Rethinking News: Sources I

For Rebekah:

To point with what a windbag I am, I think I asked her what do you want me to write on? And she said something like "Wine and what news sources are good for quick coverage so one can stay informed." The details are a little fuzzy now. Anyways...

We have two different demographic profiles sis, and mine is definitely on the more extreme and weird side, yours more Christian libertarian. It is at a loss to me why anyone would watch "Fox News" and I feel compelled to show them the folly of their way, whereas you'd shrug your shoulders I guess. On the other hand I like talk-radio, and stereo-typical Christian news-sources. So, without further ado...

Junk Food

Take your pick: Huffington Post (Progressive)/Drudge Report (Conservative)/Politico (Junkie)/World (Conservative Christian)

I read the New York Times a lot, which probably has to do with Dr. Nina Morgan and free copies on campus in my college days than anything else.

There's also Democracy Now!: the War and Peace Report. It's not a paper, it's purely audio/video/transcripts with renowned journalist Amy Goodman. Great for international coverage both developmentally and conflict; however, it's progressive. You also wouldn't have Jon Steward showing up on her show accusing her of asking soft-ball questions, in fact.... Clinton I think described her as out-and-out "hostile and combative". If this is junk food, then I'd consider it more along the lines of the In-and-Out of fast food, or take-out Chinese or something. They'll cover issues you won't see in the mainstream, and interview the folks others simply do stories on.

Research Groups

Let's see, I subscribe to the Barna Group cause it's referenced in a lot of Christian papers. They and others also bring up the Pew Research Center which, I've never subscribed to until I just thought of it now. There's the Brookings Institute which is much ado about nothing, and has um an RSS feed. Again, there's the Gallop Poll. You might wanna just select the feeds from those sites that are on topics of interest to you, but like I said why not go to the source?

Podcasts

The World Next Week. Okay, I don't know why I listen to this one. It's put out by the Council on Foreign Relations and its mag Foreign Affairs, and two guys just discuss the upcoming weeks international events. It's fine and all, but it might interest you more than me. It's about 10-18 minutes, generally 13 minutes.

Freakonomics Radio. BTW - all these have iTune options too. This is cool. This is one of the many things that Kev turned me on to recently. I'd read the Freakonomic section before, but I kinda always forgot about etc, and Kev told me he read it, and I had recently gotten all excited about their new book, so I was like a kid "hell yea!" and got their podcast and am loving it. The folks from Freakonomics, a NYT journalist and UoC economist (that's fresh-water fyi), have put together two books, one which had everyone caught up in the hype.

The authors attempt to demonstrate the power of data mining. Many of their results emerge from Levitt's analysis of various databases, and asking the right questions. - wiki

What questions? Well I'm glad you asked:

Chapter 1: Discovering cheating as applied to teachers and sumo wrestlers (See below)
Chapter 2: Information control as applied to the Ku Klux Klan and real-estate agents
Chapter 3: The economics of drug dealing, including the surprisingly low earnings and abject working conditions of crack cocaine dealers
Chapter 4: The controversial role legalized abortion may have played in reducing crime. (Levitt explored this topic in an earlier paper entitled "The Impact of Legalized Abortion on Crime.")
Chapter 5: The negligible effects of good parenting on education
Chapter 6: The socioeconomic patterns of naming children

It's cool stuff.

Audio Mises Daily. This is of course, Austrian School economics and is very heterodox. You probably won't find this a great deal for value/time investment, although you can as mentioned download them and play them on the Bose while cooking or something.

There are some others on my iTouch, but... I'm too lazy to hook up the iTouch to comp so...