I recently updated my About page with new content I follow alongside old favourites. All resources are available on the About page.
Blogs
- old favourites – Bill Gates, Cal Newport, Bellingcat
- new content – Five Books publishes interviews with experts on various topics and asks for their recommendations. For example, the article The Best Agatha Christie Books recommended by Mathew Prichard, is an interview with Mathew Prichard, a grandson of Agatha Christie and a Chairman of Christie’s estate. This website has hundreds of interviews, so you can easily spend hours browsing different topics and book recommendations.
- Mindcraft Stories (Romanian website). They publish science and technology articles and how new scientific progress will affect our everyday life. For non-Romanian speakers, an option to translate articles is to open this website with Google Chrome, right-click with the mouse and select “Translate to English”.
Newsletters
- old favourites – Caroline Criado Perez (Invisible Women), Quanta Magazine, Ryan Holiday, Subtle Maneuvers
- new content – David Epstein’s Range Widely newsletter. Epstein is the author of Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World, a book I thoroughly recommend.
Podcasts
- new content – 99% Invisible is a podcast focusing on the often overlooked architecture or design features. The name derives from Buckminster Fuller’s quote, “Ninety-nine per cent of who you are is invisible and untouchable.” One of my favourite episodes is about Friederich Froebel, who invented the concept of kindergarten and impacted architects such as Frank Lloyd Wright and Buckminster Fuller, famous for his geodesic domes.
Youtube Channels
- old favourites – ColdFusion, CPR Kids, Emmanuel Acho, Foil Arms and Hog, Julie Nolke, LastWeekTonight, Medcram
- new content – Kurzgesagt – In a Nutshell is an old favourite that I rediscovered recently.
- Never Too Small is a channel dedicated to ingenious solutions adapted to small footprint living. Some of my favourite videos are The Cairo Flat (the versatility of the curtain. Such a simple and sophisticated solution!) or Flexible Minimalist Micro Apartment (every detail is well thought out and adapted to the client’s needs). Some designs are highly personal (Lego collector’s minimalist apartment or Iconic Tokyo Architect’s Tiny House), and few of us could see ourselves living in them. And we shouldn’t try this imagination exercise as the houses are designed for their owners, not the general audience.
- The Atlantic – For my Leonardo da Vinci article, I tried to find a video explaining the tens of pages Walter Isaacson wrote about all of da Vinci’s innovations that helped him paint the Mona Lisa. No better explanation than this 3-minute video from The Atlantic. And so, I subscribed to their Youtube channel simply after watching that video.
With all the newsletters, videos, blogs, and tech resources I need to follow for my job, if I were to consume them as soon as they come, I wouldn’t have any spare time to do anything else or write my own articles.
So, once the newsletters start coming in every week, I move them to the newsletter folder. Then, after a few weeks, on a late Sunday afternoon, I open my Youtube subscriptions page and the 60-70 unread newsletters and blog articles. I make myself a cup of tea, put some Youtube videos in the background and read through this amount of knowledge.
By applying time as a sieve, I filter news from noise. There is a podcast episode on NPR about the fifty-year newspaper. Imagine that instead of trying to keep up with the endless lists of articles, there was a newspaper published every fifty years. What would its headlines be? As the NPR journalists say,
Destruction tends to happen quickly. Progress often is slow. And this combination of sudden, bad things and slow, good things – it kind of messes up the way we see the world. The news is all about bad things – hurricanes, school shootings, fires, all the political fighting. And in the background, these good things happen kind of sort of invisibly.
Some headlines include “Is it Just Me, Or Is it Hot in Here?” (global warming), “Humans to Animals – Drop Dead” (the astonishing rate at which terrestrial animals are eradicated, 60% since 1970), “Poor No More (in the last fifty years, global poverty fall from over 60 per cent to below 10 per cent)”. Many other such headlines from this once every fifty years newspaper would make us realize how much of today’s news culture is dominated by churnalism with click-baiting titles in a hunt for better SEO ranking and accumulating bits and bobs bytes about our identities in the background.
Instead of rushing to read all new content from my subscriptions, I recap the news once every few weeks, following the pattern of the every fifty years newspaper. More often than not, important information from two seconds ago becomes trivial in two weeks. And if I don’t finish all unread articles in a few hours, it’s ok. How many of them would become headlines in the fifty-year newspaper anyways?
Sometimes I prefer to read the podcasts’ transcripts, especially when some episodes are on the heavy side of knowledge. I can finish those articles more quickly by scanning the text, skipping the intro about sponsors, and looking for headlines and main ideas. It does happen that when I read a transcript, I sometimes need to reread a paragraph a few times until I understand it and absorb it. It is much easier to do that with eye scanning than to stop a media player and replay the exact timestamp a few times in a row. For example, the episode about the fifty-year newspaper, you can listen to it here … or read its transcript here. It is obvious which media version I chose for this article.
Another example of listening versus reading a transcript is this hefty episode from Quanta Magazine about Why and How Do We Dream?
At 45 minutes, this podcast episode is something I might not be able to finish in my allotted time of a few hours dedicated to catching up with my news. Read the transcript, and in about 10 minutes, I discover yet another reason to worry: dream engineering and sleep-related tech:
But this technology [sleep-related wearables and dream engineering] is quickly evolving. Now, if you think about the amount of money advertisers are willing to spend to get 30 seconds of your attention. Imagine what they’re willing to spend to get several hours of your attention on a nightly basis for which you have no memory, but for which the effects might be even stronger than anything you could do during wakefulness. Now, we’re not saying this exists now, but we think it’s coming down the pipeline. We’re bombarded with advertisements, on social media, on highways, on television, before films, after films. We also believe that sleep should probably remain one area that is free of these kinds of influences. And I wouldn’t want my great grandchildren to have to pay $10 a month to opt out of advertisement in their dreams, Scott.
As I don’t want to end this article on a terrifying note, I will finish it with another Youtube channel that I prefer, Hildegard von Blingin’ which specializes in the bardcore genre (modern songs in a Medieval or Renaissance key). Some favourites: Holding Out for a Hero, Save Your Tears, Somebody that I Used to Know or Summertime Sadness.