On the history/theory debate, a lot’s been written that’s much more incisive and lays out the issues more clearly. Here’s a very good book where top historians and political scientists have a dialogue/ debate.
Just had to say that my Twitter experience changed drastically for the better the day I learned most Ad Blocker browser plugins can be configured to hide a section of a web page. The What’s Happening section is an endless source of enraging garbage and removing that has noticeably improved things for me.
I think the Associated Press deserves a mention. The AP seems to be the one truly nonpartisan, non-opinionated outlet left. They seem to be the last journalists to believe in objectivity and take it seriously. If you want to recommend an outlet to your conservative friends and family members that can't be reasonably accused of liberal bias to get them away from Fox, the AP is the one.
Disagree strongly with the answer to the last question, it reminds me of Josh Barro’s recent column about why the NYT is good: it’s good because it has Wordless, Cooking, Wirecutter, and (some) good writers in their opinions section. If you want the best reporting in the world, you should actually read the Wall Street Journal, and ignore their rancid opinions section.
I agree. The NYT is not as good as the WSJ at the fundamentals of comprehensive news reporting. I'll say that the Times has the edge in "data journalism" and in news graphics excluding business and the economy. But the WSJ seems to cover more stories and has a more concise and readable house style. The Times is ponderous. On the other hand, the Times opinion pages are great and WSJ opinion pages are mostly terrible. Bloomberg.com has a surprisingly great collection of opinion writers -- including, of course, Matt Yglesias. For the $100/month option, I'd suggest going with NYT + WSJ + Bloomberg.
How does the system of quoting experts in journalism actually work?
Whenever you see a story about group A publishing a paper it has a quote from an expert B who supposedly wasn’t involved, and I always wondered how they found them or why B wanted to take the time to be quoted.
"At the end of the day, I think the main reason the U.S. government paid reparations to the victims of Japanese internment is that the bill was pretty low."
Reparations for Japanese internment were paid only to direct victims. No descendants got anything from the government. I think the main reason the U.S. government paid reparations to the victims of Japanese internment is that there were still living victims at the time that the idea of reparations gained popularity.
I feel like the requirement to dispense racial justice pablum as a condition of college admittance is the sort of thing that should be sorted out by GPT2.
The "NY Times" answer is TERRIBLE because it massively over-weights national and international news. Reading the NY Times might suffice to "write an interesting Substack" or to "follow politics as a hobby," but to "be an informed citizen" it might even be *more* important to know and care about local issues as compared to national/international. There's a rant to be had about how many of the problems with the country and especially the American Left boil down to a too-national perspective. Here's Exhibit A!
Also, just because you subscribe to the Times doesn't mean you're consuming it well. Lots of online subscribers just end up clicking on whatever opinion pieces or horserace stories interest them the most. In the spirit of the Facebook article the other day, there's a wide gulf between first-order preferences about "which story I feel like clicking on right now" and second-order preferences about "what reading pattern would make be a more knowledgeable person." The Douthat/Brooks recommendation is good, but it's still opinion-oriented in a way that I think is less than optimal.
I live in New York City, and I *still* don't rely on the Times for most local coverage. My diet is:
* The Brooklyn Eagle. I get a daily email from the Brooklyn Eagle with links to a bunch of local NYC stories: some from the Eagle itself, but many from the AP. It also has a few links each day to Brooklyn-related stories from the Times, Gothamist and other sources.
* The NY Times. I use the well-hidden "Today's Paper" tab on the app to read, as a minimum, every news story with text on the front page and the top story from every section. (Plus anything that catches my eye, often stories that touch on Israel, Minnesota, mathematics, the business of law, etc.)
* The Brooklyn Heights Blog. Not my source for real local news, but useful for hyper-local matters like weekend subway closures and new stores on Montague Street.
* The Star Tribune. I grew up in Minneapolis and still glance at it for the local stories.
