Ask HN: Where are you going to find long-form content online these days?
Obviously, outside of Hacker News. A cautionary message from someone who used to think long form content equals quality and indepth coverage: Long form content in magazines still used to have limited pages. So there needed to be a balance between information and prose. So even in long prose, the content was well edited, every sentence brought something important to the table. Nowadays, on the web, an article could have infinite length without any limits. Less editing skills required and more importantly, the longer you stay on page, the better their metrics. So the content tends to be way longer with more passages that do not really add anything to the central message. Most of them are approaching novellas in length. At one point in time, this became such a big time sink for me, I wrote a firefox extension to warn me how long the page was and how long I spent on it. I am a moderately good reader and still some of these articles would typically take 45 mins to finish. One heuristic I follow nowadays:
Before reading, I think about what my purpose of this article is, what I hope to learn from this exercise: (It could just even be entertainment) A few mins in, I see if this purpose is being fulfilled. If yes, I continue. If not, I just bail out. Yes, it's mainly because Google started using a similar heuristic a few years ago: length equals quality. Or so the SEO world concluded. It may not have been true; correlation != causation is not a popular concept in SEO. The result is publishers and marketers padding content to achieve some imaginary ideal length. It's why recipes, for example, have hundreds of words of irrelevant crap at the beginning. That said, the long-form essay is an ancient genre—much older than the modern magazine article—and they have always been filled with "irrelevant" asides, tangents, artistic flourishes, and so on. Concisely conveying their "central message" wasn't the primary point of the form, and people who enjoyed that type of essay wouldn't expect a linear explanation of the topic. The prose style, imaginative complexity, unexpected comparisons, digressions, and explorations were integral to the genre. Sadly, great essays of that type take a long time to write and edit, and most people aren't interested in reading them. So we get long, repetitive, unimaginative junk instead. > passages that do not really add anything to the central message I really hate that thing where the authors tease you with an interesting story like "Mr X did this really interesting thing" and the third paragraph starts with "Mr X grew up in a nondescript village and now we take a detour to highlight how he grew up that has basically nothing to do with the thing I expected to read about here" ... Anyway ... I grew up in Germany in the early 80s and my parents were completely normal people ... I think people are taught to write this way, it's called "human interest" or something. Presumably, if they tell me Xs story starting with their grandparents, I'd be more read to extend empathy to Xs story later on. Except that by the time it gets to the interested part, I'm usually to tired to care... To add from a different perspective, long-form content also doesn't guarantee organic traffic: https://ahrefs.com/blog/short-form-content/ A lot of blogs/articles will also let you know how long it takes to read said content. Some even have progress bars. I really like the Astral Codex blog[1]. It is rationalist blog that features a variety of long-form posts, book reviews, discussions, etc. I don't really know if I consider myself a rationalist or not but I find the posts, discussions, and community to be very stimulating. I'm not sure that the author is fully committed to the rationalist zeitgeist either, but, of course, no true rationalist would be! Thanks for posting this! Seems super dope with a large backlog of articles to dive into! Someone wrote a nice intro to Scott Alexanders Blogs with links to some recommended articles. My personal favorite read from the past months is definitely the article on ivermectin. Its a hell of a ride and he was able to create a very well working (at least for me) metaphor that allowed me to imagine how the covid-denial people came to their conclusions. Same guy (Scott Siskin) wrote slatestarcodex.com, which covers over a hundred writeups of a similar quality, going back to 2013. Lots of great stuff. I recommend checkimg the top posts on that blog, its the best content on the internet imo. I've read almost all of it. He changed to Astralcodexten after the New York Times threatened to Doxx him (for "policy" reasons), which basically upended his entire life, since he had (and now still has, in a slighly altered form), a successful psychiatry practice. Brilliant guy. I didn't know his name until you wrote it here (I specifically abstained from looking it up), so to me you're the part of that NYT doxxing crowd who "upended his entire life". While he is still uses the pseudonym Scott Alexander, he has told his real name in Astral Codex Ten so I don't believe it's supposed to be a secret anymore. Non-tech and non-news (and not even that long), but I have to plug https://www.themarginalian.org/ (previously called "brain pickings"). The author reads voraciously and follows common threads across many works, compiling her thoughts into articles which often contain beautiful prose in their own right.
