Well, I decided to bury my longstanding grudge against The Washington Post, and actually shelled out for the on-line subscription. So, now I read a lot more Washington Post. As the paper of record for a company town, it still has its flaws, but recently its had a pretty good run of not seriously pissing me off.
Before the election I had an semi-regular habit of listening to AM talk radio, Sean Hannity and Rush Limbaugh were on during my afternoon driving times, and I had some idea that it was important to understand the world view of their audiences.
Since the election, I've decided the worldview has come down to, "Up yours, liberals," and that anything else would be a better use of my time.
(It was lots of fun to listen to Limbaugh the day after Obama was elected though.)
The charitable giving thing kills me. I have promised myself that once the kids are out of college, I'll start properly. But the combination of life, retirement, and college? My level of giving is shameful.
Other than the WP, I stopped looking at Twitter, hid a bunch of people on Facebook, and started reading TPM a bit more often than I had.
I haven't really gotten organized around staying informed -- I've been pretty parasitic off you guys and other friends. (Which, given my friends, leaves me pretty well on top of things, but I'm not proactively keeping ahead of stories unless someone links.)
I am still leaning on "my personal life is disrupted enough that I'm not really responsible for being a good citizen this year, the rest of you can handle it." Although let me tell you I am unimpressed with the people of the US while I've been slacking.
I also gave up twitter. I find I pay less heed to the BBC, but this wasn't a conscious decision. I follow a lot more sciency groups on fb instead.
OUT: WaPo, Paul Krugman
IN: Guardian, Rude Pundit
I'm still into Twitter, maybe even more so.
More WaPo, TPM.
A lot less LGM. Something about the election made the blog almost unreadable to me (EMAILS! EMAILS! EMAILS! I know I know I know, enough already). I still do read the FPP's but it's rare that I comment and I've been around there commenting since they opened shop.
I started reading MetaFilter a lot. I don't know why I never used to. But it's fairly apolitical, mostly.
I canceled my (online-only) subscription to the Times about a month ago and have gradually been unfollowing everyone, except my very closest friends, in my facebook feed. I stopped listening to NPR, even accidentally, during the primaries. I look at TPM a couple of times/day, I guess, though JMM's writing is harder on me than it used to be. I only check twitter if someone links to it. I haven't watched television news since the Swiftboating of Kerry. I'll soon consume no media at all, I guess
We're very charitable, but only because we're better people than the rest of you.
TPM is starting to get on my nerves. It doesn't seem to be breaking all that much news these days and isn't particularly fast as a news aggregator. And I really dislike it's house style in terms of the way it contextualises news.
That said, I still read it. Just a lot less avidly than I sued to.
I've also stopped reading Guardian editorials, but frankly I did that a long time ago and it has nothing to do with Trump or even Brexit.
I find myself reading the WaPo far more than I did under Obama or Bush.
Of course I would make a typo in a peeve about house style.
9: Yeah. The 2016 primary/election has kind of spoiled LGM for me as well, and I've been reading and commenting there since about 2005.
Like almost everyone I know, I find that I don't miss any of the media that I forswear. I also don't think I become any happier, though, as my life becomes uncluttered.
I stopped reading Pierce- just too overwrought.
I read twitter a lot more, feeds of the same people whose blogs I used to read, and I hate myself for it. But Krugman has stopped blogging almost entirely and has move to twitter-only aside from his columns.
We made a couple large anti-Trump donations at the end of last year- planned parenthood and ACLU. But our overall giving as percentage of income is still well below what I sense is considered "acceptable."
We (well my wife) subscribed to NYT after the election even though I get it free through work, but I'm reconsidering that with at their recent fuckups.
I subscribed to JMM's prime even though I don't use the associated features.
My wife, who is still abroad, was confused about the whole Comey situation, I think she's only been reading NYT and things people link on FB. She said she couldn't figure out if he is a good guy or bad guy so I had to explain that he's just an idiot who sucked up to Republicans in public and thought that would somehow protect him, and it remains to be seen how aggressively his investigation was actually pursuing Trump.
This is cute though- my 12 year old is texting me nonstop right now about all the supposedly secret stuff he found online. He's taking a white-hat beginners hacking course and they just learned about google filters and structuring searches and he's telling me how he thinks he found all this secret stuff from the CIA website and Congress armed service committee about nuclear weapons and confidential presentations and biomedical info from all kinds of people.
