Wait, this doesn’t look like a blogroll

No. I like the concept of a blogroll, and in the old “blogosphere” they made sense, but that world no longer exists and the way we consume content has changed a lot. Also, shouldn’t there be more than just blogs in the list anyway?

This is a list of things I’m reading now, or trying to read, or at least an aspirational collection of my inputs.

Methods

I’ve tried reading some content digitally; it just doesn’t work for me. Periodicals, mostly. There was a revelation for me there in that the way in which I read impacts whether I do, what I’ll retain, and what my tolerance for distraction is.

Put that way, it sounds obvious, but noticing it has made a big improvement to my reading life. I’m still learning about this part of myself.

So: how do I consume content?

• RSS
• Some apps (Guardian, mostly)
• Paper periodicals (LRB)
• Books of essays

I try to stay away from other content.

Periodicals

This is an easy section to put first, because there’s really not much here. The LRB and the Guardian are my poisons of choice. I’m curious to read more of the New Left Review and Monocle, but they’re a little too artsy to keep my focus right now. When I’m better at sitting down and immersing myself in the written word — without getting distracted by some youtube video or my latent snack habit — I’d like to expand this section.

Blogs

Blogs! Blogs forever. I’m a huge fan of curating trusted thinkers and reading specifically their output, so blogs collected together in a good RSS reader — I use Reeder — are a blessing for me. The benefits are two-fold:

1. When somebody publishes something new, I don’t have to remember to check the blog. That means someone who publishes infrequent but high-quality content doesn’t get forgotten about: I subscribe, and their content bubbles up to the surface when I need it to.
2. There’s no algorithm, at all. I pull the content I’m interested in, I read it in an environment I control (no ads, tracking, and so on), and I sort and filter it however I like.

So, less distraction, more high-quality content. Yes please! Here’s some of what I enjoy, when it does bubble up (some of these post quite infrequently)…:

• Craig Mod is an obsession. I think everything he writes is gold. He’s been a huge influence on me.
• Hillel Wayne writes relatively infrequently, but their writing on engineering and formal methods is always salient and interesting.
  • Take June 2021 post on clever vs insightful code, for example.
• Tim Bray writes about tech and life clearly and insightfully.
  • He’s actually quite an interesting character. He’s worked at Sun, Google, and Amazon on standards like XML, ATOM, and JSON. He was a VP at Amazon and left in 2020 (relatively publicly) in protest of their treatment of internal whistleblowers. Tim seems to be a smart and principled person.
• Maciej Ceglowski at Idle Words, too, of course. Maciej seems to see the tech world through the lens of his fine arts education, but with a background of actually having developed and produced software as a living for over a decade, which gives him a fascinating perspective. He’s also a terrific writer.
  • I was quite affected by his writing on the Hong Kong protests a few years ago.
  • He writes really well about all sorts of things. Here’s a great “turns out” story about how, through the 19th century, we completely forgot the cure for scurvy, then discovered it again through blind luck.
  • If you’re a tech-y person, you might also enjoy his tech-adjacent writing and talks. I think of this, reflecting on the history of planes to consider the future of the web, probably once a week.
• Maggie Appleton has a delightful digital garden. It’s a real gem! For the design alone, I adore this site, but her content is really good too.
  • A good place to start would be her essay on the history and ethos of the digital garden, which I imagine must be relatively famous and certainly got me interested in the subject.
  • I’m very jealous that she gets to work at HASH.ai, incidentally. Those folk do some very related stuff to my PhD. Hey, HASH, if you’re ever keen to chat, let me know.
• pudding.cool do some really interesting visual explorations of topics.
  • I don’t keep up with this like I’d like to (in fact, I’ve paused my writing here to add it to my RSS!), but it always bubbles up in my feeds somehow — usually on pinboard’s popular list.
  • This recent article trying to replicate the results of a cool study that they wanted to validate is the latest to rise to the surface.

News and magazines

I’m bad at keeping up with the news (or, is that good?) — but this is what I typically read to get a sense of what’s going on in the world.

• The Guardian, for better or worse.
• The LRB, for better. Discovering that “book review” magazines/journals/whatever are often collections of essays was a revelation. This is great stuff!
• Tortoise Media has impressively good reporting. They focus on what they call “slow news”. Think the news, but publishing less frequently and trying to interrogate the root causes of the issues they report on. I’m bad at keeping up with this stuff, but I’m always glad when I come back to it.