For me, the underlying problem is 24/7 news, and the consequent requirement to come up with something to say 24/7. This has largely been what's led to the conflation of journalism and punditry.

These longer segments, the various talking heads going back and forth, editorializing, etc., are all symptoms of the need to fill airtime, and fill it relatively cheaply.

What's funny is that the Right doesn't believe in "activist judges," but it largely ushered in the era of "activist reporters," as they sought to confuse news and commentary toward the furtherance of political agenda. They'll loudly defend Fox News, and rail against the bias of CNN.

The situation has become somewhat hopeless because any organization working the large-scale audience has been forced to move into the "infotainment" realm while still calling it news.

Once the networks decided, back in the day, that news operations had to turn a profit rather than be prestige loss-leaders, it became a business. And that leads to all sorts of problems, not the least of which, as you point out here, you can see daily when these folks start opening their mouths, continually trying to come up with something to say, some insight, some whatever in addition to the basic facts. Then it just becomes a sort of disease that spreads.

who embrace/recognize/savor these feelings, as some wonderful letters attest.

There are those who don't. As the dumbass letters attest.

As do many others, obviously, there is a persistent, melancholy ache, a longing that seems unresolvable, that I often experience. Sometimes it is most acute when I should be the happiest.

I've tried to learn to love this feeling, for it seems a sum of everything, the coexistence and simultaneity of all states, the impermanence of all the things, the imperfection of all things, which becomes their perfection, if we allow ourselves to see it and be grateful for what is.

I'm sure it's a combination of all the mysterious and sensible things suggested...evening on the savannah, memories of being part of the universal whole before the big bang, negative ions, curious wavelengths in firefly bioluminescence...I don't know.

But I do know it can cut right through you, leave you small and frightened, or big and hopeful, fill you with wistfulness or tears. And it doesn't seem to go away the older you get.

Poetry, music, art, love, ecstacy . . . that's the ONLY stuff that makes any of the OTHER stuff worthwhile.

It is the very REASON we are all down here on this isolated little rock struggling to make it through another day, as we have been doing for the last gazillion years.

******

Exactly. The derisive pragmatists...don't know whether they're just having a bad day, a bad life, but god, their worldview is so small and mean.

upon coming up against something which the reviewer/reader just can't quite get her head around.

So, one falls back on the hipper-than-thou throwaway review, the drive-by BS that seeks to hide the reviewer's lack of literary chops. Pynchon is so, like, overrated and ... wordy. And I'm so cool for just, you know, like totally dismissing his sad old white ass and not even needing to present a, like, cogent argument, or anything. Cause I'm just too cool for that shit, and if I actually get into details, the "fanboys" will tear me to shreds. And who needs that?