Links
I would recommend not losing more time to the Internet than you already have, but in case you’re curious, here’s how I do it. My latest finds can be had from del.icio.us.
Friends. Dave likes math, cognitive science, and baking his own bread. Elsa likes graphic design and music (but cupcakes most of all). Legion is written by fellow Harvardians and (it seems) aspiring New Yorker-ers. Dem Apples is by the Harvard College Democrats. (I don’t read it, but thought I’d return the recent blogroll).
Eye Candy. The Flickrblog highlights nice photography that is sometimes hard to find browsing through Flickr yourself. Kitsune Noir is a daily treasure trove of photography, illustration, animation, and occasionally music, collected by a graphic designer with an eye for wittiness in all its forms. Flight404 is a blog of inspirations, sketches, and concepts (and some astounding results) from a digital artist who works in the medium of the programming language Processing.
Ear Candy. Music blogs can waste a lot of your time, but you can be efficient about surfing them if you do it through the aggregator Hype Machine. Word of warning though: Hype Machine, much like all sources of music on the Internet, tends to have a confusing blend of indie, electronica, and brain-numbing mashups of otherwise harmless hip-hop/pop songs. If you want mainstream, better to ask your friends. Videos and commentary on indie/rock can be had at Stereogum, which is a hipper, less polished alternative to the giant Pitchfork. Somehow NPR World Café has a good selection too, decidedly more suited for your tastes than your mom’s.
Silliness. The Onion and McSweeney’s provide a daily hit of highbrow (and occasionally incomprehensible, in the case of McSweeney’s) humor. The unabashed geekiness of XKCD is one reason to hope that webcomics might one day approach the unconventional wit that Calvin and Hobbes (and frankly, not much else) once gave to the medium of newspaper comics. Occasionally I also enjoy Cyanide and Happiness, which, like XKCD, loves visual puns. The subject matter, on the other hand, ranges from groan-inducing toilet humor to strangely disturbing existential reflection. All with stick figures.
News. New York Times. The Economist. ‘Nuf said.
Ideas. The blog Ideas is a good place to start–it’s a collection of what the NYTimes staff is reading daily, and probably the one RSS feed I check the most. The links deal with psychology, economics, politics, etc. The same genre of articles abound at Slate (more newsy) and The New Yorker (more artsy). TED is an annual conference on cool ideas that publishes all its speeches online. Some more topic-specific blogs for your RSS reader: Human Nature (ethics/bioethics), The Great Beyond (science), Smooth Pebbles (science/culture), The Elegant Variation (literature), On An Overgrown Path (classical music).