Oh cool! Funny links to crazy videos of drunk celebrities and dogs on skateboards, right?
No. Sorry. That's what you were expecting?
Yeah. That's what links pages are.
You're probably right. But I'm not going to be updating this all the time, so I just wanted to link to a handful of really good blogs and news sources - obscure or totally mainstream - that I check out every morning. So this is where I go (and pretty much always in this order) every morning:
9:01 AM
Pop Candy A couple years ago, I went through a weird phase. After visiting all my usual web-surfing destinations, I would stare at my computer and wonder if there were any other sites that I should check out. And one site would pop into my head EVERY time: usatoday.com. But I had no idea why this was happening. I had never actually gone to usatoday.com, and I rarely read it in its tangible, printed form. One time, just out of curiosity, I went to usatoday.com and had a totally forgettable experience. I don't even remember what the top news story was that day. I thought I would never go back. But as it turns out, there is a blog on usatoday.com that I really, really like. It's by Whitney Matheson and it has links to all kinds of entertainment news, and enough Dwight Schrute references to keep me coming back every morning. So that whole usatoday.com thing turned out to be pretty prophetic.
9:03 AM
Fimoculous More entertainment links, but with a higher-brow, nerdier, techier lean. This is when I start to feel smarter. But I am not actually getting smarter.* I am just ramping into the first caffeine spike of the day, and I am having a momentary, euphoric, misguided epiphany: I will definitely accomplish something today.
9:06 AM
Sports Guy This is still my favorite online column even if its author, Bill Simmons, spends most of his time talking about a league - the NBA - that I find completely boring. That means he's a good writer. On an analgous note, Ernest Hemingway once wrote an entire book about an old guy going fishing, and I read it despite:
A) hating fishing, and
B) having a stubborn prejudice against old people-as-main characters.
9:11 AM
YPulse Anastasia Goodstein doesn't know it yet, but she is helping to write our book about young people in the U.S. Her links are about youth and marketing, and I'm stockpiling them, so that when we write the (The) Young Americans Project book, we can say it's "researched." Thank you, Anastasia.
And then I go to NYTimes.com and ESPN.com to glance at the news before staring at the computer and wondering where to go next.
*My friend Huge would, at this point, make the joke, "I just stayed in a Holiday Inn last night," but I am not Huge.
adam@theadamwhite.com |
