It’s not just enough to keep yourself informed by watching television news, reading blog posts, or flipping through social media posts. These all contain bias to an extent and rely on sensational headlines to grab attention and your clicks. Sure, reading a WIRED article or swiping through that influencer on Tik-Tok may tell you what’s going on, but what’s the validity to it?

Do you truly understand what message and information is being conveyed. In today’s era of AI generated news clips and politically charged headlines, what does keeping up with the latest mean to you? Does it really make you understand the underpinning of why world events unfurl or are we really on the edge of some big space boom? These are questions that also took me a long time to answer.

A few years ago, I began really digging in and reading “backstory” so to speak about what terms being thrown around mean, and histories behind certain industries' to better portray context. They used to say content is king, but I’d rather believe that context is king. To paraphrase Mark Twain, history doesn’t repeat itself, but it often rhymes.

If you consider recent global headlines about tariffs, the Straits of Hormuz, Chinese technological embargos, SpaceX colonizing Mars, and AI taking your jobs, for example, you’d think that we have a lot to be afraid of. You might be right, but it all matters about context, and as most history goes — we’ve all been here before.

To understand the history and to better inform yourself, I recommend seeking out books authored by subject matter experts in their respective fields. Recently, I’ve read “Chokepoints: American Power in the Age of Economic Warfare” by Edward Fishman, a former diplomat and economist. In his rather lengthy but easy to read chronology, he discusses a brief and recent history of what ‘blocking sanctions’ do, how tariffs are properly used, and what the role the US has played in Iranian diplomacy in the past.

Recent headlines don’t have the time nor inclination to help the reader delve further into these topics, so understanding a primer to these terms in the news gives you a better understanding so better decisions can be made by the reader’s part.

To give another example, the wild, but speculative SpaceX IPO by Elon Musk is all the rage. In the S-1 filing, Musk promises “A million people on Mars” as a goal of its organization. But also, if you parse what the company is, it’s not solely a rocket nor space exploration company. It’s a rocket manufacturer with X (formerly Twitter), xAI (including Grok, the controversial chatbot), and Cursor AI, a firm that has absolutely nothing to do with space colonization all rolled up into one company.

If you listen to the clickbait headlines, you’d assume that Mars colonization is only about a decade off. Can you be sure? I’ve been reading, “A City on Mars” by Kelly and Zach Weinersmith. A fairly levelheaded deep-dive into the complexities that Moon, Mars, and other off worldly colonization need to realize before any of SpaceX’s lofty goals can be realized. Hint: It is not 10-years off. As far as SpaceX and it’s S-1 have told us, there is nothing to protect potential habitants of Mars from dust storms, radiation, and basic necessities for moving around a habitat.

It’s important to create context for yourself when reading headlines and clicking news articles, especially with AI taking on a lot of journalistic activities — especially the errors. If you really want to learn more about why things work, books by SMEs are still your best bet to understanding what’s going on in an ever-complicated world that sinks us in headlines, such as this one.