Day: January 28, 2022

Despite their supposedly being quite passé, I still read many, many blogs.

I really like those blogs where the authors periodically post “links” pages – they link out to various items of interest found all over the internet. The absolute master of this is Tyler Cowen, who does it every single day, without fail, on his Marginal Revolution blog: he will post 4-10 links to items of political, philosophical, economic or cultural interest. Another blogger who does this well is Scott Alexander, who posts a monthly links page on his Astral Codex Ten blog (successor to the Slatestarcodex blog) – his links are less frequent but more interesting, on average.

I have often felt somewhat jealous of this capacity to post links-of-interest this way, reliably – and I’ve thought, oh, I should do that, too. But I’ve not been sufficiently motivated to do so myself.

Mostly these “links” articles link to specific blog entries found out there on the internet, or news articles or academic papers and publications. The other day I had a kind of brainstorm, which was that rather than try to replicate this “links” summary style, I’d instead do a kind of periodic “blogroll”. “Blogroll” is a term of art in blogging that stands for that thing on side of a blog that lists other blogs of interest – this here blog of mine has one, but I’m really bad about updating my blogroll. In fact, I only do so once every few years, and over time, it ends up being just barely indicative of what I’m reading regularly.

So I thought, instead – what if my blogroll was a feature on the blog? That would force me to update it more regularly, and you’d see what I was reading. I always have 5-10 blogs open in my browser: so how about if I just publish that list, on a regular basis? That’d show what I was reading. I suppose over time it might get repetitive or boring – some blogs are almost always open (e.g. Marginal Revolution or Astral Codex Ten, mentioned above). Others are one-time shots. So, to prevent that, I think I’ll make a rule that I can only mention a given blog once. Then it would be a kind of master list of blogs I’ve checked out at least at some point in my career of online textual consumption.

So with that preamble, this is my first entry in my hoped-to-be-regular feature, my “Friday Blogroll”. We’ll see how that goes.

Blogs in my browser right now (in a few very broad categories):

“Rationalist” or “rationalist-adjacent” blogs
(by my own conception – not necessarily the classification the author would choose)

• Sasha’s ‘Newsletter’
• Astral Codex Ten
• Marginal Revolution
• Noahpinion
• Don’t Worry About the Vase

Tech or programming related blogs

• Cheapskate’s Guide
• Woodrush’s Blog

Design or urbanism related blogs

• Works in progress

Language or Linguistics related blogs

• Language Log