If you're interested in retro stuff, I highly recommend checking out Byte Magazine's archive at https://worldradiohistory.com/Byte_Magazine.htm. They have issues dating from 1975 to 1994, and the search functionality is pretty good.
While not all of their content is of high quality, there are some fascinating gems hidden in there. For instance, their February 1992 issue has a section on Archie, one of the earliest internet search engines:
> For many people, particularly programmers and engineers, the Internet means "info- booty": shareware and freeware source code, documents, graphics, and data sets available by file transfer downloads and from E-mail servers. Sites like UUNET and The World each have several gigabytes' worth of publicly available archives. These are but two of the hundreds of sites with archives accessible via these methods. Even admitting a fair amount of redundancy among archives, it still adds up to about 100 gigabytes, and new sites and offerings are coming on-line every day.
> With so many different archives, it can be hard to figure out where (and at what network address) to access the items you want. If you don't know what you want beyond compilers or CP/M applications, it's even more overwhelming.
> The "archie group" at McGill University (Montreal, Quebec, Canada) has one solution to the problem: archie (archive without the v), the Internet Archive Server Listing Service (for access, see reference 2). Archie is a central database of information about Internet-accessible archive sites, plus server programs that provide access by telnet, anonymous file transfer protocol (FTP), E-mail, and the Prospero distributed computer system.
The archive at World Radio History has much broader interest, with hobby electronics, professional electronics, radio and TV management and programming, and some popular music history.
I miss Byte and Nybble mags. There are no good programming/computer mags that take you into the software and teaching programming at different levels.
Not just beginner, intermediate, etc., but software and low level hardware for specific chip sets.
Raspberry PI mag is the closest thing. Maybe I should just downgrade my desktop to a RPI and enjoy the hobby again. Maybe, build a robo-dog/cat/creature.
Quality is evident immediately from the lead story on Noema: "A Parliament of Earthlings". Fascinating read for a Sunday morning on AI efforts to enhance whale conservation (with plenty of knowing nods to Star Trek IV). At least the first half of the article felt that way. But instead the article just sort of devolves into a rolling argument for a "Gaia 2.0" hypothesis. Curious, I delved a bit deeper. And what I found is a kind of supremacy of faith in our ability to delivery planet-scale geoengineering. Terraforming Planet Earth, in a nutshell ;)
I haven't heard of Jim Simons before, so I looked him up on Wikipedia. He sounds like quite a character. I, too, would stop wearing socks and fund a non-profit science magazine if I had a billion dollars.
I feel I get a lot of value for the $60 I pay annually to read The New Yorker online. [1]
It's not perfect, but it's become essentially the only place I consume "long-form articles about interesting stuff"-type content, which I think they still do better than anyone.
Agreed about the New Yorker. Likewise, agree with the exact same description for the Atlantic. And I have bounced back and forth between them over the years.
Be sure to find out to see if you can check out issues from your library through Overdrive/Libby. Granted, I have to read it via a browser but can still read for free.
Same. I find it hard to read long and complicated articles from a screen, and I would pay a lot for a weekly subscription to dead-tree magazine Quanta.
Right now I print articles I'm interested in, which is far from the most efficient solution.
The Conversation (https://theconversation.com/) publishes news-style articles by working academics and graduate students, so the contributors typically have a technical background relevant to the subjects they are writing about (making the publication comparable to Quanta).
Nautilus magazine also publishes excellent science journalism (https://nautil.us) with high-quality writing comparable to Quanta. In contrast with The Conversation, the contributors are typically professional journalists and writers—the writing quality is therefore often much higher and more literary than The Conversation's, though Conversation contributors have relevant specialist knowledge more often than Nautilus contributors.
Also, Lapham's Quarterly (https://www.laphamsquarterly.org) is perhaps comparable to Noema, as the magazine publishes essays and analyses of modern issues, often via making comparisons between current affairs and important parts of history. This looks similar to Noema's approach of analyzing current events from an academic perspective, from noticing references to academic publications in several essays featured on Noema's front page.