Hmmm, maybe I should get my kid some Junior White Hat training.
I've completely avoided Twitter. I get a little info from my FB feed but the liberals tend to post only the more bothersome stuff and my few conservative friends mostly post stuff from sites so far right I can't take them seriously. I'd kind of like a right wing news source that was at least moderately reliable. Sullivan used to serve that role (sort-of) but his blog is shut down and now he only writes stuff occasionally. He was the furthest right of the writers I can stomache. For mainstream news I listen to NPR, the beeb, read the WaPo, NYT, Guardian, and occasionally the Washington Times when I need a boost of anger hormones. Oh, and the Wall Street Journal front page gets a quick peruse every time I go to Starbucks because it's at the top of the pile of Newspapers.
For me, I gave to ProPublica and the Guardian, subscribed to the Atlantic. I follow a bunch of journalists and foreign papers on Twitter. Greece, Turkey, Venezuela, and Mexico all have stuff going on. I keep my twitter manageable by getting rid of most people who actually write stuff rather than posting links.
I give to MSF and sporadically to ActBlue. I'd like to give to a local pro-immigrant charity, have a list to start with but haven't worked out how to assess what makes sense. I signed up for SwingLeft, I'll participate in a at least a few get-out-the-vote events.
19: Sullivan is back, writing a weekly blog in New York Magazine: http://nymag.com/tags/interesting-times/
I read the Guardian (of course - and what's wrong with their editorials, she asks proprietorially?), but balance it out with a nauseating addiction to Daily Mail comment threads. I'll flick through the accessible content on the Telegraph and occasionally glance at the BBC, but get most breaking news by following a bunch of journalists and news organizations of different stripes on Twitter, mostly in English but some in Japanese. I keep meaning to subscribe to the FT and Nikkei, but they're expensive.
Two most notable changes: I stopped following the water news, because I'm saturated with federal politics. And, mid-2016, I stopped being able to tolerate words on the radio. Even lyrics. I switched to the classical/jazz station, even though I don't really know either format. But it is better than hearing words when my attention is already full.
Besides that, I am reading all the blogs and the twitters and gorging on it all. Although I still don't have internet at home, so all that does end at the end of the workday.
but balance it out with a nauseating addiction to Daily Mail comment threads.
You poor dear.
Oh, I would give a long answer here if I had time. I have been observing the fascinating experiment of letting my Google news feed become auto-personalized into uselessness based on a few intensive story-tracking bouts last year. LGM is hard to take on the snark/rhetorical outrage end, but Loomis still comes up with good substance fairly often. I wish there were less SadlyNo-style filler and more battleships.
Charitable giving mostly aimed outside the US, pretty high this year, but election has coincided with trying to dig out of a financial hole that will take at least the rest of the year. I can't decide whether having relatively high taxes and no mortgage is more or less devastating than gaining five pounds. Can someone help me meditatively knead my highlighted bangs and/or pass the coconut water?
As previously mentioned, during the Bush II administration I read politics online so obsessively that it inarguably delayed the completion of my dissertation, and was bad for me in numerous other ways as well. I have been keen not to repeat the experience, although I do find it very difficult at times like now to stop looking for the newest little morsel.
Out for me are almost all of the smaller lefty blogs I used to read, some because they're gone, some because they grew tiresome, but mostly because I find I don't now need something I did back then -- convincing. I needed to hear the arguments and the outrage both to feed my confidence as a right-to-left convertee, and b/c I foolishly believed it was important that I be able to debate the issues persuasively.
I still read Drum partly out of habit, and partly because he's a good outrage calibrator for me, and because unlike nearly all of the rest of them, he sometimes does unexpected things and a little bit of actual reporting in the form of data crunching. But mostly, you guys and my IRL friends are the only outraged liberals I want to hear from anymore. (And I agree with everything already said upthread about JMM. This verbal throat-clearing tick of his has always irritated me.)
I had never read the Guardian before moving to the UK, and I like it. I have been meaning to ask the crowd here for other suggestions for UK news. I had also never read the Washington Post before and although their visual design decisions give me a headache, I have been surprised at how much I like it. I read the NYTimes but slightly hate myself for it. Same w/Slate. I read ProPublica when I remember that it exists (and have given them money). Salon, unfortunately, is a lost cause. I occasionally miss Gawker. If I want in-depth political commentary to help process the latest outrage, the New York Review of Books and London Review of Books both have pretty good bloggy sections now.
