- 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.
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.
A year ago was a rough day for Americans. I wrote this shortly after, and I’d like to think it holds up.
🗞 Your Attention Didn’t Collapse, It Was Stolen
Brutal. See also, Deep Work
🗞 Why has classical music declined? - Marginal REVOLUTION
Tyler mentions them, but I’m going with two wars that destroyed European culture and technologies that shifted “music” from the score to the recording (read: personality).
Here’s a (possibly) mind-blowing fact: just about every time you load a web page on a browser, or click to a new experience inside an app, there’s code being run that sends your data to an ad exchange, which then broadcasts that data to hundreds of potential bidders (themselves connected to countless actual advertisers). For every click of yours, picture a dense bundle of data going into the cloud and instantly duplicating into hundreds of copies to thousands of servers, each one accessing millions of rows of data to figure out who you are. That’s the pulsing, arterial information flow of the modern mobile internet, and it beats billions of times a day.
Jobs outlook for the summer
Lot of intereesting stuff on the jobs data, From the Washington Post, via @Pratik earlier today:
It’s not a ‘labor shortage.’ It’s a great reassessment of work in America.
But Scott Sumner called it awhile ago
Because millions of unemployed workers in low pay service sector jobs earn more on unemployment than they did on their previous jobs, and because most of those jobs are unpleasant, employment will likely remain quite depressed all summer, before bouncing back in the fall. That’s not to say the economy won’t grow. The end of Covid makes it likely that sectors such as travel will pick up, but the quality of service will be lousy, perhaps the worst of my entire life.
Put differently, while the WaPo and Sumner are not talking strictly the same thing, there will be a lot of movement in the labor sector in the coming months. Lots.
The Crypto State?
Bruno Maçaes, writes at City Journal
But here are my provisional suggestions on how things could go. The critical issue is, of course, taxation. It is here that crypto issues the more determinate challenge to the core powers of the modern nation-state. Some in the crypto space believe that the slow erosion of the state’s tax powers will eventually determine its final collapse, at least as we know it today. Others have told me that they expect all nation-states to disappear over the coming decades, with the notable exception of China, which alone, they maintain, has the political and social resources to penetrate or disable fundamental choke points in the crypto system. China is responsible for something between half and two-thirds of global Bitcoin mining, but local authorities have made it clear that they regard the crypto space with enormous suspicion. In 2017, China banned fund-raising through initial coin offerings, and all digital-currency exchanges were shut down. If Beijing decides to cut off the Bitcoin network in China, it could make it hard for mining pools to sync their data on blockchain with the rest of the world.
The Chinese case does offer a possible template for the ongoing power rivalry between crypto and nation-states. In this scenario, crypto systems would double down on their technological superiority, while states would necessarily appeal to their secret weapon: the monopoly of the legitimate use of physical force. But a second scenario seems much more plausible, at least outside China. Public authorities and crypto systems could reach a grand bargain or agreement, whereby the state would be able to tax crypto-assets in exchange for security guarantees for crypto. Legacy institutions and structures in the political world aren’t going away anytime soon, so it’s critical for blockchain projects to be able to interface with them. I believe that legacy systems can also benefit from this. The Swiss canton of Zug has taken initial steps in this direction: recently, it announced that beginning in 2021, taxes can be paid using Bitcoin and Ether.
Why the debate might have been the best in 20 years
It’s been a busy news week, and I forgot to post this. I wrote up a short piece arguing what has been a minority view on the debate. While the debate may have been overshadowed by the growing number of cases inside the upper-reaches of American government, I still wanted to get this note out here.