It used to be that the Dancing Baby animation and "All Yuor Base Are Belong to Us" would become points of commonality for web culture and you were one of the cool kids if you were already on top of all that when it finally trickled into the somewhat more tactile world of broader pop culture. Now there is no such thing as separate web culture, it is fully merged with broader popular culture. In this world, old school blogs are as quaint as fax machines.
As a byproduct of all this, the web world is awash in the same level of noise and nonsense of any other medium. The trick when surfing these days is not to find curious bits of entertainment or news that are ahead of the curve, but to find high quality thoughtful posting; things of intellectual or critical value that you can really sink your teeth into. In that respect, the web is no different than any other source of communication. So let me recommend five "blogs" where I regularly find thoughtful posts. Were I still an old school blogger, I bet 80% my posts would come from these places.
First and foremost is Overcoming Bias. From Professor Robin Hanson, this is an attempt to do just what the name says, overcome bias in understanding the world. He will take the most basic ideas, simple things that you (and me, and him) have always accepted accepted as natural and rational, and delve deep inside of them to see that they are often not remotely rational but indicative of subcutaneous assumptions that we have so thoroughly assimilated that we don't realize it. But he does not identify them to call them false or perverse. He angles for understanding the source of the assumptions, to identify the points of human nature that bring them about.
Not surprisingly, Hanson is rooted in the behavior theories of Economics, a field wherein one makes quantitative predictions based on assumptions about human behavior, and thus, one is forced to identify what human behavior is assumed to be and question the assumptions if the prediction is measurably wrong. But Hanson has broadened his scope. Here is a sample quote that starts out as a review of the kids movie Dragonball Evolution.
Let me suggest that humans are much like story characters. Since others like us better if the story of our lives seems to fit with standard human ideals, we try to appear to so fit. But since it is expensive to actually fit these ideals in great detail, we instead manipulate our cheap surface words and acts to give a loose appearance of a fit. The expensive details of our lives, however, instead better fit the non-ideal necessities of who we really are. None of this works if our hypocrisy is too obvious, but thankfully we tend to cooperate to squint and avoid seeing each others' non-ideal realities.
You are a character in the story of your life. Evolution has formed you so that you, mostly unconsciously, craft the character you project to be likable and interesting. The crafting of this image is done via manipulations that are just good enough to not force most folks to notice them. Perceptive folk may notice them more, but usually also know they will not be rewarded for calling our mutual charade.
Even so, I choose to try to see through our deceptions, to the less ideal, dramatic, and sympathetic people we really are. And I hope to live to tell about it.
I want to emphasize that this is not an everything-you-know-is-wrong-you-fool or a the-human-race-is-a-self-deluded-lost-cause site. It is serious intellectual inquiry, without (as far as I can tell) a specific social agenda or any attempt to claim moral righteousness. It is not quick and easy reading for coffee breaks, and you shouldn't visit if you are happy in your internally-defined world (I say that without judgment, thanks to Hanson). But if you are looking for explosive mind candy, this is the place.
2 Blowhards is actually about 4 or 5 blowhards, I think, operating a group blog. They come from various walks of life; all of them refer to themselves as "art buffs". The site is just rife with the fascinating sort of outside-the-mainstream articles that you would not get were it not for the Web. Excellent design commentary on everything from architecture to automobiles, and a fine appreciation of the low-brow as valid art. Also, I think the blowhards are my age or even a bit older, which adds to their stand-out takes on the perpetually twenty-something Web.
Arts and Letters Daily is the only one of these sites that completely eschews original content for the good old "pre-surfing" mentality from the old days. Arts and Letters Daily is like a trusted old friend, every day (except Sunday) you get three new links to articles of interest, any area of the humanities is eligible, introduced with nothing more than a sentence or two. It has been such for many years. Don't ever change.
Marginal Revolution is the blog of economists Tyler Cowen and Alex Tabarrok from George Mason University. Both are renown in their field but Cowen, who does most of the posting, is widely known as the author of such pop-Econ books as Discover Your Inner Economist and Create Your Own Economy. They occasionally get bogged down in econ wonkery, especially during big financial dustups like the mortgage meltdown or Obamacare, but they are at their best when stripping behavior-oriented topics of interest down to their basic incentives and motivations rather than getting swamped in polemics. Even better are Cowen's posts on what he is reading (just about everything it seems) and his travels -- there are usually hidden gems in those links. Note, Cowen also maintains an ethnic food blog which is a good stop if you are wondering where to eat in the DC area.
Terry Teachout covers a wide spectrum of arts -- theatre, painting, music - for various journalistic outlets including the Wall Street Journal. He is also a biographer of H.L. Mencken and Louis Armstrong and, just recently, an opera librettist. He blogs on such a varied set of arts related topics that I wouldn't try to list them all, but the big draw here is the deeply personal sense of enthusiasm he brings to his posts. Although I have differed with his opinion more often than not about our few common artistic experiences, I get whisked along with his eager appreciation of the arts he consumes. It is true that passion is paramount in writing, but when you mix in clarity and crispness of prose, as Terry does, then add a sense of the personal, what you get is irresistible. Whenever he writes glowingly about a play, I feel the urge to hop a plane to NYC or Chicago or wherever to see it, and feel like I've truly missed out when I don't follow through.