I often pickup book recs from here that get me into reading about art, poetry, love, spirituality, and more, which I never would otherwise. In a similar vein is Commonplace by Cedric Chin. Think a Stratechery that analyzes individuals, not corporations. Has great summaries and read/don't read recommendations on book. One of the few blogs I didn't end up unsubscribing from in annoyance. Three Quarks Daily often surfaces high-quality long form content from a broad ideological cross-section. As others have mentioned, Arts and Letters Daily is often interesting too. And, while I'm commenting, some of my favorite Substacks who tend to write long content are: https://freddiedeboer.substack.com/ https://justinehsmith.substack.com/ - https://waitbutwhy.com/ by Tim Urban - https://moretothat.com/ by Lawrence Yeo - https://www.quantamagazine.org/ I didn't realise till now, I read at least 2-3 articles a week from the above list. Well written long form content. London Review of Books. It’s a print magazine mirrored on its website, but do yourself a favor and leave your phone beyond reach while trying to read long-form. The internet has ruined us all. The website it at: https://www.lrb.co.uk/ I see it's published twice a month. I also see that it has an RSS feed that doesn't seem to have an obvious link on the front page: https://lrb.co.uk/feeds/rss LRB is great. I've subscribed for years. It's more than book reviews, also social and political commentary. And often the book reviews will be nominally about 3-4 related books, and give really interesting in-depth takes on historical events, social movements, etc. Claremont Review of Books for a contrasting view. Books are available free at: Archive.org tends to have out-of-copyright stuff, LibGen newer stuff, but stuff in between (mid to late 20th C) you can often get by "borrowing" the ebook from archive.org for a short time (free, requires sign-up.) LibGen also has the vast majority of scientific papers/journal articles I look for, no matter how old or obscure. I'm a fan of the Samizdat sources (you could add ZLibrary as well). Archive.org's holdings are truly amazing for older works. Newer, in-copyright works can be checked out, though I find the e-reader software, which works well on desktop, is poorly-suited to tablets. Other sources of legal works include: - Project Gutenberg: https://gutenberg.org/ (60k books) - Standard Ebooks: very-well formatted quality ebook, largely public domain https://standardebooks.org/ - Wikisource: https://en.wikisource.org/ Public-domain works, downloadable in ePub and other formats. There are numerous other smaller collections focusing on specific topics which may also be useful. Searching for "filetype:pdf", "filetype:epub", or "filetype:djvu" may find ebook formats elsewhere. > Archive.org tends to have out-of-copyright stuff Their lending library has lots and lots of in-copyright stuff. With a free account (takes minutes to setup), you can borrow them (read in an online browser, or via DRM-controlled PDF) for an hour or for two weeks. My impression is that they limit simultaneous borrowers to the number of physical copies the Archive possesses. If it sounds too good to be true, give it a try. It's only drawback is a poor search engine (just use a general one like DuckDuckGo and add "site:archive.org" to your search) https://astralcodexten.substack.com/ formerly known as Slate Star Codex prior to doxxing by Cade Metz at the New York Times. The New Yorker is great https://www.newyorker.com. Amazing writing, so much so that I can be pulled into articles that I wouldn't expect to be interested in. I had a Kindle subscription, but liked it so much I forked out for a print subscription. I find it a real struggle reading long form articles digitally. re. digital: the last time i read a newyorker article it consumed 900+ MB of my mobile data plan and i've been avoiding it like the plague ever since. which is a shame because the writing is generally good as you note. That's impressive! equal parts impressive and irritating The New Yorker certainly is entertaining to read, but their articles are notoriously slanted. Even non-controversial subjects are presented from a polarized standpoint. Its as if the whole purpose of the articles is to misinform the reader just enough to get into an argument with someone on the topic. The only thing I resent about moving to ebooks from the library is time I wasted on second rate content from the internet. I have seven library cards and I can read almost anything for free. If none have what I want, they will often order it and notify me when it arrives. All from my sweet Gesture chair. Also Kanopy has wonderful classes for free. I've slowly come to the same conclusion, though partially in the sense of audiobooks. When someone makes a book, even if it's a relatively