In his sharp and engaging new book, The News: A User’s Manual, the philosopher Alain de Botton describes the experience of consuming news as if we are woken each morning by a frantic official armed with “a briefcase filled with a bewildering and then in the end tiring range of issues: ‘Five hospitals are predicted to breach their credit limits by the end of the month,’ ‘The central bank is worried about its ability to raise money on the bond markets,’ ‘A Chinese warship has just left the mainland en route for Vietnam’…What are we meant to think? Where should all this go in our minds?”