I've pretty much never watched teevee news except C-Span during the Bush years. i used to listen to a lot of NPR-based podcasts but for general news I have given up on them. To my surprise (because I hate the magazine), I find that I really like The Monacle's news digest podcasts, The Daily and Midori House, mostly because I like Andrew Muller who often reads. (They do have some pretty stupid guest analysts, though). I still like On the Media from WNYC -- their editorial meeting show after the election was really very interesting -- and Open Source and Reveal are both good.
Today's xkcd seems relevant to this thread, and sums up my feelings about social media in general.
I need to find an excuse to use the statement "That squid is a neoliberal".
I stopped watching all TV news sometime during the Bush administration. When Trump got elected, I (finally) subscribed to the NYTimes, and signed up to donate monthly to the ACLU.
I'm also donating monthly to our local food bank (money, not canned goods, because I hear that works better), which I didn't do before Trump.
I donated to ActBlue over the healthcare fiasco.
And I read, besides the NYTimes, the Guardian and the Washington Post, which I'd love to also subscribe to, except I'm at my limit of funding for news now. The Guardian keeps asking me to give them money, and I feel guilty every time I don't.
I used to give money to Kiva, but I decided to give it to my local food bank instead. I feel a little bad about this, since obviously people in Central America (where I mostly sent my money) are worse off than people in Fort Smith, but on the other hand, so many of my students are single mothers with kids they can't feed, and the food bank kept running out of food.
Largely unchanged - I subscribed to TPM Prime about this time last year, and still read it. Most of my news I get from the FT and the BBC. UK politics from the Guardian (when I can face it), US from Mother Jones and here, and my still-fruitful Google News alert for the word "ekranoplan".
And the Times of India, of course.
Oh -- I picked the NYTimes over the WPost b/c the Times gave me an educator's deal that was too good to pass up.
I wonder if the Post would do the same? I should email them.
No real change. I basically stopped following news years ago. I've been thinking about subscribing to the FT, but money. Also I'm leery of the time it would consume. What has happened, probably unrelatedly, is my fiction reading falling off a cliff. In the past 6 months I think I've started and abandoned three novels and finished only one (which hardly counted, like 100 pages long). I've abandoned novels before, but the intensity is unprecedented.
24 Agree on the Loomis content, I was almost going to add that as an aside. As for the snarkiness there's one commenter boosted to FPP status who I used to adore as a commenter but whose posts I find border on unreadable. I guess once you stop paying attention to the comment threads there you begin to become less aware of all internet traditions.
I like LGM more than ever, though I'm sick of hearing about the emails. I like having an outlet for venting over the things that annoy me the most these days: Republicans, the feckless media, dumb leftists.
I read the FT every day for actual news; a twitter feed groomed into lists, where I look at "Amusing", "Nerd", "Real People", "Security" and God" in more or less that order with any time left over spent in Guardian and Svenskar. Very little Facebook. I find the Guardian site immensely frustrating to navigate on a phone. I have a bot to read the Mail for me. Never watch television or listen to the radio news. If it matters, it will be everywhere in a couple of hours' time; if it doesn't the atmosphere of superficial piety and ritualised aggression will just poison my morning.
I try so far as possible to read more poetry in the face of disasters.
24, 32: The EMAILS! factor is mainly due to Lemieux's tendency to write the same post over and over. He spent years doing the same thing with "No, single payer wasn't a realistic option" posts.
I read the Guardian (of course - and what's wrong with their editorials, she asks proprietorially?)
Present company excepted, of course. I'm talking more about the likes of Harris and Orr and Freedland and Moore, who I used to read occasionally. Gary Younge's about the only one of their political columnists I still like. Garton Ash most of the time too, I guess, though I'll admit I haven't read one of his Graun pieces for a while.
I had never read the Guardian before moving to the UK, and I like it. I have been meaning to ask the crowd here for other suggestions for UK news.
The FT is the only other daily paper worth reading for news. Private Eye is good for what it does, most of the time, provided you bear its hobby-horses in mind and take things with a pinch of salt. Sometimes it gets things really horribly wrong (eg MMR) and it can take a long time to move on (it doesn't often admit its mistakes).