short one, that usually means they know enough about the subject and have something valuable enough to say, regardless of whether one agrees with or enjoys the content for its entertainment value. Although there can be good long-ish form content on the internet, there's simply too much incentive to spew loosely connected ideas that aren't fully formed and serve mostly to get attention. And a lot of it really is just chum to get clicks, however nicely it's presented. The way I see it, written content on the internet went the way of TED talks. I remember a time when TED was popular, at least in my social class, and now it's pretty widely mocked not only for being vapid but by lowering the barrier to entry via TEDx. Medium is a perfect example of this phenomenon. A lot of the Great Courses are on Kanopy. The Archeology is fantastic. I quite enjoy https://restofworld.org/ https://www.instapaper.com/daily (contains some automated spamming, flooding submissions to trick the popularity scoring I guess) Came here to mention restofworld as well. I recently discovered https://expmag.com but can't really tell yet, since it's too fresh in my bookmarks. I enjoyed the article about clothes in landfills though (mentioned a while ago on HN). Still the same old places mostly. Harper's. Rolling Stone. NY Review of Books. Lots of podcasts, especially ones that go through a long story in several episodes, for example "Deep Cover" and "Buried Truths". Books. I'm getting tired of long-form content that wanders around the point. That's just taking a small subject and adding words. I like long form when the subject demands it and its complexity makes the long form useful. In the past few months I spent a lot of time consuming content from these two sources: - https://fasterthanli.me, already quite popular on HN. Amos articles are often really long and have lot of details, they read like adventures and I love that. - https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing, Old New Thing by Raymond Chen at Microsoft. He’s writing articles since ~20 years and has a lot of really cool anecdotes regarding low level Windows stuff. I stopped trying to find platforms with long form content, personal blogs is the only thing that works for me (and HN, but that’s an addiction more than anything else :p). Podcasts. TRIGGERnometry: https://audioboom.com/channels/4991237.rss Lex Fridman Podcast: https://lexfridman.com/feed/podcast/ Science & Futurism with Isaac Arthur: https://feeds.soundcloud.com/users/soundcloud:users:23460834... The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast: https://feeds.megaphone.fm/ADV2256857693 My tips would be (a bit different than those maybe): - Fall of Civilizations podcast (Has few but some absolutely gorgeous, long episodes). - People I mostly admire - Freakonomics (earlier episodes better than current IMO) - The Joy of X - Numberphile and The 3b1b podcast - In Our Time (BBC) Thanks for those. I've really been enjoying Triggernometry. They really aren't afraid to discuss important topics. Yes every episode is worth listening to. I like how they might be talking about a serious subject one minute, then crack a joke at just the right time. I like The Economist. https://www.economist.com/ love love love waitbutwhy, i wish more people knew about it. Likewise; love Tim Urban. Spent way too much time reading his work. My favorites are "Religion for the Nonreligious" [1] (which actually has little to do with religion, despite the title), and "The Tail End" [2]. Each one gave me new ways of looking at life and relationships, in ways that I haven't thought before. I started "The Story of Us" [3], but haven't gone through all. I think it crossed the threshold of long-blog-post and became almost a book-in-a-blog. [1] https://waitbutwhy.com/2014/10/religion-for-the-nonreligious... I wish his latest post wasn't from last April. The Browser: https://thebrowser.com/ Arts and Letters Daily: https://www.aldaily.com/ Lit mags: LRB, NYRB, Paris Review, McSweeneys Lit-adjacent mags: Harpers, Laphams Quarterly I usually follow a lot of these via RSS, and subscribe to some. Beyond that, several newsletters. Astral códex ten (as already mentioned) and tomas pueyo’s uncharted territories come to mind. The Browser is easily the best reading money I’ve spent in a long time. $5/mo and it finds such good articles. The Joe Rogan podcast. Listening to long-form, multi-hour conversation is so refreshing compared to what traditional news shows have become. What do you think of the signal to noise ratio of the JRE podcast? It seems like he does minimal prep and just wings it with the idea that his natural curiosity will make up for it. yes, they are 2.5hrs+ long, but IMO at least half of it is chit-chat and irrelevant to the guests knowledge often about fitness/hunting/deer/monkeys. I