The Information Diet

Chapter 5. Welcome to Information Obesity

          I remember when, I remember             I remember when I lost my mind             There was something so pleasant about that place             Even your emotions have an echo in so much space                         And when you’re out there without care             Yeah, I was out of touch             But it wasn’t because I didn’t know enough             I just knew too much             Does that make me crazy?             Possibly         

—Gnarls Barkley, “Crazy”

In 2004, after two years of my Howard Dean–based information diet, I headed home to Albany, Georgia, for Thanksgiving dinner. It’s like a national holiday in my giant southern family—come to my family’s house on Thanksgiving and you’ll begin to wonder whether or not the whole thing about us all being related in the South is true. It seems like the whole state is at our house.

One of my favorite relatives is my dad’s brother—Uncle Warren. He’s got a deep drawl that makes you want to sip lemonade and sit on the front porch all day, and is so charming that he could convince Alex Trebek to give up on the trivia questions and just go fishing. He also loves Fox News, and thinks that if we all listened to a little more of it, we all might be a bit better off.

In that fall of 2004, Uncle Warren and I had very different information diets. It had become a sort of family tradition in the years prior for my uncle and I to clash, but this year I made it a point before my voyage home, ...