- ACC Kinder. The class blog for my son’s kindergarten class. Infrequent updates, but I like to have the RSS here so I don’t miss anything.
- American Purpose. Long-form essay on classical, constitutional, liberalism. This is a great website of liberal and conservative thought “of the old religion” (i.e., neither woke-progressivism, nor populist-nationalism).
- Cocktails With Suderman. Peter Suderman is a journalist for Reason who started a stubstack in late-2020 on home bartending. It’s great. I can’t afford to being a paid subscriber, but I’ve learned a lot. (Don’t sleep on Rittenhouse, folks!)
- The Diff. A Substack on finance and technology. It’s a recent subscription, and I don’t have a settled opinion.
- Darko Audio. John Darko has the best music first audiophile website you can find. He also has a great YouTube channel. I don’t read Stereophile or Absolute Sound anymore, not because I don’t like reviews of $100k audio equipment the editors think is “modestly priced.” (I actually like that attitude sometimes.) Rather, they are part of an older business model where so much is pay-walled, the ads aren’t good, and writers have a lot of contempt for contemporary music. I don’t have time for that in my daily news reading.
- Dissent. Arguably among the the best intellectual centers of gravity for the democratic left.
- Inframethodology. It’s a writing blog for social science, but really, so much more. If you write for a living, or if writing is important—read this blog.
- Kevin Drum. formerly of The Washington Post and Mother Jones. Drum writes on public policy and is an old school blogger (since 2002, IIRC).
- Paul D. Miller. A personal friend’s Twitter feed. I’m going to think carefully about who I want to subscribe to on Twitter, but I suspect by year’s end, I’ll have a folder of roughly a dozen folks I take seriously enough to read in NNW.
- Ross Douthat. Conservative columnist for The New York Times. IDK if it’s possible to get this feed without the paywall, but since I get the Times from my university, I’ve never bothered to check.
- Stats Modeling & Social Science. Look—this is an inside baseball website. But even for those who aren’t professional social scientists, you can learn a lot if you suck up and read it regularly. I still don’t always get what’s going on, but I’ve learned more than I can mention from this site.
- Dan Wang. Currently with Bloomberg, Dan’s been a technology writer focusing on Asia for a long time.
- Daring Fireball. Mac/Apple Blogger. John was one of the first bloggers I subscribed to in college.
- Analog Planet. Michael Fremer is a rare exception to my aforementioned misgivings about many of the writers of legacy audiophile magazines. But I don’t have a turntable anymore. If I could get a feed of just his music reviews, I’d subscribe in a heartbeat. He’ll be in a folder for the occasional perusal.
- Remodellista. I’m a sucker for good design and this is a terrific website for reading about how good design in your home works. (Do check out their book.) But the website never loads the full page inside RSS and they recently announced a subscription model. I don’t blame for doing so. But the cost/benefit doesn’t work for me right now. If you’re thinking about starting a remodeling project, strongly recommended.
- The Omni Show. I’m sucker for Omnifocus and Omnioutliner. The show is great for nerds like me. But again, it is not, strictly speaking, an essential.
- Real Clear Defense. An off-shoot of the venerable Real Clear Politics, RCD focuses on national security news. It’s so good, I include it on my syllabi for students. But the RSS is a kind of a mess. I’m sure someone who know UI/UX better than I call explain why, but this site just works better on the webpage. You can see the links, the author, and the site where it appears. It makes it much easier to scan for important things.
- The Pull Request. Antonio Garcia Martinez' Substack. Good. But I culled anyway to see if I miss reading his work.
- Glass
- Flickr
- Literal
- Mastodon
- Twitter (but only if you’re a professional academic or into national security)
📰 Mathematical Thinking Isn’t What You Think It is, Quanta Magazine
Whenever you spot a disconnect between what your gut is telling you and what is supposed to be rational, it’s an important opportunity to understand something new. And then you can start this game of back-and-forth. Can you articulate your gut instinct and place it within a rational discussion?
“I don’t at all expect to resolve the Riemann hypothesis,” he says. “But we hope that wondering about something we don’t understand will help find something that is beautiful or maybe even useful.”
“Sensational Breakthrough” on the Reinmann hypothesis
Currently reading: War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy 📚
Part of the year-long book club with Footnotes and Tangents on Substack.