* The Wiener Zeitung (of Vienna, Austria): a daily (ex Sunday) email from which I read the top and most-read stories with the help of Google Translate. I started doing this because I'm a dual citizen who votes in Austria, but I think it's a great idea for any American to pick a random small democracy (Belgium, Ghana, Barbados, whatever) and read its newspaper of record every day. Hear me out! First, it introduces a different perspective on international topics. For the Europeans, the Ukraine war is largely about heating costs during the upcoming winter. I think many Americans know about Europeans' Russian gas reliance at an intellectual level, but it's a different thing to see Winter Is Coming stories day-in-day-out. Second, it's good for building up better habits of mind regarding U.S. news. I come at Austrian politics from a pretty dispassionate place; I simply don't have emotions, personal history and biases about the SPO, the OVP, the Greens and the NEOs the way I do about the Democrats, the Republicans, and their different factions . By following stories about issues in Austria, I think it's helped me look at American issues with more of that same dispassion. As an example, there's a current scandal about how the Vienna electric company all of a sudden needs a billion dollars from the federal government to cover collateral on its futures trading. This is not good, and the national center-right-led government is hanging the whole mess on the center-left government of Vienna. I'm inclined to reserve judgment; it's possible that the Vienna government could have handled the situation better, but it's also possible that it's just a really hard time to manage the finances of a Central European power company. But, here's the kicker, when something like the Jackson MS water shutdown happens in the United States, I think I'm now less inclined to jump to conclusions about the Republicans being at fault.
* The Wall Street Journal: Just 1-2 business-related headlines from the front page on the front of Section B. Also, flip through for any articles related to distressed investing.
* Various subscriptions related to bankruptcy law and distressed investing (Petition substack, Daily Bankruptcy News, Law360, Reorg Research). Relevant to my work, not for general "citizenship" purposes, and might blow the budget out of the water.
* On a weekly/monthly basis, The New Yorker, the Atlantic, the National Geographic, and the American Mathematical Monthly.
I submit this is a much better news diet than "subscribe to the New Yorker and be sure to read Douthat."
I would much prefer the NY Times if it had only national and international news. For those of us who don't live in the NYC metro area, the NY Times's homepage is a confusing jumble of names of people and places that we aren't familiar with and have no reason to care about.
If there were a "National Edition" button that filtered all of that local NYC-area stuff out, it would be a valuable website for us. But the NY Times seems like it can't decide whether it wants to be a local or national website, making it frustrating for you and me.
The Washington Post's homepage conveniently groups all the DC-area stuff together in a labeled section that can easily be skipped over, making it a very valuable website for all Americans.
On the topic of quitting twitter, it seems to me that Matt is in a pretty unique situation that would make it much more difficult to quit even if he wanted to. Matt's twitter is the main way that Slow Boring gets advertised, and because of that he has a real fiscal incentive to keep posting and keep growing his following count.
"In practice, though, I actually think a large minority of people do place a lot of value on living near a traditional walkable retail corridor — that’s why houses on my block are so expensive — and the main problem is really that we make it illegal to build more of them."
Genuinely loved to see a question on Amazon pivot to a "Now more than ever!" moment.
Expectations of product selection have changed. I often go to local businesses, can't find exactly what I want, and end up buying from Amazon. I don't think these stores had better selection 20 years ago when I was happy to buy from them. They've suffered on a relative basis.
I concur with the folks disappointed by the NYT recommendation. It's true that there's occasionally good reporting, and their newsletters are quite good (RIP, Jay Caspian Kang), but I feel like the paper has succumbed to the worst sort of click-bait style headlines and misleading paragraph organization (Apoorva Mandavilli's COVID reporting, for example). I often get to the end of an article and realize that it has argued the opposite of the headline. And these complaints are all before considering the rigidly orthodox Democratic (party) perspective underwriting the topic selection among news articles or the deeply provincial point-of-view on cultural matters that take Manhattan as normative and authoritative (relative to the globe, not just "flyover country").
I'm fundamentally looking for news on matters of significance that can surprise me, at the level of story selection or detail (or both). It's demoralizing to read coverage that feels like it was written by a third-generation AI.
Then there are the comments, wow: a nightmare of repetitive, predictable in-group boundary-policing. Any opinion piece that tries to push the audience the tiniest bit triggers an onslaught of detailed comments accusing the author of "bothsiderism" followed by a tedious rehash of the crimes of Donald Trump and his accomplices in the Republican party. I get it, I hate him too, but there's more to the world, my friends.
