The news seems increasingly, almost unrelentingly, bad. The voices are shrill and the tone is dark. I have said before that there was bad news to be had on any given day in human history, and in roughly equal quantities of it too. Bad news catches our attention and makes us come back for more, because if the news is too rosy too often, people become suspicious that they are not being told everything. Advertisers pay for the clicks or the ratings, so it seems likely that this trend will never go away and may well be getting worse. I mean that the reporting of the news is getting worse, not the actual quantity of bad news.

Sure, things have become a little unhinged since the end of the Cold War. The massive alignments of those days have fragmented and the planet is more multi-polar. Islam is going through an interesting period on its fringes. Russia is restive and suspicious, China is inexorably rising and the US is less certain of its influence and power. The EU is wobbling. But it has been ever so, with different nations in the mix. Just change the names and the dates.