I might have to steal this great idea for 2024.
And with that, I just finished a full year with Ryan Holiday’s daily stoic journal. What a process. 2022 was hodgepodge, stochastic, and inconsistent. But once I got going, keeping it going became a major focus of my daily habits this year. 📚
📚2024 War and Peace book club, Footnotes and Tangents, Substack
I’m joining, come do it with me! We start tomorrow, one chapter per day.
Want to read: Beyond Revenge by J. B. Minton 📚
JB is on Substack. Never heard of him before, but now I’m hooked. This one is near the top of my 2024 queue.
Kaczor on Rapinoe’s miss kicked ⚽️
I don’t often agree with Megan Rapinoe’s outspoken politics, but these attacks of her reaction are deeply unfair. The poet William Blake would have understood. In his “Proverbs of Hell,” Blake wrote, “Excess of sorrow laughs. Excess of joy weeps…"
One of my students emailed to tell me he read the Declaration of Independence this morning. My work here is done. God bless, America! 🇺🇸🇺🇸🇺🇸
“If you argue with a madman, it is extremely probable that you will get the worst of it; for in many ways his mind moves all the quicker for not being delayed by the things that go with good judgment. He is not hampered by a sense of humour or by charity, or by the dumb certainties of experience. He is the more logical for losing certain sane affections. Indeed, the common phrase for insanity is in this respect a misleading one. The madman is not the man who has lost his reason. The madman is the man who has lost everything except his reason.”
—G.K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy
🤯 James Webb telescope detects evidence of ancient ‘universe breaker’ galaxies
“It’s bananas,” said Nelson. “These galaxies should not have had time to form.”
I’m struggling to put into words my grief over the passing of Pope Benedict. I learned so much about the faith from his writings, and his sermons. He became an intellectual north star for me at a formative time in my life. His abdication taught me humility beats ambition.
I didn’t watch the Super Bowl, didn’t even see scores until the morning. I’m surprised how deeply content I am with that. 🏈
What's in my RSS right now
Earlier in the week, I posted on what apps and subscriptions I have currently, going into 2022. I thought it was helpful to clarify for myself where my financial commitments were going. Even free apps will use data—either data that I pay for, or data that I create in using it—or my time, both of which have financial implications. I thought, therefore, it might also be helpful for me to sketch out what I am consuming in RSS right now. As I said before, nearly everything is inside Net News Wire, an original RSS reader for the Mac with a protracted, yet storied provenance.
In addition to reading both the NYT and WSJ most weekday mornings, a common theme you’ll find here a heterogeneous and eclectic mix of political writers and websites, from social-democrats, to libertarians, to constitutional-conservatives. Much of these readings patterns are functions of my day job, but also of adding, dropping, and re-adding websites and writers who continually show up in places I respect. My goal is to have a broad mix in my morning reads. Basically, if I don’t finish the queue on any given day, it all gets marked as read and I don’t worry about what I missed.
On my Laptop
Synced to iCloud
What’s getting dropped, or has been dropped
That’s it. I wonder how this list will shape up through the year. I know it’s changed a lot since last year, and I regret not writing down where my news consumption was back then.
Daily Stoic Journal
📚 I’m teaching a course on political leadrship this semester (only ten days until classes start!), and among the required books for my students is Ryan Holiday’s The Daily Stoic Journal. It’s a daily journal with prompts and reflections from the stoics. I am integreating it with our readings because I hope to teach them the art of critical self-reflection.
But as a teaching method, I decided I would practice what I preach and do it with them. Although I keep a semi-daily journal of professional things, like research notes, this seemed like a fun challenge. They won’t start until the first day of class. That’s by design, so that I have a head start to think about how the daily prompts are working for me.
Not quite a New Year’s Resolution—more like a new semester experiment. But since it coincides with the new year, I guess we’ll count it but with the asterisk.
Resolved, 2022
TL;DR: My changes, and updates for (mostly) personal social media use
I’m very much looking forward to making Microblog my digital center of gravity in the new year. I came back to it in the spring after trying, then quitting it, back in 2018. I relied on it, a lot this year. I expect to be more active in 2022. But, I’ll still be around in other places.
