. It’s designed to feel urgent but to leave you powerless. It offers stimulation, not resolution. And because it never ends, neither does your agitation.

It’s a trap masquerading as awareness.

Bounded media, on the other hand, invites closure. You finish an issue. You absorb its voice. You reflect on its themes. And perhaps most importantly, you remember what you read because your attention was held in one place, long enough to take in a coherent whole without being pulled toward the next thing.

When I open the Wall Street Journal in digital print mode on my iPad, I’m not nostalgic for newsprint. I’m recovering the experience of narrative structure. An edited, coherent whole that invites focus, rather than fracturing it. In most digital spaces, even good journalism gets broken apart by the interface: surrounded by links, nudged by alerts, interrupted by recommendation engines. This format resists that. It lets a story breathe. When I read The New Yorker in print, I’m returning to a mode of engagement that respects attention as a finite resource. I’m not fleeing from technology, I’m fleeing from a monetized attempt to distract me into engaging at their whim, not my intentions.

This isn’t about rejecting digital media. It’s about rejecting the pathological formlessness of digital media as it’s been engineered for addiction.

The Ethics of Attention

Why Citizens and Leaders Alike Must Resist the Feed

It’s tempting to frame this as a matter of taste. Some prefer print, others like scrolling. But that misses the deeper truth: how we consume information shapes how we relate to the world, and by extension, how we act within it.

If you are constantly distracted, you will struggle to discern. If you are inundated, you will default to the loudest voice. And if you are conditioned to treat everything as equally urgent, you will lose the capacity to judge what is actually important.

This is not just a personal cost. It’s a civic one.

Leaders, whether of institutions, communities, or classrooms, are especially vulnerable. The appearance of being “informed” often becomes a performance: tweeting reactions, signaling awareness, managing optics. But reacting to information is not the same as understanding it. And scrolling through the noise of 24-hour feeds is no substitute for reflective judgment.

And yet, leaders don’t operate in a vacuum. They respond to the expectations of those they serve. When people are conditioned to demand instant takes, public signaling, and emotionally charged responses, leaders begin to perform those rituals. Leadership can become reactive because people have grown impatient.

But what if the opposite were true?

What if citizens valued slower, more deliberate forms of knowledge?

What if public discourse was shaped not by perpetual reaction but by periodic reflection?

Then leaders might reclaim a different kind of authority. One grounded in trust. Forming coherent judgment instead of feeding the algorithm. The mode of media we choose doesn’t just shape how we think, it may also shape who we’re willing to follow.

Citizenship requires a form of slow knowing. A democratic society does not depend on everyone having a hot take, but on enough people having a grounded take. On people who can say: “I’ve read, I’ve reflected, and I can live with the implications of this view.” That kind of judgment takes time. It requires periodicity. It needs boundaries.

That’s why bounded media isn’t a retreat, it’s an act of resistance. It says:

“I refuse to be turned into a reactor. I want to be a citizen.”
“I refuse to perform knowledge. I want to understand.”
“I refuse to live in a state of perpetual emotional mobilization. I want moral clarity, even if it takes longer.”

If the algorithm is built to erode discernment, then choosing a bounded publication is a form of civic hygiene. It restores editorial accountability. It recalibrates urgency. It respects the reader as someone capable of reflection.

When Belief Becomes Armor

Teaching Pseudoscience in a Culture of Identity Performance

I’ve seen this fragmentation not only in social media, but in my own classroom.

In the spring of 2023, I taught an undergraduate course on pseudoscience and superstition. The goal was to explore what makes an idea “scientific,” and why certain beliefs persist despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary.

One student refused to consider astrology as pseudoscience. She didn’t argue for its empirical merits. She simply declared it off-limits. “It’s different,” she said. “It’s personal.”

That semester has stayed with me. Not because astrology was in question, but because inquiry itself was. What I encountered wasn’t disagreement, it was insulation. A belief held not as a hypothesis to be tested, but as a piece of selfhood to be protected. It was a signal of identity and to question it felt like an attack to her.

I’m not alone in this. As a recent Chronicle article2 describes, faculty across the country are witnessing a collapse in reading as a form of inquiry. Students increasingly turn to AI summaries, not because they’re apathetic, but because they’ve been shaped to believe reading is inefficient and confusing. And in many cases, they’re not wrong—fragmented attention, fast-paced courses, and superficial media norms have conspired to make slow thinking feel obsolete. But without it, judgment becomes impossible. Reading, at its best, isn’t just input. It’s formation.