One more thought-- I moved about two years ago. Since then, I hardly ever drive to my office, so not much NPR, and I switched to streaming services, so TV news requires actively seeking out, and I basically put it on only when guests request it.
One more way that cities and not-cities are different in the US.
For quickly getting the "front page" news of the day online, the Guardian has replaced the NYT for me. The NYT has been such a shameless bad actor in US politics for so long that I don't even want to give them the page visits.
My media? Same as before the election: you guys and Facebook, and my circle of friends is mostly a bunch of outraged liberals, and sometimes the front page of Reddit or local community of it. I have a few centrist or wingnut friends-of-friends, so I'm not in a complete bubble, but pretty close. Cassandane listens to NPR a lot and I don't avoid it but I don't pay much attention either. She gets news from other sources too. She'll often tell me about the latest outrage when she gets home or over dinner and half the time I've gleaned the basics of it from the above sources.
My charitable giving? Before the election, it was zero, unless you want to count giving a dollar to a beggar when I was in just the right mood. For a few years I had set up a monthly donation to the ACLU, but that stopped in 2012 for a petty reason. (I was annoyed by continued solicitations for more money.) After the election I set up monthly donations for them, Planned Parenthood, and the local food shelf.
My political engagement? As I've mentioned, very little. Sometimes the family has gone to a local group trying to help Democrats in nearby swing districts, but when we do, I'm usually running around keeping Atossa busy while Cassandane actually participates in the meeting. Sometimes Cassandane just goes to the meeting alone. I figure the full attention of one adult is worth more than two adults distracted by a toddler.
The NYT has been such a shameless bad actor in US politics for so long that I don't even want to give them the page visits.
Yes.
I'm with Walt in 33 on LGM. The nature of the comment system has always made that aspect of the blog near-unreadable to me, but it provides an important sanity check for me.
Otherwise, not much change for me. Still read JMM, Drum, NYT regularly. I read Chait but have largely given up on Pierce, who I agree with SP is a bit over-the-top for me. I really admire the WaPo coverage, but don't read much of it for some reason. Same for the Guardian.
I less religiously read Vox, 538 and Salon. Still read more Slate than I ought to.
A day or two after the election, I mass-ignored a bunch of folks on Facebook, and immediately improved my mental health.
I was at a family gathering recently, and a favorite nephew mentioned an important biographical detail that he had put on Facebook. I was surprised I had missed it; then remembered that he is full of bad crazy politics in a way that absolutely required me to hide his stuff.
I still start my days with Drum; there are more days where that's all I get to. Otherwise, I'll often visit here and Scalzi's blog after. Once or twice a week I'll carve out time to catch up with Marcotte, Lithwick, and Digby.
Facebook is a lot of time, as it's the primary way my wife and I communicate through they day on both personal and business fronts.
The big change is TV; we eagerly anticipate new Full Frontal, and catch John Oliver within a few days. Daily Show is gone--they want visits direct to their website, which just doesn't happen.
Giving is terrible; I turned inward at the end of last year, dealing with Dad's death and didn't do the traditional end of year giving. My wife got us NYT subscriptions, and I give monthly to Mother Jones after their deeply researched pieces last year, in addition to subscribing to their magazine. Planned Parenthood, NOW, and environmental groups have fallen in giving, while the ACLU came to the fore.
I would probably read Salon, but it freezes my computer every time I open it.
Yes. Salon was just unreadable, for technical reasons.
43.2: I meant to mention that my FB feed isn't as politically curated. I live in a pretty conservative area of the state, and my friends tend to be generally conservative, though with a mix of actual conservative, reflexively trump supporting, and "pox on all parties, but guns are great".
The trump supporter is public enough that my wife avoids him in person--the taint is just too indelible for her. On the other hand, his opinions are all ill rooted but shallow; he can be educated out of most positions, but falls for the same framing on the next issue and the next. (In other words, he graciously concedes all specific points, but holds to his worldview and rabidly supports each new idiotic point until "no, the world is more complex than that" sinks in. And he never learns the general lesson to not take "sunshine and unicorns" promises at face value.)
44,45: This is why I never visit the site.
"pox on all parties, but guns are great"
The penis can bring pox.
And, mid-2016, I stopped being able to tolerate words on the radio. Even lyrics.
