Roy Tang

Programmer, engineer, scientist, critic, gamer, dreamer, and kid-at-heart.

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Newsletters, Redux

A while back I wrote about how I wasn’t a big fan of the recent trend of newsletters. Since then, I’ve realized Substack actually publishes RSS feeds for their newsletters, so I’ve been following a a bit more of them. I thought I’d recommend a few that I’ve found to be quite interesting/useful:

  1. Money Stuff by Matt Levine. The only non-substack entry on today’s list, this Bloomberg column covers financial matters like stock market and investment stuff. (It was certainly useful when following the whole Reddit/Gamestop stock market saga!) Levine likes to go in-depth and long-form, so his columns are usually quite long and cover multiple topics. I’ll admit that this kind of thing isn’t really my specialty, and most of the time I have trouble even getting to the end of any single entry without my eyes glazing over, but I do feel like I learn a lot every time and I hope to someday finish a column claiming I fully understand it!
  2. Noahpinion by Noah Smith. Noah Smith writes mostly about economics and US politics. The articles are fairly in-depth (not as much as Money Stuff), and I’ve found them generally informative and educational on topics I’m not especially familiar with.
  3. Today in Tabs by Rusty Foster. I used to consider myself “extremely online” and aware of most everything on the internet. That might have been true back in 2010, back before all these youngsters came online and added all their vlogs and tiktoks and whatnot. This newsletter (and the next one) helps me keep up with all of the modern internet’s day-to-day nonsense. Each issue of Today in Tabs is dense and jam-packed with a whole bunch of recent cool internet things.
  4. Garbage Day by Ryan Broderick. I first encountered this newsletter when someone shared his article giving an explainer about the Tumblr subculture. It covers a variety of internet-focused topics, but each issue focuses on less… things than Today In Tabs, albeit covering each item with just a bit more depth. Together, both newsletters give me a good idea of what’s happening on the internet on a regular basis.
  5. Normcore Tech by Vicki Boykis. The author’s background is in data science, and from their own description, the newsletter offers “takes on tech news that are rooted in humanism, nuance, context, rationality, and a little fun” – I couldn’t write a better explanation than that.
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