Maybe it’s because I’m feeling rather lazy myself as I prepare to shuffle over the conventional threshold into old age, but I have been thinking a lot lately about the paradoxical power of laziness and inertia over what we do and, especially, what we think. What I am inclined to think—perhaps out of sheer laziness—is that laziness is ultimately the reason why the media report half the things they do, especially when they are “too good to check.” That’s if, by “too good,” we understand “too conveniently in line with the ‘narrative’ we are promoting at the moment”; and if, by “check,” we mean (among other things) “looking skeptically at the stories told to us by people who have something—especially media celebrity—to gain by the publicity they are seeking on behalf of allegations against former bosses, husbands, wives, lovers, or political opponents.”

This indolence on the part of the media, to the extent that it is indolence and not malicious bias, has now spilled over into other areas of public life. It’s now pretty clear that the fbi ran to the fisacourt seeking a surveillance warrant against the Trump campaign with nothing but the highly dubious Steele dossier to back up the request—when they didn’t even know where its allegations came from, let alone whether or not any of them could be substantiated. Who could be bothered to run down such details? Likewise, in April, the nomination of Ronny Jackson to be head of the Veterans’