Que Sera Sara?

Today’s assignment was to read something outside my comfort zone.

I love reading articles and ideas from all sorts of people, and social and cultural commentary are one my secret loves. I am glad to be alive today (not exclusively) because the advent of internet periodicals feeds an heretofore unmet need in my word-hungers.

Beyond the BuzzFeed Quizzes and shopping and personal blogs — all of which I spend an inordinate amount of time surfing — there is a whole world of intelligent, well-informed and articulate people thinking interesting thoughts.

My Google search and Facebook feed are so well tailored target marketed now I think I’ll be hard pressed to find anything new to my eyeballs through my well-tread avenues.

So while I ferret out something new to me, here are few go-to sources of mine in which you might find something fresh and interesting for yourself.

BrainPickings – Maria Popova is a little bit of a god (I so wish I’d been there to see her talk at the Melbourne Writers Festival last week). Her regular essays and weekly digests are part-book-review, part life-study of big ideas in art, creativity, neuroscience and philosophy. I’ve gleaned about a million book recommendations from her succinct essays, and I’ve loved almost every one.

The Atlantic – A mainstay of young intellectuals for ages, but not my bag until it came online. I love the variety and the incredibly talented writers, and it feels better informed and less generically bias — though that isn’t to say it’s editorials aren’t highly opinionated — than say, Salon.com or some of the other commentary sites.

Hyperallergic – Ostensibly an art critic’s magazine and blog, but often with a wider repertoire of thinking about culture, media and society through a critical lens, as well as some excellent, personal reporting (of which one of my friends from college is the editor, he!).

Honorable Mentions include Quartz (Politics and Economics from Atlantic Media), Electric Literature (the future of words), Mashable (media & tech), AdWeek (advertising & marketing), Wired (the fun side of all this), and of course Granta and the London Review of Books from die-hard my literary roots, plus about a billion others.

Happy Reading!