Don't read the news

I don’t normally read the news. But with the current situation in Iran I’ve been reading a lot more. Something like 7-8 hours on some days. Reading that much bad news with that high of an impact takes a big toll on my brain and basically paralyzes me.

On days that I could keep it to 3-4 hours I noticed I was more functional. Then speaking with family helped me bring it down to 15 minutes a day. A few times Ali gave me a rundown of the most important things in very short sentences, like 5 bullet points. That was enough. I realized the news itself is not what paralyzes me. The rabbit hole is.

So I built a tool that does what Ali was doing for me. It fetches news from multiple sources, translates Farsi items to English, removes duplicates, filters for relevance, and groups stories by topic. It compares against the past week to tell me what’s new and what’s just a continuation of something I already know about. The output is a short daily brief. You can see the results here.

One tricky part is source bias, which I try to account for. You can read more about how it all works on the about page.