Reading
Since I first began working online in 2016, I have grown and maintained quite a curatorial habit, and therefore sought all sorts of modern curator's tools. The system I settled upon for some five years: a dedicated Reading List channel in Extratone's Discord. It wasn't until this past year that I encouraged something which (so far) has exceeded willy-nilly copy-and-paste of URLs into a single feed. It's an application/bookmarking service called Raindrop which includes tagging, public, RSS-enabled collections, and fairy competent web page archiving. I became a paid subscriber within minutes of discovering its existence, three months ago, and have since integrated it quite hardily in my workflow (including automated reposts in that same Discord channel, for good measure.) For now, the arrangement is sortof experimental, but obviously, I'm rooting for Rustem Mussabekov – sole creator and sentinel of Raindrop.
Raindrop Collections
Favorite Newsletters
An ongoing list of my favorite email publications.
Art & Letters Daily
The Chronicle of Education's ancient “web portal” is a bit overwhelming, but their weekly newsletter has somehow become perhaps my most unmissable email subscription.
Platformer
I have made my tremendous admiration for Casey Newton quite plain over the years. His relentless watch on the social industry is simply superhuman. Recently, he departed The Verge – and therefore his seminal daily newsletter, The Interface, to have a go at independent publishing via substack.
Nextdraft
Dave Pell's Nextdraft newsletter is the only hard news mailer I would ever recommend. If you can stand his puns, you need to subscribe. I've recently reduced my actual clicking on hardnews in a big way, so Nextdraft has become the singular hard news-ish aggregator I make sure to skim regularly.
Memoir Monday
A weekly collaborative effort between Catapult, Longreads, Granta, Guernica, Narratively, and The Rumpus that provides memoirs I actually want to read, which is astonishing.
Tedium
Ernie Smith's Tedium is unlike any other publication on the web.
All-Time Favorites
An ongoing list of some of my absolute favorite reads/listens/watches/otherwise consumables on The Net.
- “Critical Mass” | The New Yorker
- “Indie, rocked” | The Verge
- “What's going on with Elon Musk?” | Search Engine with PJ Vogt
- “Going to a white church in a Black body” | Code Switch
- “Small Works” | DIS Magazine
- “The Lives of Others” – This American Life
- “I’m still here: back online after a year without the internet” – Paul Miller for The Verge
- “Losing Religion and Finding Ecstasy in Houston” | The New Yorker (Jia!! <3)
- “Alone Enough” | Radiolab
- “Cosplayers On Coke, Computers, Communication, Competition, And Lack Thereof” | Morgan Imago
- “Solomun, the D.J. Who Keeps Ibiza Dancing” | The New Yorker
- “The Million-Mile Lexus” | Road & Track
- “The Age of Instagram Face” | The New Yorker
- “Janet Jackson had the power to crash laptop computers” | The Old New Thing
- “Taylor Swift on People Who Call Her 'Calculating'” Chuck Klosterman for GQ
- “They, Then and Now” | The Cut
- “I Finally Reached Computing Nirvana. What Was It All For?” | WIRED
- “The Ladies Room” | Nancy Powaga
- “AppCenter Spotlight: Write.as” | elementaryOS Blog
- “A Great Diversity of Relationships” | CJ Eller
- “What would a real Web3 look like?” | Matt Baer
- “Katie Couric Is Not for Everyone” | The Cut
- “Finding Inspiration Again” | Matt Baer
- “The Airwaves of Navajo Nation “| The Verge
- “On Techno-Orienatalism” | Real Life
- “a comprehensive guide to being really annoying on the internet” | ILL
- “Let’s Learn About Waveforms” | The Pudding
- “The Lottery Hackers” | Huffpost Highline
- “The Curse of the Bahia Emerald” | Wired
- “The Secret Rules of The Internet” | The Verge
- “Why Is Joe Rogan So Popular?” | The Atlantic
- “The Galaxy-Sized Video Game” | The New Yorker
- “Billions Registered” | Wired
- “Philip Roth doesn’t live here anymore” | Forward
- “The Billion-Dollar Disinformation Campaign to Reelect the President” | The Atlantic
- “The Californian Ideology” | Mute
- “Disruption: A Manifesto” | Logic Magazine
- “Rediscovering the Small Web” | Parimal Satyal
- “Is Google Making Us Stupid?” | The Atlantic
- “The myth of an objective press benefits the powerful at the expense of the people” | Media Matters
- “Spies, Lies, and Stonewalling: What It’s Like to Report on Facebook” | Columbia Journalism Review
- “Raiders of the Lost Web” | The Atlantic
- “It wasn’t easy to describe The Outline. That’s what made it great.” | Columbia Journalism Review
- “Come for the Network, Pay for the Tool” | Toby Shorin
- “The Crisis of Intimacy in the Age of Digital Connectivity” | Los Angeles Review of Books
- “Space, Time and DVR Mechanics” | Grantland
- “Fish: A Tap Essay” | Robin Sloan
- “The Sentence is a Lonely Place | The Believer
- “When in Need of the Right Word, Great Writers Simply Make Them Up | LitHub