Omg this is me, too. On my commute, 95% of the time I sit in silence. I dwell on things that please me, I plan my day, I think about problems that need solving. If I were bored, I'd turn on the radio, but so far that hasn't come up. Probably pre-2016, though.
Twitter, and I'll follow a Sargent link to the WaPo now and again, or a Marshall link to TPM maybe just a little more often (but certainly not daily). Non-political news mostly FB links. No TV since the Olympics, and not much netflix in the last several months. My principal vice is Larison, and the occasional troll of Dreher's unhinged following.
I'm giving time more than money. In addition to my local Dem officer position (from which I did not get purged this week!), I'm on the board of a local arts educational center (and donate), and am president of a long-distance hiking trail association.
I've never liked talk radio of any kind, whether liberal, conservative, or nothing to do with politics at all.
For me, radio = music and nothing else.
My news sources have expanded considerably during and since the election. For national news I used to mainly read Slate, NYT, and TPM, to which I've added WaPo, NY magazine, 538, and Politico (which is annoying in tone but apparently the preferred outlet for leaks from the administration so excellent in coverage). Since the health-care bill became a big topic I've started reading Vox more regularly too. I link a lot of stuff on FB, and that structures my news consumption to some extent. I also read a lot of stuff other people link there.
After the election I subscribed to TPM and my local paper. I've considered subscribing to NYT and WaPo but haven't yet and may not.
My giving has mostly been political rather than charitable, primarily to local races and the special elections. Doing more charitable giving is a thing I've been meaning to do but haven't followed through on so far. I went to a volunteer training on Wednesday for the local refugee resettlement agency, but since they aren't getting any new refugees right now and may not for a while they don't seem to have a huge need for volunteers. The monthly Young Dems meeting is tomorrow; since we aren't in an active election cycle that's been fairly quiet lately but there's been talk about ramping up outreach efforts so I might get involved in some of that.
1. We're all going to die.
2. I haven't returned to the GWB-era blogs, except for TPM, which I still appreciate.
3. We're all going to die.
Kind of on topic: These are great ways to worry less. I'm thinking of stealing my son's.
Any worthwhile Twitter lists or particular people to follow?
Aristegui Noticias is good for Mexico, in Spanish. Mustafa Akyol for Turkey.
I am kind of unhappy for no good reason, looking at cheerful images. Milton Glaser tennis player is very nice.
Design blog, mostly books and music
Try to avoid TV news even more than before. My wife likes to watch the weekday national and local to "get a sense of what others are hearing" but I have to remove myself of hearing range. We added the WaPo to the NYT (very mixed feelings on NYT*, but my NYer wife is very attached), reading more WaPo. Still use Twitter as my interface and read way too many links to all sorts of places. Liking TPM and Drum somewhat more.
On giving, main add has been things like ActBlue Healthcare, and a gift this xmas to kids and sibs of money with a list of suggested places to donate it.
*One of my retirement projects will be my long form rant on how NYTimes played a pivotal role in the soft coup in the US over the last 20 years. Complete with many, many footnotes...
I can't wait for Stormcrow's Retirement Blog.
57: It's sad, because Stormcrow media rants are one of the Internet's premiere art forms.
I think I better work for another 25 years, but I want to retire.
59, 61: Don;t worry I'm only retiring from work not from being an asshole on the internet.
I read the sites teo listed in 53 (minus Vox and 538), plus Reveal/Center for Investigative Reporting, ProPublica, and The Marshall Project. I tried to cancel my NYT subscription, but they dropped my price for online access to $5/month, so I figured I might as well keep it. I also discovered that people with .edu email addresses can request free student access to WaPo.
My only regular charitable donation is a small monthly gift to Scarleteen. When my budget allows, I give cash to the local food bank, and I almost always donate an extra dollar at the cash register to whatever charity is being featured.
I listen to NPR in the car. Can't stand television news, and haven't been able to watch tv punditry since Obama's first term. Over the past two years I've become more likely to watch hearings on C-SPAN.
While I'm on the subject, Scarleteen remains an amazing, independent sexuality and relationships education resource, and it has continued to grow and add services even as the founder has been dealing with some major medical challenges (disclosure: she's a good friend). For those of you who want to increase your charitable giving, it'd be awesome if you could throw them $5-10/month. I think they've now worked out an easy tax-deductible way to give: https://donatenow.networkforgood.org/1433116
(Oh, duh. I just remembered that NPR is my other regularly scheduled donation.)