Maybe Matt felt he couldn't recommend Bloomberg, due to a conflict of interest? I think both Bloomberg's and the Wall Street Journal's news sections are more limited, but significantly better than the NYT. Al Jazeera is often better, too. I used to like the British papers, but the Guardian just feels like feels like an NYT clone now.
I wish editors let journalists and columnists write the titles for their articles. At The Atlantic, article titles change throughout the day based on the whims of editors, which seems really click-baity to me for what are supposed to be "prestige" publications.
Noah is actually lending some respect to history here. He’s saying, if these conversations are actually *useful* they should be rigorous. And then making the claim that they can be useful!
And the response seems to be like, “be careful in calling this stuff useful.”
NYT: Is there anything we can do to get them to allow more comments. Most of the time I find that either there is no commenting at all or comments were closed after about 100.
On quoting experts: The valuable part of this would be if you ask the expert to address points on which other experts disagree or more specific implications of the expert's general knowledge. For example, there was some (not enough, but some) reporting on early CDC mistakes in which experts were cited about the nature of the mistake, whit it was a mistake, etc. But nothing about why the mistake was made. Did any journalist ever ask FDA experts to explain why it took so long to actually roll out the vaccines that were developed with amazing rapidity? Why it took so long to approve screening tests for COVID? Why vaccines for group x could not be available (as therapy) even before the are recommended for everyone in group X (on transmission prevention grounds?
It's quite important that journalists ask experts those questions when doing their investigations. But I'm not sure what the value is in providing quotes rather than paraphrases to their answers? And I think that in articles on the topics you bring up there all the good articles on them I've read were very light on direct quotes because knowledgeable experts don't want to get into the FDA or whoever's bad graces and so are only willing to speak off the record.
On the history/theory debate, a lot’s been written that’s much more incisive and lays out the issues more clearly. Here’s a very good book where top historians and political scientists have a dialogue/ debate.
https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0262550393/ref=ppx_yo_dt_b_search_asin_title?ie=UTF8&psc=1
Bridges and Boundaries: Historians, Political Scientists, and the Study of International Relations
Just had to say that my Twitter experience changed drastically for the better the day I learned most Ad Blocker browser plugins can be configured to hide a section of a web page. The What’s Happening section is an endless source of enraging garbage and removing that has noticeably improved things for me.
I think the Associated Press deserves a mention. The AP seems to be the one truly nonpartisan, non-opinionated outlet left. They seem to be the last journalists to believe in objectivity and take it seriously. If you want to recommend an outlet to your conservative friends and family members that can't be reasonably accused of liberal bias to get them away from Fox, the AP is the one.
Disagree strongly with the answer to the last question, it reminds me of Josh Barro’s recent column about why the NYT is good: it’s good because it has Wordless, Cooking, Wirecutter, and (some) good writers in their opinions section. If you want the best reporting in the world, you should actually read the Wall Street Journal, and ignore their rancid opinions section.
I agree. The NYT is not as good as the WSJ at the fundamentals of comprehensive news reporting. I'll say that the Times has the edge in "data journalism" and in news graphics excluding business and the economy. But the WSJ seems to cover more stories and has a more concise and readable house style. The Times is ponderous. On the other hand, the Times opinion pages are great and WSJ opinion pages are mostly terrible. Bloomberg.com has a surprisingly great collection of opinion writers -- including, of course, Matt Yglesias. For the $100/month option, I'd suggest going with NYT + WSJ + Bloomberg.
How does the system of quoting experts in journalism actually work?
Whenever you see a story about group A publishing a paper it has a quote from an expert B who supposedly wasn’t involved, and I always wondered how they found them or why B wanted to take the time to be quoted.
"At the end of the day, I think the main reason the U.S. government paid reparations to the victims of Japanese internment is that the bill was pretty low."
Reparations for Japanese internment were paid only to direct victims. No descendants got anything from the government. I think the main reason the U.S. government paid reparations to the victims of Japanese internment is that there were still living victims at the time that the idea of reparations gained popularity.
