Its been quite a while since I have added any new sites to my regular routine. But over the past few months, I have come across a slew of terrific offerings. They mostly seem to have come out of finding material for later iPad readings. (I wonder if the iPad is actually causing more people to read).
“Less is more” is the cliche, but these days, I find myself leaning towards “Better is more, (length be damned).”
If you enjoy good writing on a broad variety of subjects, you will find plenty worth reading here:
• Long Reads pretty much what its name suggests: Longer form journalism, magazine stories and interviews, 1500 words+.
• Gangrey bills itself as “prolonging the slow death of newspapers.” I found it via an entry titled Stories That Should Never Go Away which itself could its own blog (or at least a category). The House That Thurman Munson Built was surprisingly beautiful for a sports story.
• Instapaper was designed as an iPad app, but it works as a standalone page. Install a little java bookmark, and anything you want to “Read Later” gets saved to your instapaper page (and synched to your iPad). You can create folders for different groupings of stuff. Its a simple, single purpose page, but it works terrifically well.
• Five Books interviews a leading expert each day, and asks them to recommend (you guessed it) 5 books on their area of expertise. Another simple idea, well executed.
• Give Me Something To Read: Out of Berkshire County, England, Richard Dunlop-Walters offers up this cross between Long Reads and Instapaper. He describes it as “hand-picked selection of the finest articles and essays.”
Intelligent curation works for me.
If the reductionism of our short attention span society annoys you, if you find catch phrases destructive, or think Twitter is absurd, these sites are for you . . .
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