During the Chimperor's reign, I read blogs, but didn't comment. Ditto PBHO (PBUH). Now ... I read and comment. And watch Maddow. And ... ugh. comment. Obsessively.
Donations: I used to donate to various places. Now .... half goes to Planned Parenthood and other women's rights groups. And sure, I donate more, but I should have done that before.
One thing that's changed (slightly off-topic): I disowned any Twitler-voters from my social circle. But I'm finding it impossible to converse with "my wingnut uncle" (not really my uncle -- a former colleague who didn't vote for Smallgloves, but is otherwise really, really right-wing) who sends me links from RWNJ Puke Funnel outlets. As in: I told him not to send 'em, and after a couple of repeats, lblocked him.
Which is something I would never have done in the past. It's a sign perhaps, that Reverse Midas has turned me to shit, too. I used to be able to look past that sort of behaviour. And I repeatedly entertain fantasies of sending those Trumpist ex-friends taunting emails. Won't do it, but it's bad enough, fantasizing.
The anger/rage and fear of the future borders sometimes on distress-making.
I am trying figure out places I might want to volunteer with my theoretically increased spare time. Voter rights and helping register and turn out voters are an area of interest. Possibly more involvement in the local Dem party. We'll see.
58: I can't wait for Stormcrow's Retirement Blog
Assume diligence not in evidence.
Back in Bush days there was a site I liked to read that was an aggregator of news articles about the US in foreign media but I forget its name (and it may not exist anymore). Would like to find a decent one to start doing that again. Found this one, but not impressed so far.
It's interesting, the people who don't want to listen to talking anymore. I kind of understand it, but also I spend quite a lot of time working alone at tasks that don't require much concentration (aka bench work) and although I like music, it's also often a comfort to have interesting people talk at me.
But I *have* dropped all the call-in shows because people who call in are mostly idiots and the hosts become secondary idiots by having to be respectful of their callers, and I've dropped any sense that I owe idiots a hearing.
I've been reading the reddit neoliberal subreddit the last couple of weeks. It was fun for while, since they spent their time trolling Trump supporters, libertarians, and brosocialists, but now it's centrists earnestly discussing centrism.
I just found out that one of my favorite movies of all time, The Bicycle Thief, is actually called Bicycle Thieves. My entire life is a lie. I was wondering if my 12 year old daughter was old enough to appreciate it (I first saw it in my 30s), and I found out that a) I don't even know what the movie is called, b) it's on the BFI's top ten list of movies to see before you are 14, and c) that BFI actually made a list of movies to see before you are 14.
I started reading TPM regularly again, but haven't picked up anything else I used to read from Bush admin days. I subscribed to the local paper, didn't consider NYT because I expected to see them do stuff like what's leading people to unsubscribe now. NYT is probably a better overall paper but has less local news for me, plus my paper syndicates a lot of the better WaPo national articles. My subscription comes with free online access to the WaPo for a few months but I haven't claimed it. I've also subscribed to Pacific Standard.
I would passively monitor a lot of sources on RSS if I found a reader I liked, but my days of obsessively reading RSS feeds are over.
31: Toldja the book club should have gone for light fiction! Apparently I've finished 33 books so far this year. That seems lower than it should be for how much I usually read, but for personal and political reasons it's been a tough and numbing year.
I subscribed to the New Yorker and scored a free tote bag. I suspect a lot of people did the same, because I'm seeing these tote bags all over the place.
I don't keep track of how many books I read in a year. But looking at my Kindle purchase history, around 12 novels since the start of the year, plus two or three non-fiction.
I'd have guess way more, if you'd asked me to guess. Double that, maybe. That's a surprise.
I get my news these days mostly from the Guardian, the Washington Post (much less so), Twitter and blogs. Increasingly, though, I can't watch the BBC. The BBC is always somewhat biased towards the current government, but the past 3 or so years, I've found it too blatant to stomach.
I averaged a book a week for the first twelve weeks of the year, then dropped off almost completely as I got sidetracked by other things, some work, some other personal projects, and some unhealthy procrastination brought on by anticipating public speaking (for a conference, which went fine, once it was time).
