What I'm Reading and Listening To, February 2025

2025-02-07 ~600 words

Since last year, my content consumption has changed a little bit. Not that much though.

If you’re just interested in what’s changed since last year, here’s a summary:

Removed: Noahpinion (repetitive, lots of posts, not always insightful), Money Stuff (so many long posts), The Pragmatic Programmer (not that useful imo)

Added: Astral Codex Ten (the new MVP of my content consumption), The Intelligence from the Economist (well worth the short episodes), Shardcast: The Brandon Sanderson Podcast (truly useless but I enjoy it, what can I say)

Newsletters

  • The Morning Briefing by The New York Times – General news. I increasingly skim this more than read every word.
  • Slow Boring by Matt Yglesias (paid version) – Political commentary. Left-leaning but pragmatic, empirical, and relatively non-idealogical.
  • Silver Bulletin by Nate Silver (paid version) – Commentary on political, sports, and other things. This is on the chopping block though: Nate posts a lot about things he doesn’t really have anything insightful to say about.
  • Benedict’s Newsletter by Benedict Evans (free version) – Tech business news and commentary
  • Stratechery by Ben Thompson (free version) – Tech business commentary
  • Python Weekly (free) – News and articles relating to Python (the programming language)
  • Astral Codex Ten by Scott Alexander (paid version, but almost all the content is free) – A very thoughtful blog on all kinds of things, usually focusing on how to allocate resources (our own and the government’s) and how to live an effective life.

Podcasts

  • The Tony Kornheiser Show – Daily-ish “radio” show about sports and anything else
  • EconTalk – Deep dives on economics topics and sometimes beyond. 2024 was a very bad year for EconTalk, with a lot of Israel/Palestine coverage that I didn’t find enlightening along with the regular dose of somewhat-silly topics. But I remain a devoted fan of host Russ Roberts and I’ll be sticking with it unless things get worse.
  • Dunc’d On Prime – Impossible volumes of NBA talk
  • Freakonomics Radio – Discussion of various topics through an economic lens
  • Conversations with Tyler – Interviews with unusual people across all kinds of domains
  • Accidental Tech Podcast – News and discussion about Apple products and occasionally other tech
  • Connected – A nonsense show that’s nominally about tech
  • Happy Path Programming – Thoughtful discussion of programming topics. This might be on the chopping block though, as I like the hardcore programming topics but often the episodes focus on something about people management or social dynamics, where I think the hosts have little to say.
  • Cortex – Productivity & complaining about nothing
  • Plain English with Derek Thompson – Deep dives and interviews across various topics
  • Python Bytes – Weekly roundup of Python-related “news”
  • The Ryen Russillo Podcast – Sports and “life advice”, though I usually skip everything but the life advice.
  • The Intelligence from the Economist – Short episodes (about 25 minutes) that cover a few of the biggest world news items of the day or week
  • Shardcast: the Brandon Sanderson Podcast – A bunch of dorks talk about the fantasy universe created by Brandon Sanderson. Embarrassing, yes, but I’m a dork too.