Media Audit
Top few sources for each category.
Newspapers
- Financial Times
- Bloomberg
- Seven Days
- News & Citizen
The Financial Times has become my primary daily read for national and international news. I have let VTDigger, VPR, and WCAX go. Seven Days remains my preferred source for state coverage. Local news keeps getting thinner, although Golden Dome's smart summaries have made it much easier to follow the legislature.
As before, I ignore opinion and editorial pages.
Blogs
- Andrew Gelman (Statistical Modeling, Causal Inference, and Social Science)
- Marginal Revolution (occasionally)
- Matt's Weather Rapport
I have phased out RSS reading. The feeds I maintain now are either narrow in focus (a local weather blog, a statistician writing about methodology) or broad enough to be useful as a filter for what is worth paying attention to, as Marginal Revolution has always been. The volume of expert commentary I follow has shrunk considerably, partly by attrition and partly by choice. My judgment, built up through longer-form reading, is doing more of the interpretation.
Podcasts
- In Moscow's Shadows (Mark Galeotti)
- Inside Economics (Mark Zandi / Moody's Analytics)
Podcast subscriptions are down by two-thirds or more from a few years ago. I don't even listen on my phone anymore. Both of what remain are narrowly focused and domain-specific: Russian politics and the U.S. economy. I listen while doing housework rather than as a primary information source. The standard from my last audit still holds: a charismatic speaker can absorb a lot of time while conveying very little.
Books
Currently reading:
- Power Failure: The Rise and Fall of an American Icon (Cowan)
- The Rise of American Democracy: Jefferson to Lincoln (Wilentz)
Recently finished:
- The Making of Oliver Cromwell (Hutton)
- Almost a Miracle: The American Victory in the War of Independence (Ferling)
- Deng Xiaoping and the Transformation of China (Vogel)
- My Years with General Motors (Sloan)
- Mao: The Man Who Made China (Short)
Books have become the center again, partly by design and partly because the present has not been rewarding to follow closely. Lately I'm into organizational history and political biography: how power is accumulated, how institutions are built and degraded, and how individuals navigate systems they did not fully design and cannot fully control.
Television
- The Sopranos (rewatch)
- Succession (rewatch, recently completed)
- Mad Men (rewatch, completed)
The Mad Men rewatch was the most substantive. Watching it non-linearly (season 4 outward) reframed the show for me.
Forums
- Talk Elections (uselectionatlas.org)
- Hacker News
- Bogleheads
Most Influential
- My Years with General Motors (Sloan)
- Mao: The Man Who Made China (Short)
- Mad Men
The voices I named two years ago included economists, a military analyst, and a political consultant. What has changed how I think more recently tends to be longer-form and more removed from the present.