prefer much more focused podcasts, where the interview has prepared a series of well targeted questions. The magic is that it’s like you’re listening to two friends have an interesting conversation and you’re the third person listening in.. particularly in this pandemic when so many suffered severe social isolation, this form of podcast is almost therapeutic. I feel like he intentionally does no research. It would be so easy for him to pull up the Wikipedia page for his guests and read it before interviewing them. I think that he believes that by not researching before the interview, he will be better able to represent and empathize with his viewers, who also won’t have done any research before watching. I’m not sure if this is good interviewing technique, but it certainly gives the interviews their characteristic disorganized feel. It's certainly 'long-form' and certainly 'content'. Funny that I interpreted the original "long-form content" as being writing. Rogan's podcasts are certainly long, multi-hour sessions, but tend to wander fairly aimlessly and don't really have a central thesis or topic that they stick to. This is unlike most traditional "long form" writing that I assumed OP was looking for. Try some of William F. Buckley's old Firing Line episodes, available on YouTube. I really only listen to Rogan for two types of guests: comedians I like and physicists. The episodes for the latter are always fantastic. Brian Cox, Sean Carroll, Brian Greene, Lawrence Krauss, Neil deGrasse Tyson, plus a couple more. He's even had Roger Penrose on. Roger Penrose is a legend. Some of the episodes of JRE with Bill Burr I've watched more than once. Some of my favorites have already been mentioned: The New Yorker, The Atlantic, The Economist. But one missing jewel of great long-form stories told with excellent writing is: Texas Monthly I love finance biographies from Neckar, its more of a longer newsletter but stories are fascinating: https://neckar.substack.com/ Its not sensational, but just well researched and put together. A good example is bootstrapping buyouts: https://neckar.substack.com/p/reginald-lewis-bootstrapping-b... Cedric's commoncog already mentioned here. And second these resources: - https://waitbutwhy.com/ by Tim Urban - https://moretothat.com/ by Lawrence Yeo The New Yorker is great too, if you’re willing to pay a few bucks a month. Often free in eform via your local public library. Books. My general preference these days is non-fiction. For discovery methods see this comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29609479 Generally my problem is far too much content and not enough time, rather than the reverse. Online content seems to have rapidly diminishing quality. Search and discovery tools are increasingly disappointing. More on general "finding stuff" here: https://tildes.net/~misc/szx/what_tips_or_tricks_do_you_use_... I like aeon.co - a collection of essays, thinkpieces and articles about a wide range of topics As much as The Economist is good, it's still news, which has negative effects on the mind + it's too focused on global economy which don't really have any value for me, maybe to an actual economist/global leader, it would XXX Review of Books are good, but they're basically convoluted essays. Good for anybody else, not for my time though Aeon focuses much on philosophy. I no longer read this though because it's too academic for my taste Brain Pickings, Arts & Daily, 3 Quarks Daily focuses much on classics, mostly - I'd rather read classics that reading writings about classics, nowadays ^ This. Important quote to not forget:
"If I had more time I would have written a shorter letter" Meaning quantity =/= quality.
That being said, a lot of short content today has near zero quality. When TikTok reached first place on the DNS thingy, I decided to try it, so as to not feel like I'm out of touch. My findings were that TikTok works on disappointment, it's going to show you low quality content for so long that you drop your expectations to almost zero, which means that when you do eventually see some content with at least a bit of effort put into it, it gives you a dopamine hit and you feel like it was all worth it. I personally have not been able to find any usefulness from the app except consuming time, which it's great at. But if you've got a lot of time to waste you might as well be reading a book or something, not sure. I haven't really been able to fit TikTok into my life, but I don't really feel like I'm missing anything. Also food for thought:
"YouTube used to have much more short form content, but then the algorithm forced many to making videos that are at least 10 min long. Doing that YouTube removed enough creators for a platform like TikTok to be viable and successful. Now YouTube introduced YouTube Shorts. Think..."