I feel like the requirement to dispense racial justice pablum as a condition of college admittance is the sort of thing that should be sorted out by GPT2.
The "NY Times" answer is TERRIBLE because it massively over-weights national and international news. Reading the NY Times might suffice to "write an interesting Substack" or to "follow politics as a hobby," but to "be an informed citizen" it might even be *more* important to know and care about local issues as compared to national/international. There's a rant to be had about how many of the problems with the country and especially the American Left boil down to a too-national perspective. Here's Exhibit A!
Also, just because you subscribe to the Times doesn't mean you're consuming it well. Lots of online subscribers just end up clicking on whatever opinion pieces or horserace stories interest them the most. In the spirit of the Facebook article the other day, there's a wide gulf between first-order preferences about "which story I feel like clicking on right now" and second-order preferences about "what reading pattern would make be a more knowledgeable person." The Douthat/Brooks recommendation is good, but it's still opinion-oriented in a way that I think is less than optimal.
I live in New York City, and I *still* don't rely on the Times for most local coverage. My diet is:
* The Brooklyn Eagle. I get a daily email from the Brooklyn Eagle with links to a bunch of local NYC stories: some from the Eagle itself, but many from the AP. It also has a few links each day to Brooklyn-related stories from the Times, Gothamist and other sources.
* The NY Times. I use the well-hidden "Today's Paper" tab on the app to read, as a minimum, every news story with text on the front page and the top story from every section. (Plus anything that catches my eye, often stories that touch on Israel, Minnesota, mathematics, the business of law, etc.)
* The Brooklyn Heights Blog. Not my source for real local news, but useful for hyper-local matters like weekend subway closures and new stores on Montague Street.
* The Star Tribune. I grew up in Minneapolis and still glance at it for the local stories.
* The Wiener Zeitung (of Vienna, Austria): a daily (ex Sunday) email from which I read the top and most-read stories with the help of Google Translate. I started doing this because I'm a dual citizen who votes in Austria, but I think it's a great idea for any American to pick a random small democracy (Belgium, Ghana, Barbados, whatever) and read its newspaper of record every day. Hear me out! First, it introduces a different perspective on international topics. For the Europeans, the Ukraine war is largely about heating costs during the upcoming winter. I think many Americans know about Europeans' Russian gas reliance at an intellectual level, but it's a different thing to see Winter Is Coming stories day-in-day-out. Second, it's good for building up better habits of mind regarding U.S. news. I come at Austrian politics from a pretty dispassionate place; I simply don't have emotions, personal history and biases about the SPO, the OVP, the Greens and the NEOs the way I do about the Democrats, the Republicans, and their different factions . By following stories about issues in Austria, I think it's helped me look at American issues with more of that same dispassion. As an example, there's a current scandal about how the Vienna electric company all of a sudden needs a billion dollars from the federal government to cover collateral on its futures trading. This is not good, and the national center-right-led government is hanging the whole mess on the center-left government of Vienna. I'm inclined to reserve judgment; it's possible that the Vienna government could have handled the situation better, but it's also possible that it's just a really hard time to manage the finances of a Central European power company. But, here's the kicker, when something like the Jackson MS water shutdown happens in the United States, I think I'm now less inclined to jump to conclusions about the Republicans being at fault.
* The Wall Street Journal: Just 1-2 business-related headlines from the front page on the front of Section B. Also, flip through for any articles related to distressed investing.
* Various subscriptions related to bankruptcy law and distressed investing (Petition substack, Daily Bankruptcy News, Law360, Reorg Research). Relevant to my work, not for general "citizenship" purposes, and might blow the budget out of the water.
* On a weekly/monthly basis, The New Yorker, the Atlantic, the National Geographic, and the American Mathematical Monthly.
I submit this is a much better news diet than "subscribe to the New Yorker and be sure to read Douthat."
I would much prefer the NY Times if it had only national and international news. For those of us who don't live in the NYC metro area, the NY Times's homepage is a confusing jumble of names of people and places that we aren't familiar with and have no reason to care about.
If there were a "National Edition" button that filtered all of that local NYC-area stuff out, it would be a valuable website for us. But the NY Times seems like it can't decide whether it wants to be a local or national website, making it frustrating for you and me.
