“Reading the morning newspaper is the realist’s morning prayer,” wrote the philosopher Hegel at the turn of the 1800s. It was a time when the mass dissemination of news was allowing people to make decisions based on something concrete, beyond religious beliefs.

Would Hegel have seen the sanctity in propping yourself up on one elbow half-conscious in bed to scroll through Twitter? Certainly, the contemporary reality of nonstop news is one he never could have predicted. The average adult in the US now spends more than 11 hours per day listening to, watching, reading or otherwise interacting with some sort of media. A good part of this is news—news that comes tumbling into our brain throughout the day via our social media feeds. It’s so constant that many of us report feeling anx...