A professor I knew conceived of a little experiment for understanding what affects us and what affects the world, though he put it in more modest terms. He proposed that for thirty days one avoid all sources of “news.” No newspapers, television, radio, magazines (there was no Internet then). At the end of thirty days, return to the “news” and decide. What had fundamentally changed in the world, not as a sequence of events but had really changed, intrinsically changed? And, more importantly, what could we have done in thirty days to change ourselves, intrinsically?