It’s pretty clear that faced with the information mess that is besieging us, we must build a personal information architecture, so instead of asking “What’s the right media?”, we should ask “What information do I need to live well, think clearly, and act meaningfully?”
Tier 1 — Structural information (high value, low noise) These are long-term forces that actually shape our world. They are demographics, economics, technology, climate, geopolitics and institutions. Good sources for these, I am told, are The Economist (weekly magazine), the Financial Times (weekend edition), Foreign Affairs (magazine, 6 issues a year), MIT Technology Review (bi-monthly magazine) and long-form podcasts (Ezra Klein, Sean Carroll, Conversations with Tyler). Currently, I don’t subscribe and never read any of these, except the Economist on occasions. I will have to seriously look into these.
Tier 2 — Curated analysis (medium value, medium noise) These are designed to help us interpret events without drowning in them: They are newsletters by domain experts, Substack writers we trust (online publishing platform that allows writers, podcasters, and video creators to publish content directly to their audiences via email newsletters and a dedicated website). There are think-tank explainers (Brookings, RAND, CSIS) that should be just skimmed.
Tier 3 — Daily news (low value, high noise) This is what I use and according to the experts where the rabbit holes live. Again a “rabbit hole” is a situation where a seemingly simple inquiry leads to a complex, time-consuming chain of related discoveries, making it difficult to stop exploring or return to your original task. A list of these daily news sites are AP News, Reuters, the BBC and NPR Morning Briefing.
These are factual, low-drama, low-spin and AP News as well as NPR are part of my daily news diet and are likely to remain that way. In the next blog, we’ll try to focus on keeping a direct and simple critical view...
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