I'm not sure what you mean, but all the publications are non-profit organizations—none of which I am affiliated with.
Lapham's and The Conversation also don't have any paywalls, though Nautilus does have a soft paywall of two articles a month (this is comparable to the magazines mentioned by other users in this discussion, with similarly fairly relaxed or stricter paywalls).
I don’t have a link to share, but I’d like to thank OP and every comment in this thread. There are some gems here. Of course one can google, but when something is recommended by a human, and is purely based on merit, it is much more trustworthy than a random site filled with ads looking to make a buck.
I used to be a fan of The Economist but after a while I figured out that it’s better at sounding smart than being smart. If they ever write about a field you know we’ll you’ll see what I mean.
Maybe it depends on your field a bit. I'm in physics, and a few of their articles on particle physics and quantum computing have really impressed. They hit all of the main points and caveats that almost all other news sources usually miss.
The depth of the reporting also depends on the article. For a particular example, I thought The Economist's article on GPT-3 published in June 2022—before ChatGPT would later be released in November—was particularly good, as the article soberly discussed at length the strengths and weaknesses of large language models, without overhyping the technology (paywall): https://www.economist.com/interactive/briefing/2022/06/11/hu...
However, it's also fair to note that many articles in their weekly issue—often at 600-800 words—just don't have the space to go in-depth enough into an issue, in contrast to a feature in The New Yorker or another long-form magazine like Foreign Affairs.
I've found The Economist to be a useful publication to hear about interesting problems I might otherwise have never heard of, and to read a fact-checked concise overview of a particular topic, before looking for a more in-depth source if there is a motivation to read further into the topic.
I feel that way about Bloomberg Businessweek. There was a time when I was doing a lot of business development work and it seemed I had some insider insight into some story in in every issue. That is, I had been in on a sales call with the people at some company they profiled, or knew some competitors in stealth mode or somebody had told me and my partner more than they should have about what was talked about in some article.
Yes. Though it might be better to say that they are very consistent with their writing style, snobbish attitude, and ideology. Vs. hit-and-miss at times with good, accurate reporting.
Hadn’t seen Noema before, thanks for the pointer - someone already mentioned nautilus, Aeon.co is quite good with a very diverse set of topics, and Hakai (https://hakaimagazine.com/) has some very good environmental writing.
It's not going to be that relevant to many people here, but there is a longform soccer writing magazine called The Blizzard which is excellent. It's edited by Jonathan Wilson of 'Inverting the Pyramid' fame.
Harper’s magazine is great for general interest (much less pretentious than the New Yorker). One of the oldest magazines in the country.
Noema has some good stuff, although check out their advisory board. So many high profile neoliberal ghouls that the first time I saw it I thought it was a joke. It introduced me to Byung-Chul Han, for which I am forever grateful. Hope they can keep it up since they were hiring for a senior editor for a while there recently…
If you have a tablet, it’s worth checking out the apps PressReader and Libby. I’m not sure if it works in other countries, but in the UK you can login with your local library card number (which you should be able to sign up for online) and get access to lots of free digital copies of printed magazines (and newspapers) including high quality stuff like The Economist
It's along the lines of Quanta or Nautilus but with more of an investigative type of work, the main goal being bringing under-reported science-adjacent issues to light.
They do have a slightly leftist tilt but it's still mostly professional. I haven't really noticed them doing that thing left-leaning publications do where they act as though some matter of opinion is fact, and can't conceive of counter-arguments. They do a good job investigating all angles, in my experience.
I had the pleasure of accidentally meeting one of their editors for something entirely unrelated, but we did chat about the magazine and I was pretty impressed with her desire for rigor rather than agenda.
https://thinking-about-things.com/ is great, it's one interesting article three times a week. I've learned about a lot of interesting blogs/publications from them.
You should check out the Times Literary Supplement.
