4.11.2003


Stuff that I am reading


If you're ambition is to grow up to be like Idaho (heaven help you, poor fool) than you have to develop a voracious appetite for news. The easiest way to satisfy a lust for intelligent discourse is not the morning newspaper, (well maybe since it is online) or televison news, but internet media. Most newspapers are also available online for free on the day of publication, and there are also numerous independent webzines that publish outstanding opinon articles about all and sundry.
My favorite webzine and one of the few completely free news websites left standing, is Slate magazine. Slate owes its existence to the help of Microsoft (much of Slate's traffic is routed through Microsft's MSN portal) but the quality of the opinions and writing at Slate is ungodly. Slate doesn't attempt to cover the news in the same way MSNBC.com or CNN.com does but the results are more satisfying since you get the news distilled through the lens of an intelligent writer's opinion. My only beef with Slate is that the journalists are overwhelmingly liberal. My beef is mitigated by the fact that the bias is acknowledge rather than covered in a veneer of journalistic integrity.
The next best way to find breaking news is Google News. I don't consult google for news very often, but the results are always satisfyingly comprehensive. Here's a story about UN involvement in post-war Iraq that I just picked up from the google news homepage. If it is out there google will find it.
The bulk of the most interesting material I read are random links picked up from the web from my start page, Slate.com, MSNBC.com, and random web browsing. Here's some stuff I am reading now:

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