It’s certainly possible to watch the news too much, but I think there’s a great danger when people tune out altogether from what’s going on outside their own little private sphere — they become easy prey for a demagogue who can manipulate them emotionally, and they don’t have the knowledge they need to see through what the demagogue is doing.

Also, one detail — on the Steven Pressman quote about Hitler — Hitler was a prolific artist when he was young, but he stopped after being rejected twice from art school — it was rejection, not the blank page (as Pressman claims), that scared him. https://www.vintag.es/2017/05/paintings-by-adolf-hitler-40-rarely.html