(https://twitter.com/LoveMortuus/status/1485258235137429507?t...) The Atlantic has some of the highest quality long-form content I've ever read in my life. It's not all excellent, but quite often it is. Highly recommended. The New York Times writes great articles and usually you get a discount so it only costs 1 or 2$ per week which I find really fair pricing. Also popular substack Newsletters. It totally depends though, some are just hot air even in the paid versions and others really have good content also for free subscribers. If there is more need for content I will go through my list of 100+ blogs and just grab some random old article about compiling gtk on gentoo or similar… haha My pipeline of interesting Twitter users/threads to Substack mailing lists has served me well. I recently discovered Google Assistant's "read this article aloud" functionality and it's been amazing to help cut down the backlog of unread newsletter emails. The experience is quite good, makes a newsletter feel almost like a podcast. I find them either on https://longreads.com/ or in a couple of indie magazines I follow (like for example this one: https://logicmag.io/) Happy to see someone beat me to the recommendation of longreads.com, I get their weekly newsletter and have found some really great pieces there that I wouldn't have seen otherwise. I subscribe to Apple News, which includes access to a large number of magazines, and I have an electronic subscription to a couple of newspapers. My morning routine is reading from these sources on my iPad... and a coffee. :) You can join here for the best reads that I curate manually for the long-form:
https://t.me/+pwdYcfBiV1I3Njll This is on Telegram and will require admin approval. I had to keep this as a private channel. I read a lot; if I find (and come across) good book recommendations, I post them too (including the books). You can save content locally, but the channel is restricted to disallow forwarding. This is intentional, because once I plan for comments and group discussions, I need something more substantial than fluff. I joined the Telegram group, Monday 24 Jan 20:10.
Netherlands UTC + 1 from the top of my head. Unpopular opinions: the pirate bay. Cabinet Magazine: https://www.cabinetmagazine.org/ /r/TrueReddit and /r/FoodforThought subreddits are both pretty interesting and tend to have insightful long-form articles. Substack for blogs. They have some famous people like Snowden. Medium is more popular but they constantly bug youto subscribe and have too much tracking. I go on Quora. I don't really like their digest emails or any of their recent monetization efforts but it's still unparalleled in free high quality writing, especially if you follow the right people. It remains one of the best places to find interesting stories and explanations, and also for exposure to a wide range of human experiences. I really prefer interesting blog posts. While I use HN and Twitter and such often to find interesting links, if I find one, and it's part of a blog, I usually take the opportunity to pull it's feed into my RSS reader, since other content on the same site is likely of similar quality. https://www.aldaily.com/ Arts&Letters daily was a curated collection of links that introduced many to highbrow internet longform. Not sure how it does those days Not sure it counts as long form since it isn’t written but I’ve been loving YouTube documentaries on big infrastructure projects and geopolitics issues. There are a handful of small content creators cranking out quality content in these areas What are the channel names? I've been looking for some quality YouTube videos. Thanks! Infrastructure heavy list: Megaprojects, neo, real engineering, Free Documentary, The B1M, Tomorrow's Build, Wendover Productions. Not infra, but similar long form docu vibe: Johnny Harris, Coldfusion, Vice. I'd probably start with Johnny Harris - his style is somewhat unique. All over the place when it comes to topics but usually thoughtfully executed & researched. Wow thanks! It's a bit niche but for reading about military history I've really been enjoying https://acoup.blog. I've been liking Packy's writing over at Not Boring (https://www.notboring.co/). https://fiftytwo.in [Largely India focused stories] Worked with this company for building their Newsroom Workflow solution. Books Seriously. Books are the ultimate long-form content; their authors typically spend years researching and writing them, and you can sample many reviews before committing to read one. How do you avoid the problem of low signal to noise ratio? Some books in the popular business press can be reduced to several pages, with the core idea, rationale, and examples. Yet they all end up being longer than needed with tons of exposition. I’m curious too. I’m at the point where I stop reading books of some categories altogether. I read a bunch and they have all the same message. Such books about: - "the economy is shit and we are just waiting for the mega crash" (popular in Germany) - books about sustainability (buy less shit, don’t waste so much) - anti-consumerism (we consume