News did occasionally filter in--but such dim, long-after-the-event, unreal news.

Oppenheimer told me he had not learned of the Russo-Japanese war until two years after it was over.
We were the buried alive, the living dead.

Solitary was our tomb, in which, on occasion, we talked with our knuckles like spirits rapping at a seance.
News?
Such little things were news to us.

A change of bakers--we could tell it by our bread.

What made Pie-face Jones lay off a week?
Was it vacation or sickness?
Why was Wilson, on the night shift for only ten days, transferred elsewhere?
Where did Smith get that black eye?
We would speculate for a week over so trivial a thing as the last.
Some convict given a month in solitary was an event.