I don’t “do” resolutions, but this year almost made me
I haven’t done a new year’s resolution in over a decade. I forget where I learned it, or heard it first, but I concluded that if you want to resolve to do something, then resolve today. Waiting until the new year is—or, at least, can be—a form of procrastination. It wasn’t Seth Godin, but he once wrote something similar, namely that the most important blog post is the one you write, today.
Moreover, resolutions usually fail, or at least they did for me, because they often aren’t clearly defined SMART Goals. “Lose weight,” or “read more” don’t work because they lack a measurable objective as in “lost x-number of pounds by summer by working out at least three days per week and cutting out fast food runs.” None of this is particularly surprising or revolutionary to anyone who’s read books on contemporary goal setting.
But a new year is a time to reflect, to take an inventory of one’s time and attention. It is a natural break, and it is natural that we all are reflecting on our lives in a semi-collective way. As much as I am loath to read yet another year-in-review post, I am also eager to see what changes and lessons others have learned over the last year.
This year seems to me to be especially reflective as the end of the pandemic seems to be within eyesight. All reasonable estimations that I’ve read think that after this current omicron wave subsides, we should be more or less done with it. (To be fair, they said that before the Delta variant. Hope spring eternal.) If those estimates hold, the pandemic as a social phenomenon will have lasted 2 years (give or take when the first wave hit one’s region of the world). I’ve noticed a palpable sense among almost everyone that January will be a sort-of collective psychological ending to this whole thing.
Sure, we’ll still have to take reasonable pre-caution, and governments may still yet impose various restrictions which may or may be be sound policy; and yes, thousands of people are still going to die from the virus. But even with those caveats, many folks—liberal, conservative, pro-vaccine or anti, religious or secular—seem ready to use the New Year as a mental demarcation point. I welcome that.
Reflections on the year
I got sidetracked from a lot of professional and personal projects. Although I managed to get my first peer-reviewed publication during the pandemic, my book manuscript lingered, and my leisure reading and music listening more or less collapsed to name a few. I ceased being more deliberate about my media consumption and, as a result, I was spending more time aimlessly when I already knew that these apps are designed to do precisely that.
But although I was aware of the friction, I think it provided a way to feel connected even though I was becoming less connected. And besides, I was connecting with old friends who I had lost touch with during my doctorate and early years of marriage. So, I ignored the friction to an extent.
But the friction, man. It took some time to identify what has been bothering me about social media. Much of the social media landscape has changed, often (not always) for the worse. Twitter is an example. Contrary to popular opinion, I don’t think it’s anything the company is doing. Rather, the social landscape has shifted. When I signed up for Twitter in late-2008, it was because a good friend messaged me that there was a taco truck in LA using Twitter to broadcast its location throughout the day. I demurred the thought of microblogging until then. All the way from Philadelphia, they were the first account I followed.
Now, Twitter is mostly a public forum for elites to yell at other elites. (Indeed, the collective yelling distorts reality and doesn’t represent real life.) You’re expected to be “on brand.” That’s fine, but it wasn’t why I originally signed up. I considered quitting it, but I accept that there’s some utility to be had, provided that it is a different value proposition than 13 years ago.
Intentionality
So what am I doing if I’m not making resolutions? Well, I decided to be more deliberate about my digital habits. I synced my Twitter with Microblog, I’m experimenting with Mastodon, and dramatically cutting down on consumption. I’ll still be on Twitter, but mainly to interact with colleagues and friends I’ve made there.
I am, joyfully, deleting Instagram. Long story short, my wife convinced me because I like taking photos but I wasn’t sharing them outside of niche sites like Flickr. (Niche in the sense that outside of dedicated photography circles, few know about it, even now.) But where IG was a great place for photography, the center of gravity of sharing photos is elsewhere. I spent the better part of the other day getting my archive to import to Microblog (thanks, @manton).
Eg., I recently unsubscribed from well over a dozen podcasts, maybe two dozen. Now I have three, tried and true. Between work and the kids (really, just the kids), my disposal free-time isn’t what it used to be. I love that—but I had another friction point in my life (namely feeling guilty about missing this episode or that interview, ignoring the episode for weeks while I do other things, and eventually bulk delete the backlog).
And don’t get me started on email. It took all of December and most of November. But my daily inbox of email is in the single digits. That’s a huge start.