Sometimes I wish there was a script I could plug in that would automatically link to new articles posted by certain writers. Mandy Brown of A Working Library is one of those writers. Everything is pure gold and her most recent post discussing the state of journalism, news, The New York Times, and paywalls is simply brilliant:

[T]he Times paywall does not map to my reading behavior. I don’t read a single source for the news—I read thousands. I consume the news from all directions—from venerable institutions like the Times, to blogs that obsess over particular topics, to tweets from witnesses, and every imaginable source in between. I want news that is the aggregate of all these sources, that admits all of these varying (and often contrary) perspectives. Erecting paywalls between these locations misunderstands the ecosystem that each story participates in. The value I find in the news today is in its connectedness—in the ways in which often divergent sources come together to create a story—not its solitary authority.

This is a fascinating insight that I had not considered when thinking about why the paywall rubbed me the wrong way. Like many others, I was concerned about the general complication and confusion about the setup and pricing structure as well the fact that it’s hard when something that was free gets taken away. I don’t want to pay for something I got for free for so long.

But this idea of the connected story? This was new to me, yet in retrospect feels completely obvious. It started seven years ago when I set up my first RSS reader and started compiling the sites I visited each day. The way I got my news, in that moment, changed and it’s only deepened since. The Times wants me to pay because they think they will be my number one, go-to source, except that’s not the kind of world we live in anymore.

So what does this new world of news look like? It looks like Instapaper, or Readability, or perhaps Flipboard, if Flipboard can learn how to aggregate information in a way that makes sense. It looks like 1-Click, or Kickstarter, or Amazon’s singles. It looks like tools for making timelines or managing primary sources. It looks like dispatches from people on the ground. It looks like startups we haven’t seen yet, because a few smart people (perhaps exiles from newsroom layoffs) are right at this moment looking at the reactions to the Times and starting to plan for how they can do better. It’s both dispersed and connected, social but not inane, reliable and diverse. It looks like many things, because there isn’t going to be a single way forward; the future is, as ever, more complicated than the past.

So what is the future of news consumption? It’s incredibly personal, customized to each consumer yet, in the same breath, it’s beautifully connected, allowing us to see the larger stories unfolding around us.

David Brooks has a nice piece in The New York Times on two ways to live life. The first is from an essay Clayton Christensen wrote for the Harvard Business Review: 

Christensen advised the students to invest a lot of time when they are young in finding a clear purpose for their lives. “When I was a Rhodes scholar,” he recalls, “I was in a very demanding academic program, trying to cram an extra year’s worth of work into my time at Oxford. I decided to spend an hour every night reading, thinking, and praying about why God put me on this earth.

Essentially, Christensen proposes applying business planning techniques to life, developing strict plans and purposes. I think I tend to do this, often subconsciously, thought the older I get the more I realize the truths behind a summoned life:

This mode of thinking starts from an entirely different perspective. Life isn’t a project to be completed; it is an unknowable landscape to be explored. A 24-year-old can’t sit down and define the purpose of life in the manner of a school exercise because she is not yet deep enough into the landscape to know herself or her purpose. That young person — or any person — can’t see into the future to know what wars, loves, diseases and chances may loom. She may know concepts, like parenthood or old age, but she doesn’t really understand their meanings until she is engaged in them.

Like Brooks, I think a healthy balance of both of these are good. Plans are important, but being open to exploring outside those plans are equally fulfilling.

Now that The New York Times mini-series on Math is complete, they welcome Simon Critchley for a new series titled The Stone which is focused on philosophy:

Pushing this a little further, we might say that to philosophize is to take your time, even when you have no time, when time is constantly pressing at your back. The busy readers of The New York Times will doubtless understand this sentiment. It is our hope that some of them will make the time to read The Stone. As Wittgenstein says, “This is how philosophers should salute each other: ‘Take your time.’”

I’m looking forward to this.