Do we have too much news?

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: she has been concerned about the direction of the country that she has been taking her Kindle to bed so she can track the headlines. In recent weeks, Caschetta said, the news has even invaded her dreams. A recent one had her grilling the House speaker, Nancy Pelosi, about the economy over cocktails, she said.

“It’s just the last thing I think of every night before I go to sleep,” Caschetta said, referring to the news.

This spike in news interest is reflected in web traffic figures from Yahoo!’s political and financial news sites, according to the company. “Both sites are experiencing record traffic over the last few weeks,” said Brian Nelson, a Yahoo spokesman. “Finance has been operating at near capacity.”

Traffic on the financial channel jumped by 27% during the week of September 15, when Lehman Brothers and Merrill Lynch imploded as the simmering crisis boiled over, company figures showed.

Eric Klinenberg, a sociology professor at New York University, said people are unusually transfixed by news of the day because the economic crisis in particular seems to reach at every corner of their lives. Usually, he added, people can compartmentalise their lives into different spheres of activity, such as work, family and leisure. But now, “those spheres are collapsing into each other.”And the news is not just consequential, but whipsaw-volatile. Financial markets swing hundreds of points within an hour; poll numbers shift. This means that news these days has an unbelievably short shelf life, news addicts said. If you haven’t checked the headlines in the last half an hour, the world may already have changed.

Jeff Slate, a songwriter who lives in Manhattan, said that he has found himself logging on to the internet in the middle of the night to check the Asian financial markets, something he had not done for years. And a quick scan of the headlines usually leads him down an information rabbit hole, since almost every blog or news article links to a half-dozen others, which link to others. Even music blogs these days are filled with links to political news and commentary.