Very, very interesting articles. Fiendish crossword.
They don't much cover any technical material, but they cover all kinds of everything else. The reviews are often much better than the original material.
Foreign Affairs. Its basically where the serious international affairs community (Western) talks to one another. It has a print mag (monthly) with about 8 long form articles, an online version, and an app where you can read the articles offline or have them read out to you. They also run webinars where specialists talk, very interesting.
You wont agree with every writer, but every article is at least thought provoking.
You may also like Emergence Magazine. It's significantly more humanities/culture oriented but similarity wide-ranging and imaginative.
Come to think of it, I think imagination is one of the qualities that makes Quanta so magical. Ostensibly it's a magazine about the interactions of formal and natural sciences, but they're not afraid to include a bold dash of imagination.
I really enjoy Delayed Gratification (https://www.slow-journalism.com/); good breadth of globally diverse news, written a quarter or more after the event, to discuss the long term impact.
+1 for IEEE Spectrum. I recently stumbled upon print issue archive from 2010-2012 and was delighted by their coverage of private space flight and 3D printing. To me, Spectrum is an early high-level overview of interesting technology.
Liberties Journal continues to impress me. Culture, Politics, Poetry, good stuff. Leon Wieseltier is the former Literary Editor of the New Republic and is now chief editor of Liberties.
Libcom.org is a wonderful place. I still benefit from it regularly after 10+ years of reading wide and deep, there. It's not very similar to Quanta though.
> It was one of the fastest decimations of an animal population in world history—and it had happened almost entirely in secret. The Soviet Union was a party to the International Convention for the Regulation of Whaling, a 1946 treaty that limited countries to a set quota of whales each year. By the time a ban on commercial whaling went into effect, in 1986, the Soviets had reported killing a total of 2,710 humpback whales in the Southern Hemisphere. In fact, the country’s fleets had killed nearly 18 times that many, along with thousands of unreported whales of other species.
> The Soviet whale slaughter followed no such logic. Unlike Norway and Japan, the other major whaling nations of the era, the Soviet Union had little real demand for whale products. Once the blubber was cut away for conversion into oil, the rest of the animal, as often as not, was left in the sea to rot or was thrown into a furnace.
the biggest argument against this is that communist countries still achieve great things in the face of MASSIVE setbacks and sanctions from capitalist countries with lots of power. Yet after an initial period of food insecurity, these nations tend to do great for a while. For example, the CIA reported that the Soviet diet had less calories and was more nutritious than the American diet.
In 1980, the average life expectancy of a man in Russia was 62.5 years. Women about 10 years longer. In other words, less than the average life expectancy of each gender in the US. According to the journal "Alcohol and Alcoholism", the life expectancy improved by a couple of years in the 90s but subsequently fell back to Soviet Union levels. The aggregate life expectancy bottomed out in 2003 (UN Statistics) and has since improved to about 73 (average of men & women). That's #35 on the list of similar countries, trailing countries like Mexico and Iran. The aggregate life expectancy in the US is above 79. These are all from the UN Population Prospects 2022 Report. You can check them yourselves. Finally, are we supposed to trust the CIA?
i don't know why you're all arguing about marxist-leninist state communism in a thread about anarchism. of course it's bad and does not work. that's what the link i shared says.
Quanta https://api.quantamagazine.org/feed/
Noema Magazine https://www.noemamag.com/feed/
Aeon https://aeon.co/feed
Nautilus https://nautil.us/feed/
The Point Magazine https://thepointmag.com/feed/
Asterisk Magazine https://asteriskmag.com/feed
Symmetry Magazine https://www.symmetrymagazine.org/feed
n+1 Magazine https://www.nplusonemag.com/feed/
Harpers Magazine https://harpers.org/feed/
Low←Tech Magazine https://solar.lowtechmagazine.com/feeds/all-en.atom.xml
Public Books Magazine http://www.publicbooks.org/feed
The New Atlantis https://www.thenewatlantis.com/feed