This is what happens when belief becomes armor.

In Tom Nichols’ The Death of Expertise, he describes a cultural drift from shared standards of knowledge and toward a flattened landscape in which everyone’s opinion carries equal weight, regardless of grounding. “People believe they’re smarter,” Nichols writes, “but in fact they’ve gained only an illusory intelligence bolstered by a degree of dubious worth.” I don’t adopt all of Nichols’ cynicism, but I share his concern: when epistemic humility disappears, so does the capacity to learn.

And that concern links back to everything I’ve written here about media, attention, and the conditions for judgment. We’re experiencing a collapse of the very structures that allow truth to be contested, examined, and slowly understood. The boundary between inquiry and offense, between critique and invalidation, has eroded.

When social media trains us to perform identities instead of test ideas, belief ceases to be a starting point for conversation. It becomes a boundary against it. The result isn’t pluralism. It’s fragmentation. And in that climate, teaching rational inquiry isn’t just difficult, it’s countercultural.

I’ll write more soon about what it means to teach in this environment. What it demands of both students and instructors, and why reclaiming the capacity for shared inquiry is a civic as well as intellectual task. But for now, I mark this moment as part of the same challenge:

How do we rebuild the boundaries that make judgment possible? Boundaries that don’t constrain thought, but protect its very conditions.

What If No One Knows What to Do With the Truth?

Reflections on Local Governance in an Age of Fragmentation

I didn’t come to these reflections abstractly. I moved to Ashland, New Hampshire, and joined the Ashland Economic Development Committee. I served quietly (mostly). I listened (ok, I tried). And I eventually stepped down in recognition of something: governance in small towns is nearly impossible without shared coherence.

Local government is often led by people doing their best, but with little political experience, no policy staff, and no meaningful civic press. And the people they represent, our neighbors, are overwhelmed. Attention is fragmented, time devoured, mental models are shaped by national spectacle.

Even if good information were available, local journalism with depth and integrity, I’ve begun to wonder whether it would land. Whether people would know what to do with it. Whether we still have the shared habits of attention, interpretation, and mutual concern that make the truth actionable.

This is what media fragmentation has done. It hasn’t just confused us. It has disarmed us as citizens.

Restoring the Conditions for Judgment

The Way Back Begins with Where You Look

I wasn’t just chasing a quieter reading experience when I changed how I engaged with the news. I was trying to recover something that felt increasingly out of reach: the conditions under which judgment is even possible. Not decision fatigue. Not performative awareness. Not the ambient hum of constant crisis. But the slow work of weighing, discerning, and living with a clear mind.

And I’ve come to believe I can’t get that from a feed.

Postman (in Amusing Ourselves to Death) warned us about this. He saw the danger in the form media takes, not just in what it says. How it trains us to attend, to respond, to think. He feared a culture that would prize stimulation over coherence, performance over principle. He didn’t live to see the feed, but he understood its logic before it arrived.

Because it isn’t just information that scrolls endlessly. It’s us. Our focus, our time, our capacity to decide what matters. Feeds fragment attention and blur context. They flood us with headlines and hashtags but offer little time to ask, What does this mean? or What should be done? (See Kyle Chayka’s Filterworld, which explores how algorithmic platforms flatten cultural experience into something ambient, predictable, and ahistorical.)3

That’s why I’ve chosen to return to bounded media: daily editions, weekly issues, curated collections that begin and end. I don’t care whether it’s paper or digital. What matters is that it respects the reader as a moral agent, not a metric in an engagement report.

To read this way is to reclaim agency.

Not control over events. But control over how we attend. What we allow in. What we allow to shape us.

Leaders often reflect the tempo of those they serve. If we reward speed, they stay fast. If we reward judgment, they might slow down.

Reading differently isn’t a retreat. It’s a form of resistance. It says coherence still matters. Reflection isn’t weakness. The world is too complex to be consumed in fragments.

Maybe by consuming less, but with more care, we would form opinions that are not just defensible, but exchangeable. Not positions to perform or protect. Views we could offer, revise, and carry into real conversation.

And maybe then we’d start talking with one another again.

Not just at one another.

“You cannot do political philosophy on television. Its form works against the content.”
—Neil Postman, Amusing Ourselves to Death

A Peripatetic Physical Therapist

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