Here are a few of the more substantive parts of my media diet this week:

Joy of Less by Pico Iyer (NYTimes.com “Happy Days” blog)
Iyer says that “the crazily accelerating roller-coaster of the 24/7 news cycle has propelled people up and down and down and up and then left them pretty much where they started.”
Many of the  reader responses to Iyer’s article are worth reading as well; better than the average message board.

How Google Trained Your Brain by Douglas Rushkoff (Daily Beast)
In this review of the new search engine Bing, Rushkoff argues that “while Microsoft engages with us as consumers, Google treats us as producers.”

Should Creative Writing Be Taught? by Louis Menand (New Yorker Magazine)
“The University of Iowa Writers’ Workshop is the most renowned creative-writing program in the world. Sixteen Pulitzer Prize winners and three recent Poet Laureates are graduates of the program. But the school’s official position is that the school had nothing to do with it.”

The Watchmen (This American Life)
The radio show puts two reporters on the task of finding the regulators who were supposed to be overseeing the finance industry. Great reporting performed by asking a lot of people one obvious question, “Aren’t you responsible?”