to much stuff, but buy this book) - minimalism (own less stuff) - bootstrapping a software company (find an audience, build a product, release, iterate) - nutrition (eat food, mostly plants, not too much, everything else can’t be properly researched because of long time horizons and an incapability to find causation) - correlation is not causation (and here are one hundred examples, Freakonomics style) - success (all survivorship bias) Get it from a pirate site (l--g--, zlib----), survey the sections, and skim a few pages. That'll let you know if it's 90% filler or 90% useful content for you. One person's useful content is another person's filler. It depends on how familiar or agreeable you already are with the material or advice in the book, and how difficult a read you're willing to tolerate. I only read books where i have a recommendation. This can either from a conversation or just a mention in a Blog post or here on HN in a comment. Its definitely not a 100% method but i feel like that the chance that the book is not well written is much lower when at least one person found it readable/enjoyable. I have a Trello Site for that where i create a card for every book and write down or copy+paste the recomendation. I also typically download the book from libgen first, take a quick look at it and then buy the book. I get a high ratio by reading old books that are still highly regarded. If it’s been around for generations and people have and continue to find it worthwhile, it’s a pretty good indicator that it will be a good use of time. It’s not perfect, but the hit rate is much better than when I dip into pop psych/business/self-help books. I do still read modern books, but only when something strikes me as particularly worthwhile. Fair question. I spend some time researching books before I read them; very low signal-to-noise books typically will have reviews saying that. I also mostly avoid whole categories of books which are prone to this; I still get bitten once in a while, but like in one book out of 20 maybe, so overall it's not bad. Read old books that have stood the test of time. Agreed, I try to read books that are at least 10 years old. I wonder why publishers seem to lean towards 500-pages books. Very complex ideas have been expressed in 10-page articles, spreading probably much smaller amount of information across hundreds of pages does not help. While I agree with you about the observation that many non-fiction books seem unnecessarily padded with filler, I think it’s because otherwise the book looks physically inferior and/or would be expected to cost less. And they’ve decided that this is the page count that optimises sales, instead of optimising reader satisfaction. If someone’s at the book shop and see a bunch of one-inch thick books and a small 20 page pamphlet, they’d expect the pamphlet to sell for a fraction of the price. Or be tempted for the thicker book because “the author clearly did more work.” I have the same feeling, however personally I'd prefer thin book to a thicker one even for a greater price in most cases, mostly because I just dont have enough time/stamina to dig through graphomaniac texts. I've found that two strategies help: 1. Readily give up on a book, or skim through the rest, the moment you realise that the book has 400 pages of filler 2. Find recommendations from thought leaders you subscribe to, while staying true to Rule 1 (Sometimes it's just a matter of taste, and it's counterproductive to force yourself to finish reading something just because someone else said that it's a good book) Read more broadly. I used to read a lot of business books. It got to the stage where half of the stories and quirky little anecdotes kept recurring. It got boring. But that's probably a sign that I've read enough in this field! Now I rarely read new business books, but still find a lot of interest in other non-fiction in areas I know a lot less about. You may want to check out Blinkist. https://www.blinkist.com/ They give you the condensed information. Usually it is enough to get an overview. For a deep dive you can follow up by buying the book. Judicious online research will give you a much better signal than any single book will. But the book may engross you in a narrative or walk you through complex topics in stages. Read books because it's fun, not to accomplish a goal. At this point I pretty much just read histories, mostly written by academics, and fiction. Most popular press books are simply garbage and almost anything written for the business community is likewise garbage. Simple answer for me is to not feel obligated to finish the book. But if you’re looking for a binary, then does it have an index? How about audiobooks? Had I had the option to listen to audiobooks while I was in school, I would’ve been a much better student. I never read any of the assigned reading when I was in school because I couldn’t keep my focus on the words, but I’m finding myself cruising through about one very long book per month. Most of the books had been non-fiction (social science and history mostly), but more recently I’ve been