It’s common to hear the phrase “you are what you eat” when it comes to diet, exercise, and overall health. Especially as you age (I’m 45 now, so these things take on more significance.)

But it’s equally and perhaps even more true that more generally, what you pay attention to defines who you are. Especially as our world becomes engulfed in information that is increasingly false, misleading, and likely generated with the help of AI, where you focus and how you do it matters more than ever.

Here is my own current list of areas I read and focus on in a given week. In no particular order.

Magazines/Newspapers

  • The London Review of Books: One of the things I’ve enjoyed most in recent years is the discovery of this fortnightly (it is a British publication) paper that is ostensibly just book reviews, but in practice uses book reviews as a launching pad for wide-ranging essays at times only obliquely related to the topic at hand. The writers are uniformly excellent, often bored and tenured academics, who mix deep knowledge with a cultivated bitchiness and cleverness in turn of phrase that I find irresistible. It can feel like finishing a novella to complete a full issue, but it is always well worth it.
  • Los Angeles Review of Books: This is a newer discovery that I’m really enjoying. An American version of the LRB noted above that goes deep on topics and is mostly digital. I should probably be reading The New York Review of Books as well, but there’s only so much time.
  • New Yorker/The Atlantic: I’ve had subscriptions to both over the years. They have good content, but not enough for me to pay the quite high subscription fees and read everything when I find the magazines listed before better.
  • The Economist/New York Times: I used to read both cover-to-cover; now I find myself hate skim-reading them at best. Neoliberal to a fault in both cases. Pretending to be liberal when they are more dyed-in-the-wool neoliberal. For The Economist, in particular, two truths emerge for me after years of consumption: the first is that if you actually know something about what an article describes, you see how often they get in wrong while writing in the voice of someone who should be obeyed and not questioned; the second is the tired neoliberalism on display at all times. Look no further than a recent issue devoted to the idea–I kid you not–that the rich already pay too much in tax and something else must be done to fix the insane inequality everywhere. What is the cure? The Economist surprisingly doesn’t know, just that it doesn’t involve redistributing wealth down, only up.
  • The Guardian: A paper I’ve read for a long time because I appreciate a non-US slant on things, and it is left of what remains of “liberal” papers like the NYTimes, which to me are center or center-right at best in practice. As good a single online resource as there is, but also afflicted by largely Oxbridge authors who can’t shake their class bias.

Socials

I am professionally obligated to be on these channels, but I try to limit my usage. The signal-to-noise ratio is pretty bad and getting worse with the AISlopification of everything.

  • Reddit: In the last year, I’ve increasingly turned to Reddit to find something approaching non-Fox News-like information, especially given what’s happened to the U.S. media landscape since 2025. It is imperfect, infuriating, clearly censored, and yet more open than almost any other site. I lurk in logged-out mode on occasion. Sometimes it is interesting; mainly, it is the same dozen topics rehashed, so I use it less and less. But it is telling that it is far more engaging than, say, The Washington Post, these days.
  • LinkedIn: I was blissfully off this channel for about 10 years, but rejoined when I started working at JetBrains last January. It’s the best social channel out there right now, which is damning it with faint praise. Likely that’s because, in theory, everyone is a human and you know who they are, so there are fewer anonymous hot takes and attacks. But there are still hot takes and attacks, and everyone seems to be using AI to gain engagement to some unknown end. I post thoughts there and follow colleagues, but largely, I find it pretty useless.
  • Mastodon: I quite like it because it’s where the Python and Django communities have migrated since Twitter/X turned into its current self several years ago. I’m interested in what these people have to say and many would rather craft a short message than write a blog post. But… it’s a scan for me.
  • YouTube: I’m going to include it on here. I have deeply mixed feelings about the platform. That said, there is good content on there, and it’s about the only place to find long-form takes from people who have something to say. The issue is that these same people feel compelled to feed the algorithm and create a lot of content, so I find myself liking someone’s stuff, then seeing them self-dilute in an understandable effort to gain subscribers, and it generally feels like a wonderful espresso turned into a bad americano. Still has value; likely losing it though.

RSS Feeds

Most of my digital content comes from RSS feeds at this point. I use the News Explorer recommended to me by Carlton Gibson, a one-time purchase that makes it easy to follow things.

I have a pretty long list on here that is the most revealing of my interests and sentiments: technology, economics, history, politics, science, and literature. It’s a list that works for me, but likely doesn’t overlap well with too many other people.

Books

Here is where I have focused more and more of my attention in recent years. Being a parent to young children for so many years has made it harder to enjoy fiction than before–something about needing 30+ minutes of uninterrupted time when I’m not exhausted is hard to come by in this stage of life–but given that my youngest is now 6, there are increasingly moments where I can read fiction again for fun.

I’ve been more and more rereading older books since I first digested many of the classics in my teenage and early/mid twenty-something years, but now that I’m twice as old and closer in age to the authors when they wrote them, I can appreciate deeper things in the text. Basically, I’m less focused on plot and more focused on people themselves, their characters, what they engage with, how they feel, and how they interact. There are only so many stories out there, but the human skin on top of it is infinitely fascinating.

When it comes to nonfiction, I read a lot. The ability to read a few pages at a time, if needed, means I’ve kept up this habit over the years more than long-form fiction. There are so many great writers and books out there; I almost feel guilty spending any time doomscrolling or looking online. Multiple lifetimes’ worth of amazing content and insight to be found. And often great nonfiction writers will mention or refer to other great writers, and so it is a wonderful game of telephone to pull on those threads.

I don’t have to love everything I read to find value in it. If I don’t like fiction, I’ll probably stop. But for nonfiction, I try to read books I disagree with if the writing is otherwise consumable. If something is popular but I don’t like it, I try to think about why. Is it the topic? The take? The lines word by word? Analyzing things makes me appreciate them more, whether I like them or not.

Conclusion

Thanks to those of you who made it to the end. The tl;dr is that in middle age I aim to remain as open-minded as I can be, to resist the calcification of mind that can come after a lot of reps, but also to recognize my preferred means of consuming things. For me, that means long-form written content by people who have put a lot of thought into it.

There’s so much interesting, funny, erudite learning out there that whenever I find myself frustrated by what’s in front of my eyes, I need to remember to search elsewhere.