Newsletters I’m Digging
Reading Craig Mod’s excellent piece The Future Book is Here, but It’s Not What We Expected got me thinking more about newsletters. I’ve never been a big consumer of newsletters, mostly because I still use RSS regularly and don’t really need more stuff in my inbox.
Then the other day I happened to find the first new blog I wanted to subscribe to in years, and lo and behold, Aaron doesn’t even have an RSS feed! Just an email newsletter.
So I added Aaron’s newsletter to a dedicated newsletter app I’m testing called Stoop and now we’re golden.
Although I still use Twitter and RSS feeds for finding interesting links, there’s something nice about a well-curated newsletter that aligns with your interests. I still don’t subscribe to many of them, but my favorites so far are:
- Dense Discovery: A weekly list of mostly design-oriented interestingness from Kai Brach. I probably click on over 50% of the links. Very high signal-to-noise ratio.
- Sentiers: A weekly list of articles related to how technology is reshaping society, curated by Patrick Tanguay.
- Axios Edge: 99% of “news” published every week simply does not matter. Axios Edge from Felix Salmon shows you only what does matter, why it matters, and what it might mean for you.
- Recomendo: A weekly list of six practical, nerdy product recommendations every week from Kevin Kelly, Mark Frauenfelder, and Claudia Dawson.
- Cumberland Advisors: If you are sickened by the clickbait at mainstream financial sites but still want to know what developments in the world mean for the markets, David Kotok’s emails from this list are particularly informative. The other authors can be a little too niche.
- The Howard Marks Memo: Marks is famous for his financial memos, which generally only come out a few times a year. Very long, very infrequent, and very well-written.
If anyone has any other recommendations, please feel free to leave them in the comments! I reserve the right to delete anything that looks spammy, self-promotional, or low quality, however. Only the good stuff, please! :)
Likely any of the “Inside” daily newsletters, if they cover a topic you are interested in.
Right now https://inside.com/ covers just over 50 topics, and you can “vote” to get more topics covered.
I subscribe to 3 of these (Inside San Francisco, Inside Bitcoin, and Inside AR/VR) and they are all great
Bruce Schneier’s “Crypto-Gram” is excellent. He’s one of our country’s top info security experts and really boils down what’s happening in the world of security, malware, etc. in this monthly digest.
https://www.schneier.com/crypto-gram/
Thanks for the mention, Mike! Another one I can recommend: https://futurecrun.ch/
Robin Sloan has started a new thing called Year of the Meteor at https://desert.glass.
I’ve unsubscribed from almost everything. Except Adam Greenfield’s irregular dispatches. They come every once in a while, include some thinking about design and society and mostly about living clean in difficult circumstances. The best part, though, is each one is like a personal letter to you from an old friend. They’re my favorite thing: https://tinyletter.com/speedbird/
California Sun — https://www.californiasun.co — is a fantastic daily aggregation newsletter covering the the state, and is really interesting even people living outside of it. It’s edited by NYT’s former California email correspondent.
Full disclosure: They are a client, but I was a subscriber all the way from Miami before we started working together.