getting into novels. They’re just so easy to listen to at the gym, or while driving, or while playing video games. For all of you who have kids, please encourage them to listen to audiobooks if they don’t like reading paper books. That is, unless you think it’s a valuable skill to know how to bullshit their way through a paper on a book they haven’t read… A lot of my reading is audiobooks. I love audiobooks - they enabled my reading levels to go way up in the last few years. Some more details about this here: https://eli.thegreenplace.net/2020/my-reading-habits/ By definition, you're not reading. It's called "listening", as in "I listen to a lot of audiobooks". Audiobooks are my saving grace when it comes to my daily commute and doing boring chores at home. Agreed on the commute. I find that, having stopped commuting, I cannot follow an audiobook any more. No question about it. There are more than enough great, great books that we waste our time (if our intention is to learn) reading much else. You don't have time to read them all. Nothing in a blog will compare. More broadly, I find a strong correlation between the amount of time it takes to write something and the value, which shouldn't surprise us: The product of years of study and writing and rewriting should be far superior to the same person's hot take on social media. Books > quarterly journals > monthlies > weeklies > dailies > 24/7 hot takes. I’d like there to be a “reader sophistication” metric that works similar to “you may also like” recommendations, e.g., if I look up Gene Wolfe, it gives me sci-fi authors in his vicinity of reading level or greater. I know that some have done this with lexical analysis of the text itself via LSA, but the results produce many false positives (i.e., high proximity). The Sunday Long Read has been a great resource for many years now. More recent but solid compilation of writing - https://www.fairobserver.com/ Thanks for the kind words! Here is my long piece on Vladimir Putin's long game that I co-authored with retired CIA officer Glenn Carle: https://www.fairobserver.com/politics/making-sense-of-vladim... Read research papers on a topic of interest to you. As of now I try to limit the time I spend on HN. I skim through articles very quickly. OTOH I recently reorganized my collection of research papers, most of them obtained thanks to that Kazakhstani heroïcal woman. I pick one and read it from start to finish, over the course of a week, a month, whatever. I often do not understand what I read. Little by little, reading again after a few months the same article, I understand one paragraph more :) The two golden rules: - stick to the most important, breakthrough papers - read a paper from start to finish, even if you do not understand it. Do not block, just keep reading. The Information is the best long form content on tech news and analysis that I believe exists. Pricey but worth it. Surprised no one else has mentioned it. I've been subscribing to http://longreads.com/ for a while. longform.org used to be my go-to, but they have stopped curating long form content. Would be interested if anyone could recommend a replacement. I have over 400 books on my iPad. A significant number are various tech tomes, but I also like to read “escapist junk”; mostly fantasy. I like a lot of David Perell's writings. Usually you'll learn at least one thing from each. www.perell.com HN, the youtube channels I subscribe to, twitch.tv, netflix. But I'll repeat what others said, that long form != high quality, especially netflix documentaries are so bad that I simply will not watch them, they seem to be optimized only to waste your time, and somehow always manage to avoid leaking any information at all. Books. They're called books. Are.na has occasional long reads Metafilter: https://www.metafilter.com/ Have you heard of books? I agree with the spirit of this. If you want serious long-form substance that is the product of months or years of careful effort, it's hard to beat a book. Usually the best long-form content I've found online (e.g. [1]) is itself just an excerpt. [1]: https://lithub.com/aneurysm/ I've also become a fan of buying ebooks through the Apple Books app on my phone, if you extend the definition of "online" a bit. Many dead-tree-book libraries also have ebook lending programs. If that's not an option, then there's also Project Gutenberg[0] and the Internet Archive's Open Library [1]. Project Gutenberg lost favour with me when they basically said "U.S. Copyright is the only copyright law that matters on the internet, so screw you Germany" and geoblocked the entire country. This must have felt like such a slap in the face to Germans who ever donated time or money to project Gutenberg. Personally, I had never done that, so I had the luxury of being able to just turn away in bewilderment. I do give money to archive.org though, and sincerely hope they will never pull crap like that. Libby app for connection via your library card. Sermons. I think I'm fundamentally opposed to long form content. I can learn a lot more from one line of code than 10 pages of theory.