Where possible I encourage friends and family to approach news as a single recent frame from a long-playing narrative, a blurb tacked onto the end of history. Without history you have no context. My agenda is to get them to ignore the 24/7 news cycle and review topics from a historical standpoint - Wikipedia and podcasts make this easier than ever before. They're imperfect sources, but if you want to crawl through dozens of topics for no cost, they're fantastic tools. From there you can purchase books on topics that you'd like to learn more about.

Something about the Middle East? You need at least a hundred years of historical knowledge to understand what is playing out. Ideally more. But it's not that simple; you need to understand the politics of countries that are recent but significant players.

And this is the problem: people believe it's reasonable to form an opinion on complex matters from consuming a few soundbites and massaged footage. How is that at all reasonable? Answer: it isn't.