My Current Reading List

Day by day my loathing of the mainstream media and fear of its insidiously vapid influence on American discourse grows like a snowball rolling down a hill. It's gotten to the point where I can barely open most publications without experiencing feelings of extreme disgust at how shallowly or even stupidly most important issues are treated.

Despite how difficult the utter meltdown in the traditional print media might make it for me to find the kind of job I'd really like to have after I graduate, I am deeply thankful for the industry's ongoing collapse. If newspapers that suck as much as many of them do were doing well financially, I would be much more depressed.

Anyway, enough negativity. There's a lot of excellent reporting and commentary going on these days and I follow many such excellent sources religiously. And so should you. So here's my complete reading list (pretty much everything I'm currently subscribed to in Google Reader)--check some of them out:

Towleroad - a multi-topic blog aimed primarily at gay men

Bleeding Heartland - a liberal blog focusing on Iowa politics

Blogging Heads - a diverse set of writers and thinkers engage in thoughtful conversations

Boing Boing - a wide variety of technology, media, and associated issues coverage

Cafe Hayek - a conservative libertarian blog

Cato @ Liberty - the libertarian Cato Institute's blog

Century of the Common Iowan - another Iowa-based liberal blog

Fastforward - a discussion of new media's impact on media businesses

Glenn Greenwald - excellent legal and political commentary on the degeneration of American democracy

Official Google Blog - Google's main corporate blog

Iowa Independent - great online-only Iowa newspaper/blog hybrid

Global Guerrillas - commentary on how technology is destabilizing traditional nation states

Climate Progress - serious, science-focused discussion of climate change problems and solutions

Overcoming Bias - unique discussion of bias issues in the social science, especially surrounding skepticism of the possibility of a technological singularity

The Agitator - coverage of how the drug war and the militarization of police are destroying civil liberties in America

Kurzweil Accelerating-Intelligence News - Ray Kurzweil's collected news stories about developments he thinks are leading to a technological singularity

Hit & Run - Reason magazine's blog

Reason Magazine Online - full articles from the libertarian publication

Responsible Nanotechnology - discussions of the promises and perils of trends in the field of nanotechnology

The Savage Lovecast - Dan Savage's weekly sex-advice podcast

Slashdot - "News for nerds. Stuff that matters."

Slog - The Stranger's (a Seattle alternative weekly) group blog

Enterprise Resilience Management Blog - how businesses and governments can best cope with globalization and its challenges

TED Talks - videos of presentations from the annual technology, entertainment, and design conference

Thomas P.M. Barnett's Blog - discussion of military affairs in the age of globalization

Urban Prankster - experiments in post-modern art, often involving flash mobs

The Fly Bottle - Will Wilkinson's blog on libertarian issues and ideas

Wired Magazine - some of the most colorful technology reporting available

Wired: Danger Room - Wired's military blog

Wired: Threat Level - Wired's electronic security and rights blog

And, as I've written numerous times before, if you're interested in a compilation of the articles from all of these sources that I find the most important and/or edifying, check out my news site: http://tinyurl.com/christopherpatton