Balancing My Media Diet

Ozempic for daily reading

If I had to pick a moment in time when the “old” Internet started its downward trajectory, it was when Google got rid of its Reader aggregator in 2013. It had been around just shy of a decade when the end came, and I can say that that was the period of my life when I truly devoured the most media since part of that time coincided with me working part time at a coffee shop that provided me free access to all the free caffeine I wanted. Google Reader made its debut in 2005, Twitter came around the next year, and I was wired up! I’d just sit at whatever place I could find with decent wi-fi and a spot to plug my laptop that sounded like a cartoon jalopy in, and I’d blog away! Social media provided me with plenty to read, but the assortment of sites I’d curated for my Google Reader was where the good stuff was. I had all the Times, Guardian, and every other big news organization, but I also had blogs…so many blogs! I’d say I mostly followed literary ones—The Rumpus, HTMLGiant, Electric Literature, etc.—and the more niche, coastal bubble sites—Gawker, The Awl—but I had a bunch of others that were usually run by a single person and sometimes gave me pure gold. It was a beautiful thing when I’d see the newly published stuff and there’d be some guy I’d followed since Blogger was known as Blogspot offering up a few thousand words on some random history deep dive into…whatever. It felt so chaotic and great. Hardly anything was edited, giving the whole experience a feeling sort of like the part from the 1986 Muppet Babies “Kermit Goes to Washington” episode where Animal is driving around Paris in a little car yelling “No rules! No rules!”

I look back at that time and miss the scrappy, DIY feel of it all. I think we’re better off when there’s more to read, and more people writing it for a variety of outlets, both big and small. But personally, I feel so much calmer just having a few things to read now instead of dozens. I’ve also trimmed down my digital intake and try to pick up the newspaper from my bodega a few times a week. It’s nice to just sit with a newspaper and decide what I’ve got the time to read and not have a hundred people on social media or an algorithm throwing some terrible hot take in my face. I can just turn to the op-ed section of the Times and see one of the many writers who raises our collective blood pressure with their truly awful opinions has a new column and just decide “Nope.”

People being chill at Balthazar in the late-1990s.

It took me a long time to figure this out, but there’s so much I don’t need to read or experience. Today, the closest thing I have to Google Reader is my group texts, a dozen ongoing conversations at once, almost all of the people I type with are friends whose opinions and tastes I respect. But I’d say once a day I’ll see a link pop up in one of them for a TikTok or some drivel that is so bad and whacked out that you can tell the person didn’t feed it through A.I. to write it. I take one look and decide pretty much on the spot if I care enough to click. Most of the time I don’t. My friends reactions usually tell the entire tale.

Over the last few years, I’ve found myself getting really strict about my media intake. Even before Elon came along and changed it to X, I was trimming down my Twitter time. I got rid of Facebook a few years ago, I won’t put the Reddit app on my phone or Bluesky on my desktop, and the only reason my phone is on my desk at all is so I can see if Lulu’s nanny is sending me videos of my baby trying to eat a book at the library. If anything, newsletters tend to be the only things that catch my eye. Sometimes they pop up in my inbox, and from time to time it’s what I see in my Substack feed. There are newsletters I read as soon as I see they’re published—Tina Brown’s Fresh Hell, The Maris Review, Feed Me—and others I know I’ll want to sit with—Lincoln Michel’s Counter Craft, many of the thoughtful essays Sari Botton publishes across her little empire, Angelica Jade Bastién’s Madwomen & Muses—but besides that, I’ve gotten to a point where I generally know what I’m going to read from day to day, and I love that feeling.

I generally treat my media diet better than my personal food intake. I have a few things I consider martinis, things I don’t need, that might actually be bad for me, but I enjoy. Most podcasts are martinis—the fun ones are, at least. I listen to Throwing Fits pretty regularly, but I find myself tuning in less because they have guests or talk about menswear, but more because the hosts are so good at what they do, they’re hilarious and actually two of the best interviewers on any pod I’ve heard. I’m a middle-aged white guy, so I listen to WTF, but I tend to pick and choose depending on whether I care about the guest or not. The Bret Easton Ellis Podcast is my martini and a bottle of wine, with a drink to polish things off. I generally feel like this isn’t good for me, but I love it and I’m usually not hungover in the morning.

Daily reads are my vitamins. I read the Times—no surprise there—and take a look the various New York mag websites—Grub Street, Curbed, Vulture, The Cut—a few times a day. But besides that, Hell Gate and Gothamist are the two sites I checkout the most because I try to stay focused on what’s going on in my city, and they tend to do the best reporting. I have a hard time classifying the monthly (or so) reads, so maybe I’ll say they’re the steak night of my media diet. I think a steak night properly done at home with a nice wine and great sides is a nice thing, and so is reading an issue of The Drift, The New Yorker, The Paris Review, the New York Review of Architecture, Racquet, Harper’s, the various reviews of books, or any of the other publications I either subscribe to or I’ll pick up when I visit Casa Magazines. Almost everything all of those titles publish is made available online, but reading it offline is so much better.

As for time, I generally carve out my mornings for reading the news and maybe an article or two while I’m waiting for Lulu to get up and while I’m feeding her. I’ll peak at things throughout the rest of the day, reading whatever seems important enough to take my attention away from writing, but I stay away from the computer and phone when I have my hour break to dig into whatever books I’m reading. At the end of my workday, I generally have three to five things I have saved to read while I wind down. By 6 or 7, I’m either reading a book or watching TV or a movie. I’m pretty much done with the internet by then save for looking at Instagram few times and the sometimes undeniable urge to post something that’s usually totally stupid. I’m trying to get to a point where my phone is face down for the entire night once my wife is done with work. I’m not there yet, but I consider everything I look at on there to be the candy in my diet. I love candy, but it rots your teeth.

What I’ve realized by trying to be more conscious of my media diet is that I’m actually paying more for my consumption. That’s the big difference between now and my Google Reader days of yore. The good free stuff to read has declined, mostly because it’s almost impossible to keep going and producing stuff for little to no money, but also because the way the modern Internet works makes it tough to find anything new. I don’t mind paying, especially for newsletters run by individuals whose work and opinions I cherish. I’m actually still getting caught up on the subscriptions I’ve been meaning to buy even though I think I’m way past my media diet calorie limit, but the name of the game is conscious consumption. As long as I’m thinking about what I want to read or listen to throughout the day and don’t get caught up clicking a link because somebody told me how terrible the article is, then I think I’m doing a little better.