What blogs/newsletters do you subscribe to and why?
Back in the day I was a hardcore Google Reader (RIP) user, and following that I continued to use https://feedly.com/ for many years, but eventually I found myself falling behind on all my feeds and stopped checking it.
Recently, I signed for Inoreader and I've started reading more blogs again. It also has the nice feature of letting you subscribe to email newsletters too, which is quite nice since I find them annoying to deal with in my email inbox but convenient in the feed reader.
I'm wondering what blogs and newsletters folks on Tildes subscribe to.
Here are a few of my favorites:
Blogs:
- bellingcat: Independent investigative journalism often based on online "open source intelligence." e.g. The Boogaloo Movement is Not What You Think
- BLDGBLOG: Geoff Manaugh's blog about everything related to the space we inhabit, both built and natural. e.g. Underground Cathedrals of Radiation and Zones of Irreversible Strain
- Flowing Data: Nathan Yau's blog about data visualization. e.g. Racial Divide
- Idle Words: The blog of Maciej Cegłowski, creator of the Pinboard bookmarking service. Covers tech and lots of unrelated topics. e.g. Superintelligence: The Idea that Eats Smart People
Newsletters:
- BIG by Matt Stoller: A newsletter about economics and in particular the economics of monopolies and disruptive startups. e.g. The Slow Death of Hollywood
- Data is Plural: A weekly newsletter of fun/weird datasets.
- Normcore Tech: Vicki Boykis' newsletter about tech and tech-related things. e.g. The Reign of Big Recsys
- Uses This: Brief interviews with all sorts of creators about what tools they use to do what they do.
This is just a slice. I can share my entire list if people are interested. But I'm curious about what feeds others enjoy, on anything from film and furniture to "movie-set" urbanism. What are you reading?
I don't have any to add myself, but just wanted to second the bellingcat recommendation. They are incredible investigators and consistently put out amazingly detailed and in-depth articles. They were the first to positively identify the Skripal poisoners as members of the Russian GRU: https://www.bellingcat.com/tag/skripal/
And AFAIK also the first to identify the Russian BUK missile system (by tracking its movements through the Ukraine) that took down MH17, and locate its launch site: https://www.bellingcat.com/tag/mh17/
p.s. Idle Words is awesome too. :)
Popular Information. Judd's reporting is just so succinct and feels objective in that he's just following the money, and helping movements like Sleeping Giants pull consumer money from places where they can, and hold them accountable.
What a Day. I love the podcast, and the newsletter is just a good wrap-up to my day and helps me get a concentrated dose of news with sprinkled humor. I just really like the format (especially ending itself with good news) and calls to action.
If I see a blog post that I like, I'll find the RSS feed and add it to my reader. Here is what I've got thus far.
I'm a big fan of all things space exploration, so I'm subscribed to the weekly Orbital Index newsletter and to Jonathan McDowell's monthly (ish) Space Report. Both cool ways to keep up with continuing news and find out about interesting new stuff.
Its paid but agoodmovietowatch.com's newsletters were really good.
https://nextdraft.com/ - daily summary of general US-centric news headlines.
https://popular.info/ - deep dive investigative journalism, primarily US politics.
https://javascriptweekly.com/ - To keep up on the rapidly changing JS world.
Could you share some examples of the feeds that have "stayed good"?