Whose fan is in his hand, and he will thoroughly purge his floor, and gather his wheat into the garner; but he will burn up the chaff with unquenchable fire.
Matthew 3:12, KJV
Nothing like a fiery biblical quote to get the attention, eh? Today is January 6th, The Feast of the Epiphany for Christians, and the remembrance of a ragtag rebellion four years ago for loyal Americans. Times of great and quite possibly disturbing change are upon us. My personal epiphany on this snowy Monday in Jersey — more of the Joycean variety than a visit from the Magi — is that I need to curate my consumption of digital readings. There are just too many sources and many of them are not useful. Being an inveterate and rapid reader was a blessing in the age of books, but in the world of the Internet this facility and disposition can become a curse. I went from ‘bookish’ (to quote Joseph Epstein’s essay on the topic) to bedeviled. To get biblical again, consider what Ecclesiastes said:
“Of the making of many books there is no end; and much study is a weariness of the flesh.”
Ecclesiastes 12:14
And that was 3000 years ago! There are so many interesting things to read, so many platforms to explore, but they are not all equally valuable and my flesh (of which there is too much but that’s for another resolution) . There is wheat and there is chaff, husks removed from grain by threshing and winnowing. My epiphany came as I realize I read three newspapers in some fashion everyday NYT, WaPo, Irish Times), skim the New Yorker weekly but always hit the crossword and cartoons, still visit my RSS feed, hop into Threads and maybe BlueSky, catch up with friends on Facebook, family and other friends on Instagram. Thank God, I have resisted TikTok, but the stray YouTube video does lure me.
This matters because I have so many projects to write — and posts on this blog count among them. I like to say that the plays and other writings planned are stacked up like planes at LaGuardia on Christmas Eve; they stretch for miles in the sky. And having turned 73 a few weeks ago, the clock be ticking.
One criterion for choosing just a few that I will list below whether each affords ample insight aligned with unusual (to me, at least) subjects. For example, I will now read Paul Krugman as a blogger more than I did when he was an op-ed columnist for 25 years in the New York Times. In his blogging (which has gone on only for a few weeks), Krugman seems to have adopted a lighter touch and a wider interest. On the other hand, I’m going to drop some people who just keep saying the same things over and over again. I won’t mention all of them, but I will give an example here as well: Tyler Cowen. I’ve been reading his excellent Marginal Revolution for decades; at least, it seems like decades. But the content has become so predictable that my initial rationale of trying to read people with whom I disagree is no longer viable. I can predict what he will say and even what topics he will choose to discuss. I need to find another provocative but rational contrarian.
So, besides Krugman, these are the sources that I will stick to:
- Mike Tanier until the end of the football season; there is no better or entertaining football writer
- Sam Kahn read his post Everything About How Writing Is Taught Is Wrong and you’ll understand right away this choice – or not
- Freddie DeBoer where else would I get such good Marxist takes on the world and he gives advice on writing here as well
- Hans Sandberg from recounting a bus trip taken from Sweden to India back when such a thing was still possible to describing life as a revolutionary youngster in Stockholm in 1968 to commenting on technical trends from the perspective of having been a science/business journalist for many years this is a treasure trove
- Robert Burnside Robert and I were both chief learning officers around the same time and got to know each other at the learning innovation lab up at Harvard University. He is still in that game very much and has a lot to say about the latest trends such as AI, but beyond that he’s just a very perceptive observer
- Henry Oliver – a little bit of the contrarian here and a lot of the world of words
- Molly Moynahan who is telling a compelling storyt so colorfully
- Arts and Letters Daily For many years, these folks have separated the wheat of interesting essays and reviews from the chaff in writings about culture, but I must steer clear from now on from their wonderful sidebar that allows me to get lost in the front pages of Associated Press, Reuters, BBC, etcetera. It’s just not useful to meander through headlines unless there is some sort of actual crisis occurring in the world. I mean a crisis other than the one that’s currently occurring in the world.
That keeps me within the realm of what is known as the magic number—7 ± 2—but there’s still the matter of those three newspapers and various emails. The most important part of this winnowing is to stay the heck out of Threads and Bluesky. Meanwhile, I have to cut down Instagram to twice a week and on the same days check in on Facebook. Also sadly, I must abandon LinkedIn as it no longer serves a purpose. I’ll let you know how it goes. Now back to eliciting epiphanies.
Also from Epstein’s essay:
“The art of not reading is a very important one,” Schopenhauer wrote.
“It consists in not taking an interest in whatever may be engaging the attention of the general public at any particular time. When some political or ecclesiastical pamphlet, or novel, or poem is making a great commotion, you should remember that he who writes for fools always finds a large public. A precondition for reading good books is not reading bad ones: for life is short.”