Culture & Society blogs

Techdirt, founded by Mike Masnick, covers technology policy, free speech, copyright, and Section 230 law.

Top post: You've Been Referred Here Because You're Wrong About Section 230 of the CDA

A group blog on technology, digital rights, culture, and oddities, with Cory Doctorow as a frequent contributor.

Top post: Lockdown – The coming war on general-purpose computing (2012)

Jeff Atwood, co-founder of Stack Overflow and Discourse, writes about programming, software culture, and the web.

Top post: The Principle of Least Power (2007)

Scott Alexander wrote long essays on psychiatry, culture, politics, and rationality on this blog, which later became Astral Codex Ten.

Top post: Meditations on Moloch (2014)

Scientific American hosts blogs by various writers on neuroscience, physics, health, psychology, and science and society.

Top post: IgNobel Prize in Neuroscience: The dead salmon study (2012)

Economists Tyler Cowen and Alex Tabarrok post short takes and links on economics, policy, and current affairs.

Top post: Laissez-Faire in Tokyo Land Use (why Tokyo Is Cheaper Than SF)

Scott Alexander writes long essays on medicine, science, politics, forecasting, and culture, continuing his earlier SlateStarCodex blog.

Top post: Ivermectin: Much More Than You Wanted to Know

Venkatesh Rao writes long essays on organizations, culture, technology, and how people make sense of modern life.

Top post: The Gervais Principle, or The Office According to "The Office"

Tim Urban writes illustrated, long-form explainers on topics like AI, procrastination, the Fermi paradox, Elon Musk, and politics.

Top post: The Road to Superintelligence (2015)

The Daily WTF collects reader-submitted stories of bad code, failed projects, and absurd workplace decisions in software.

Top post: How Æxecor’s programming error led to 28000 tons of coal delivered (2009)

qntm is the site of a writer who publishes science fiction, essays on software and time zones, and small web projects.

Top post: Lena

ZeroHedge is an anonymously run finance and news site mixing market commentary, macro analysis, and political and conspiracy-leaning content.

Top post: The Full Story Behind Bloomberg's Attempt to “Unmask” Zero Hedge

Jason Kottke runs a long-running link blog curating interesting items on culture, science, design, technology, and the web.

Top post: If you can’t explain something in simple terms, you don’t understand it

Discover Magazine hosts science blogs by multiple writers covering biology, psychology, genetics, space, and research news.

Top post: How food-breaks sway the decisions of judges

Eric S. Raymond's personal site, hosting essays on hacker culture, open source, and Unix design, including The Cathedral and the Bazaar.

Top post: How To Ask Questions The Smart Way

David Heinemeier Hansson, creator of Ruby on Rails and co-owner of 37signals, writes about software, leaving the cloud, and politics.

Top post: DHH – As I Remember London

Richard Stallman's personal site, with his political notes, free software writing, and descriptions of how he computes.

Top post: How I do my computing

Randall Munroe, the xkcd creator, answers absurd hypothetical questions with physics, math, and careful research.

Top post: Orbital Speed

Cory Doctorow's daily blog of links and essays on tech policy, monopoly power, copyright, and what he calls enshittification.

Top post: TikTok's Enshittification

Aaron Swartz's personal site, with essays on productivity, politics, media, programming, and hiring.

Top post: I Hate the News (2006)

Low-tech Magazine covers older and low-energy technologies, and runs on a self-hosted solar-powered website.

Top post: This website has 81% battery power remaining

Maria Popova writes essays and book-based reflections on creativity, thinking, and the lives of notable writers and scientists.

Top post: How to Criticise with Kindness

Historian Bret Devereaux writes in-depth essays on ancient and medieval history, warfare, and the economies and technologies of past societies.

Top post: War at the Dawn of Civilization

Charlie Stross, a science fiction author, blogs about publishing, the future of technology, politics, and space.

Top post: Accelerando

Bill Gates writes about global health, climate change, technology, and books he has read, including reviews and annual letters.

Top post: The Deadliest Animal in the World

Kevin Kelly, a Wired co-founder, writes about technology, culture, and the future, including the 1,000 true fans idea.

