Exponential View
If you want to know where top entrepreneurs, academics and journalists get the lowdown on the impact that technology is having on society, look no further than Azeem Azhar's Exponential View newsletter. Every Sunday, Azhar delivers a comprehensive summary of that week's overlooked but hugely impactful technology stories, plucked from an exhaustive list of obscure journals, industry reports and insightful thinkers. Each edition is littered with interesting technological tidbits guaranteed to make you sound clever for the entire week ahead.
Penny Fractions
Who knew an incredibly niche weekly newsletter about the business of music streaming services could be so delightful? Music writer David Turner (Bandcamp, Rolling Stone, Music Business Worldwide) pens one mini-essay per each Wednesday and rounds things out with links to stories that have caught his eye. Subscribers to Penny Fractions can expect lots of Spotify deep dives, as well as discussions around Apple Music, YouTube, Patreon and even MusicNet and PressPlay, the ghosts of music streaming's past.
The Ann Friedman Weekly
Call Your Girlfriend podcaster and freelance journalist Ann Friedman does one of the finest high-low edits of online journalism with a mix of politics, internet culture and feminism stories each week. You can catch up on big scoops you might have missed, read her quick one-line takes on smaller stories and enjoy a GIFspiration. Pay $5 a year to get the fun pie charts Friedman used to do at New York Magazine.
Recomendo
There is nothing like being shown something that you didn’t know existed, only to find out that you desperately needed it. That’s what Recomendo is about: every week, the newsletter gives you six recommendations for cool stuff to add to your life. It goes from suggestions on who to follow on Twitter to picks of lesser known shows on Amazon and Netflix, through to escape room tips and useful phone gadgets. You can even submit your own suggestion for the Recomendo community, and if the moderators like it enough, you could see it appear in your inbox the following week.
Longform
Pour a cup of coffee, find a comfy chair and get yourself lost in the very best longform journalism out there. Curated by the minds behind Longform.org every weekly email delivers a handful of truly excellent stories that usually take between fifteen and fifty minutes to read. It's a small enough selection to not be overwhelming, but still manages to squeeze in a huge range of topics – from presidential profiles to true crime capers and hard-hitting investigative pieces – so you'll almost always find something you'll want to read now or save for later. And if you're a real longform junkie you should also check out The Sunday Long Read from the American investigative reporter Don Van Natta for even more top-notch writing.
Benedict Evans
Benedict’s Evans’ newsletter isn’t as weekly as its description suggests, but it’s an instructive way of understanding a specific part of the tech ecosystem: the mindset of a Silicon Valley venture capitalist. Evans is a partner at Andreessen Horowitz – one of the Bay Area's leading investors in startups from seed to growth stage – and is particularly strong on making the links between developments in technology and the way that these will impact specific products and categories. If you read news stories about future trends and wonder ‘why should we care?’, Evans’ commentary is a good way of making the link between the high-level applications of new technologies from the perspective of someone who specialises in parsing the signal from the noise.
Read more: 45 of the best podcasts for curious minds
What's the Difference
If you're always looking for more cocktail party fodder, What's the Difference is a snappy, short newsletter, that explains the difference between a couple of interchangeably used terms. One explains the difference between an orchestra, symphony or philharmonic, and another explains the difference between jail and prison. There's a little something for everyone, and at least you'll be well informed.
Import AI
Along with Exponential View, Import AI is one of the best ways to keep on top of the fast-changing world of artificial intelligence. Created and written by Jack Clark, a former AI journalist and now policy director at the Elon Musk-backed research institute OpenAI, the weekly newsletter covers the latest in AI research. And there’s detail. Plenty of it. Each section of the newsletter covers why a new development is important, how it works, and why it matters. In addition, there’s a short piece of tech fiction each week.
5it by Alexis Madrigal
5it stands for five interesting things, curated by Alexis Madrigal, who is a staff writer at The Atlantic. The description might not give you much, but each edition (usually weekly), cuts through the internet haze and links to five random things that broadly relate to technology and culture. One edition was YouTube-specific, while others can range between articles about tipping Amazon workers to a profile of the late magician Ricky Jay.
Sentences by Darcie Wilder
Sentences is a weekly newsletter, sent out by Darcie Wilder that collects sentences from websites around the internet and puts them into a long list. The website that the sentence originates from is linked at the beginning of each sentence, and there's usually around 30 sentences in each edition. Websites include Wikipedia (from the entry on Donald Duck) to a satirical essay from The Cut, where a wellness blogger from the 1400s weighs in on their daily routine. It's light and entertaining, but you won't run out of things to read any time soon.
The Interface
Casey Newton at The Verge is a keen observer of anything happening at the intersection of social media, politics, and society – from fake news, to Trump’s tweets, to cybercrime. Always introduced by a long but witty take on the day by Newton himself, The Interface newsletter is wonderfully curated, spot-on, and never boring.
Brexit Bulletin
Bloomberg was there from the very beginning: then-Prime Minister David Cameron came up with the brilliant idea of calling for a referendum on Britain’s EU membership during a speech at the media company’s London HQ. Since the momentous ballot was cast in 2016, Bloomberg's Brexit Bulletin has never missed a beat, producing every day an insightful, compact, and mobile-friendly way to keep up with how the Brexit conundrum is shaping up.
This article was originally published by WIRED UK