The Washington Post's homepage conveniently groups all the DC-area stuff together in a labeled section that can easily be skipped over, making it a very valuable website for all Americans.
I like your suggestions, but I think you're missing the constraint of the question. $50 a month and an hour a day limit.
On the topic of quitting twitter, it seems to me that Matt is in a pretty unique situation that would make it much more difficult to quit even if he wanted to. Matt's twitter is the main way that Slow Boring gets advertised, and because of that he has a real fiscal incentive to keep posting and keep growing his following count.
"But the land is also not, realistically, going to be returned. The crime is too big."
One theft is a tragedy. A million thefts is a statistic.
"In practice, though, I actually think a large minority of people do place a lot of value on living near a traditional walkable retail corridor — that’s why houses on my block are so expensive — and the main problem is really that we make it illegal to build more of them."
Genuinely loved to see a question on Amazon pivot to a "Now more than ever!" moment.
Expectations of product selection have changed. I often go to local businesses, can't find exactly what I want, and end up buying from Amazon. I don't think these stores had better selection 20 years ago when I was happy to buy from them. They've suffered on a relative basis.
The end of this mailbag is a really sick burn at the expense of Bret Stephens
I concur with the folks disappointed by the NYT recommendation. It's true that there's occasionally good reporting, and their newsletters are quite good (RIP, Jay Caspian Kang), but I feel like the paper has succumbed to the worst sort of click-bait style headlines and misleading paragraph organization (Apoorva Mandavilli's COVID reporting, for example). I often get to the end of an article and realize that it has argued the opposite of the headline. And these complaints are all before considering the rigidly orthodox Democratic (party) perspective underwriting the topic selection among news articles or the deeply provincial point-of-view on cultural matters that take Manhattan as normative and authoritative (relative to the globe, not just "flyover country").
I'm fundamentally looking for news on matters of significance that can surprise me, at the level of story selection or detail (or both). It's demoralizing to read coverage that feels like it was written by a third-generation AI.
Then there are the comments, wow: a nightmare of repetitive, predictable in-group boundary-policing. Any opinion piece that tries to push the audience the tiniest bit triggers an onslaught of detailed comments accusing the author of "bothsiderism" followed by a tedious rehash of the crimes of Donald Trump and his accomplices in the Republican party. I get it, I hate him too, but there's more to the world, my friends.
Maybe Matt felt he couldn't recommend Bloomberg, due to a conflict of interest? I think both Bloomberg's and the Wall Street Journal's news sections are more limited, but significantly better than the NYT. Al Jazeera is often better, too. I used to like the British papers, but the Guardian just feels like feels like an NYT clone now.
I wish editors let journalists and columnists write the titles for their articles. At The Atlantic, article titles change throughout the day based on the whims of editors, which seems really click-baity to me for what are supposed to be "prestige" publications.
Re: the Noah smith v historians beef
Noah is actually lending some respect to history here. He’s saying, if these conversations are actually *useful* they should be rigorous. And then making the claim that they can be useful!
And the response seems to be like, “be careful in calling this stuff useful.”
NYT: Is there anything we can do to get them to allow more comments. Most of the time I find that either there is no commenting at all or comments were closed after about 100.
On quoting experts: The valuable part of this would be if you ask the expert to address points on which other experts disagree or more specific implications of the expert's general knowledge. For example, there was some (not enough, but some) reporting on early CDC mistakes in which experts were cited about the nature of the mistake, whit it was a mistake, etc. But nothing about why the mistake was made. Did any journalist ever ask FDA experts to explain why it took so long to actually roll out the vaccines that were developed with amazing rapidity? Why it took so long to approve screening tests for COVID? Why vaccines for group x could not be available (as therapy) even before the are recommended for everyone in group X (on transmission prevention grounds?
It's quite important that journalists ask experts those questions when doing their investigations. But I'm not sure what the value is in providing quotes rather than paraphrases to their answers? And I think that in articles on the topics you bring up there all the good articles on them I've read were very light on direct quotes because knowledgeable experts don't want to get into the FDA or whoever's bad graces and so are only willing to speak off the record.