I note all of the reading that I do on a semi-regular basis. I compiled this partially as a reference for myself, and partially to point others to.
Single-author, long-form newsletters
I love reading long-form text. Books, essays, papers—they’re all so much better than spending time on Twitter. This section consists of Substack-style essayists.
I get most of my tech news and analysis from:
- Stratechery by Ben Thompson ($120 / year)
- Platformer by Casey Newton ($100 / year)
Both are delivered four days per week and have high-quality, thoughtful coverage. These are the highest-value publications I subscribe to. I read almost every email within a few hours of it arriving.
I’m also on the free list for:
- Insight by Zeynep Tufecki, on complicated, practical puzzles
- Slow Boring by Matthew Yglesias, on American politics
I will probably end up paying for at least one at some point.
Other Substack publications include:
- Normcore by Vicki Boykis, on data science, mostly
- Gretchen McCulloch’s Newsletter by, well, Gretchen McCulloch, on linguistics and the internet
- New_Public by Civic Signals, on building better digital spaces
Other news
I get most of my regular news from The New York Times. I’ve considered subscribing to The Atlantic, WIRED, and The Verge at various points.
In the pre-COVID world, I loved getting The Morning Paper by Adrian Coyler in my inbox most mornings. It contains paper summaries from a variety of fields in computer science. It remains a huge part of the inspiration for me to write about papers, too.
Aggregators
Publications specifically related to AI and data science include:
- Import AI by Jack Clark
- Data Elixir
- Last Week in AI, formally Skynet Today.
There’s a fair amount of redundancy with them, especially when reporting on high-impact things like GPT-3 or DALL-E. But I value the low precision and high recall of these aggregators, where I’ll readily archive an email if nothing catches my eye and open the things I’m interested in to read later.
Programming and engineering newsletters include Pointer and Python Weekly. Pointer is probably the highest signal-to-noise ratio of any newsletter aggregator that I read, containing thoughtful posts about software engineering, and Python Weekly is another low precision newsletter with occasional gems.
Individual blogs
I also follow a variety of individual blogs:
Finally, I’ll read almost anything that shows up in the Tech Writers Discord community. That includes both drafts and posts that folks want to show off. If you’re interested in building a technical writing habit, please come join us!