What are the best news sources to read for *insightful* discussions?
I generally agree with Bryan Caplan that news is generally useless:
However, there are some analytical sources of news that are exceptions.
Personally, what I find most stimulating is http://www.mckinseyquarterly.com/home.aspx . http://www.cato-unbound.org/ is also quite stimulating, although it isn’t contemporary news. Then on the more non-news-y side, IEEE Spectrum and Communications of the ACM can occasionally be great. And while Scientific American has dumbed down in recent years, the featured articles in Science News (http://www.sciencenews.org/view/feed/type/article) are *amazingly* insightful. Two examples are below:
http://blog.sciencenews.org/view/feature/id/330593/title/Inside_Job http://www.comoogl.sciencenews.org/view/feature/id/74456/title/Healthy_Aging_in_a_Pill
You usually don’t even get analyses like these in Science or Nature.
And http://www.newgeography.com/ is surprisingly insightful.
What do people here think of The Atlantic? It’s better than other news sources, and I was impressed with it when I was in 8th grade. And some columnists, particularly Reihan Salam, are great (Reihan isn’t in the position of supporting *any* politician or party, so that puts him in a position where I don’t suspect him of twisting facts [even a little bit] to support his position—something that I do often suspect for people like Ezra Klein and other left-wing pundits). But even The Atlantic does seem to be too much in line with mainstream opinion.
Other than that, I get most of my analysis from Gene Expression and Information Processing. I’m not too much of an economist yet, so I don’t really read the economics blogs. FuturePundit/ParaPundit is right on many things, but its blogposts don’t contain too much depth in them.
I haven’t read this Salam but that “not a partisan so they must be unbiased” heuristic is pretty dodgy, particularly for an American columnist- that two party duopoly means you have a lot of right-libertarian and socialist/green analysts who regard each party as identical but are toting around some pretty serious ideological blinkers of their own, not to mention the cult of the sensible centrist people.
The right-wing meltdown you’ve got going on kind of screws with this though- for most countries I’d suggest that heterodox/lesser-of-two-evils party members from any group tend to suffer the least from illusions, but the impression I get is that in the US, the conservative variety no longer feels comfortable with the Republican party. This is all second hand though...
I like marginal revolution, if only because the comments section will usually yell at them when they post something stupid.
more generally just the blogs of economists.
The blog Worthwhile Canadian Initiative (an economics blog) has very high quality comments.
Your example Science News links are a bit like the articles that run in American Scientist (though some American Scientist articles are paywalled). MIT Technology Review isn’t bad either, and their culling of the best from the physics sections of the arXiv is nice, although I don’t know how much their coverage overlaps with Science News.
For breadth I like MetaFilter, a general community blog/aggregator with thousands of users. The sheer quantity means skipping most of the links and discussions on the site, but because there are so many posters there’s sometimes a domain expert or two participating in each of the threads I decide to read.
Currently, The Economist is the only news paper I read on a weekly basis. Generally, the writing seems more informed by sound social science and a historical perspective than The New York Times or The Wall Street Journal.
I do like the economist, but they suffer from a recent graduate syndrome I’ve become increasingly aware of as the blogosphere allows the sort of person who forms the majority of their staff greater access to the limelight, the very convincing on areas you know nothing about, horribly amateurish on areas you are familiar with, concatenate the last three AP reports with a dose of the old Washington Consensus style. It’s a style formed by throwing in enough second hand research that one’s editorially mandated conclusions seem authorative, which can see it in blogs like Lenin’s Tomb. Of the big European weekly don’t-pretend-to-be-unbiased newspapers, I find Le Monde Diplomatique much more useful because it doesn’t rely on that style so much. But the economist is worth reading, and I don’t think the NYT is most of the time, and anything owned by Murdoch certainly ain’t.
Also: the Guardian has a similar attitude to the NYT, with much higher journalistic standards- depressingly, the best in the UK at the moment, purely on the basis that they’ve declined the least out of the respectable papers. Combine that with the Financial Times (which is done by the same sort of people as the economist, but aimed at an audience they actually respect) gives you a decent breadth of coverage. Add in Red Pepper if you want to keep up on the latest labour issues.
Watch No Comment TV news instead to get the important news without the commentary
I follow people who have a taste for insight. Mostly via twitter, but there are other ways as well.
Agree with Caplan. Various people recommend National Public Radio.