I started reading The New Yorker in January, 2001. I was young, just out of college, and ready to hear about the grown-up world. "The news" didn't appeal to me much, but I wanted to catch up with other grown-ups, a part which I was now going to start to play myself.

In those days, there was still an economic boom going on, which meant that people were doing stuff. People were trying out ideas—lots of them mindless, some of them clever, many interesting. The world was active and interesting; I read the news with an eye toward the weird experiments of entrepreneurs, artists and hackers who were avidly reshaping life in the world. The magazine picked up this kind of story from time to time, amidst its mustier matter (profiles of 18th-century despots and little-known WWI-era poets). I dug it. Each week I couldn't wait to tear it open and look for the next item, the next step in the evolution of mankind, as seen through the Talk of the Town.

Not long after that, the news changed. Suddenly there were zero new projects going on: instead, the news was all about the one big project, and the question of whether it was right or wrong, how long it would last, and so on. Then the news was all about the deceptions that got this project started, and the moral failures contained within it. Part of the big project involved treating people inhumanely; part of it was denying that. For hundreds of weeks, this was the only project on anyone's radar.

But in the past couple of months, other projects have occassionally sprouted through the pavement cracks. The New Yorker's Feb 5 issue has an article about a project to scan every book and put it online. The New York Times' lead headline a couple of weeks ago was about the microchip companies shifting to low-power chips. There are hints that the news will begin to report on forward progress again.

Of course, the big project rages on. It still harbors those same moral whorls; it needs to be talked about. But I'm glad the news can at least sometimes remind us that some amongst us are using their energies productively, to move civilization forward—not everyone fights inwardly, wearing down humanity.