I've gone back to using goodreads after being super annoyed how predictable and cliched a long book was only to look it up and realize I'd read it years ago and just forgotten. It will push me to do things like finish a book fast because 30 by the end of April sounds satisfying, but I do at least know how ridiculous and stupid that is.
71.2: Did they explain why they chose 14 specifically?
I'm pretty much like everyone else. The Guardian is my go to site, and I read a smattering of other places and articles on facebook, which includes a lot of WaPo. I guess slate is a site I still check daily, although I probably click on an article 20% of the time. I also look at Politico every once in awhile, and TPM even less. I have almost entirely stopped reading the NYTimes, I might check their homepage every few days and then remember why I dislike them. NPR is similar, I can't listen to their news and I used to listen to their politics podcast but had to stop during Gorsuch's nomination. I check out LGM every day but I read the posts a lot less than I used to, since I find the snarky tone and the constant harping on Bernie Bros super irritating.*
I've been listening to more podcasts, for politics, the Slate politics podcast is sometimes decent (Emily Bazalon makes it listenable for me, although her voice isn't my favorite), 538 podcasts, and the Guardian podcasts. I also listen to Vox every once in awhile.
*For people who claim to be irritated with the far left, they've adopted the leftist tactic of constant infighting with people who are nominally on their side, rather than setting aside trivial differences to focus on the real enemy.
I have given very little recently and feel guilty about it, but not guilty enough to spur me to give. I tell myself when I get a real job I will give. My not-rich mother gives 10% of her income to charity every year, which I really admire and hope to emulate in the future.
Welp, I've had a Times subscription for a long time, but on top of Bret Stephens they published Erick Fucking Erickson today, so I finally cancelled. I guess this frees up some money for the Guardian. (Washington Post subscriptions are something like four bucks if you already have Prime.)
And while Josh Marshall's writing style has gotten notably worse, he produces a lot of high-quality commentary, and had the Trump phenomenon nailed from early on.
Who or what do you think is driving this madness at the Times? I know Stormcrow is on the case but we can idly speculate now...
No one is negotiating my release from this child birthday party hostage crisis. I am being treated very well and there is coffee and scintillating small talk about summer camp.
I haven't subscribed to the Guardian, but I did donate to them recently, because I do read them a lot. I gave a little money to wikipedia as well.
I am at a child's birthday party, and I'm just an uncle.
|| If people want to call Montanans and encourage them to get out and vote for Quist, there are organized efforts going on. Email me if interested, and I can hook you up. Election is in 12 days. |>
the Slate politics podcast is sometimes decent
No, it isn't. And the various Slate podcast hosts' incessant harping on their goddamned sponsors' putative virtues has grown almost as nauseating as what's-his-name's reflexive Slate-ism about everything: e.g., "No, the Supreme Court should be abolished because China's one hundred million unemployed don't enjoy the mortgage interest tax deduction under campus free speech laws." [Thumps gouty foot on ottoman, mumbles incoherently into glass of port.]
We need to raise money to send Stormcrow to NYC to interrogate some Times reporters with his fists.
What am I saying? Violence is wrong. Stay in school, kids.
Paper NYT subscription; I don't think WaPo offers that here. I get a lot more news from the paper version (since I see it daily) than I do from hitting the website on any regular basis, though I follow links to stories fairly often.
My donation habits have changed in that I'm giving more to various political campaigns, not charitable giving per se.
I get most of my news from NPR because, even though I want to punch most of the hosts in the head (David Green is first against the wall), it's still the least painful way to get the headlines. Also, the local news coverage is good.
No TV news ever, no Twitter, trying not to spend much time on FB (though I do appreciate the curating my friends do). I hate reading online so I mostly only glance at the headlines for the things I don't get on paper.
I'm ashamed of how abominable my article and book reading habits have become, but they're improving, as is the overall quality of my life, now that I've found an Android app that shuts down everything on my phone and tablet for scheduled periods. It has a setting that lets you override it after a short delay, but I have that turned off.
(I leave a few functional things turned on -- alarm, GPS, camera for occurrences of extreme cat adorability.)
I've upped my giving considerably, locally, nationally, and internationally, and everything is on autopay, the greatest innovation of the last 50 years. I think I'm approaching 10% of income if I include political donations and various other non-deductibles. (No kids = more disposable income than most.)
Would definitely contribute to a Stormcrow storming the NYT fund.