Bill

I don’t really watch a lot of television news. I mostly watch it if someone sends me a link to something they think I would be interested in.

I do read quite a few magazines and newspaper. I like the Economist because it provides good background knowledge. Scientific American is very good and so is the New Yorker. We get the Washington Post, the Wall Street Journal, the Financial Times, and the New York Times. I tend to read the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal online but I read the Economist almost entirely offline. I read Slate quite a bit, too. Slate is good because if you go there, you always find three or four things that are very interesting.

Beyond that I’m amazed at the number of great seminars and lectures that are available online. In an area like how the brain works, for example, every month I’d say there are at least ten really good videos worth watching. In fact, I used to be able to watch all of them on a topic that I cared about, but as there has gotten to be more and more out there, it’s not easy to do that anymore.

There are some good sites that make it easier to find great courses and lectures online, including Academic Earth and the TED Conference website at Ted.com. There are also good courses that you can buy online. Teach12.com is the main company for this and while their stuff costs money, the quality is extremely high.