Top post: 1,000 True Fans (2008)

Penny Arcade is a long-running gaming webcomic by Jerry Holkins and Mike Krahulik, with news posts and commentary.

Top post: Greater Internet Fuckwad Theory

Strong Towns, a nonprofit, argues that American cities and suburbs are financially fragile and proposes building towns that pay for themselves.

Top post: Why Many Cities Have No Money

Popehat is a legal blog by lawyers including Ken White, covering free speech, censorship, federal criminal law, and legal threats.

Top post: Three Generations of a Hackneyed Apologia for Censorship Are Enough

Language Log is a group blog by linguists, including Geoffrey Pullum, on grammar, language use, and linguistic research.

Top post: Language Log

Noah Smith writes about economics, public policy, manufacturing, China, and technology, with a focus on data and charts.

Top post: Interview: Marc Andreessen, VC and tech pioneer

The Long Now Foundation, founded by Stewart Brand and others, promotes long-term thinking and builds a 10,000-year clock.

Top post: Richard Feynman and the Connection Machine

Nicky Case makes interactive explainers and games on topics like game theory, trust, voting, and learning.

Top post: Game theory illustrated by an animated cartoon game

A watchdog site reporting on retracted scientific papers, research misconduct, and problems in academic publishing, run by journalists.

Top post: “I placed too much faith in underpowered studies:” Nobel Prize winner admits (2017)

Robin Hanson, an economics professor at George Mason, writes about social signaling, prediction markets, forecasting, and future technologies like brain emulations.

Top post: My Favorite Liar (2008)

Mr. Money Mustache writes about frugality, early retirement, and financial independence, with posts on savings math, commuting costs, and cycling.

Top post: Getting Rich: From Zero to Hero in One Blog Post

Damn Interesting publishes long-form articles on strange true stories, science, and history, such as the Great Molasses Flood.

Top post: The origin of circuits (2007)

Eric S. Raymond, open source author and hacker culture figure, writes on programming, version control, politics, and open source.

Top post: Eric S. Raymond

Matthew Inman's webcomic site, with long illustrated comics on technology, animals, work, and everyday life.

Top post: Design hell

A Medium publication of opinion essays on startups, technology, education, and culture, by Jean-Louis Gassée-era tech and design writers.

Top post: Stop working so hard

The Pudding publishes visual, data-driven essays on culture, music, and society using interactive graphics.

Top post: The Human Terrain – 3D map of population

SCOTUSblog covers the US Supreme Court, with news and analysis of cases, opinions, and oral arguments.

Top post: Supreme Court likely to discard Chevron

Current Affairs is a left-leaning magazine publishing essays and criticism on politics, architecture, media, and public intellectuals.

Top post: Why people hate contemporary architecture (2017)

Marshall Brain writes about automation, robots, and the economy, and is the author of the science fiction story Manna.

Top post: Manna – AI Utopia or Dystopia? By Marshall Brain

Letters of Note collects and publishes notable letters, memos and correspondence from historical and famous figures.

Top post: Why Explore Space (1970)

Bellingcat is an investigative group that uses open-source intelligence to identify people behind poisonings, military attacks and intelligence operations.

Top post: How We Identified Navalny's FSB Stalkers

Nassim Taleb, author of the Incerto books, posts essays on risk, probability, intolerance, IQ and the failures of intellectuals.

Top post: The Most Intolerant Wins: The Dictatorship of the Small Minority (2016)

Cory Doctorow is a science fiction author and digital rights activist whose site hosts his stories, novels and essays.

Top post: Spam Solutions

Works in Progress is a magazine of essays on economic growth, housing, science, and technology, focused on progress and how things get built.

Top post: The housing theory of everything (2021)

Phrack is a long-running hacker e-zine, started in 1985, publishing technical papers on exploitation and security along with hacker culture writing.

Top post: Hacker’s Manifesto (1986)

The Awl was a general-interest website with essays on internet culture, media, food and technology.

Top post: A Taxonomy of Internet Chum (2015)

Medium Message is Medium's publication by Paul Ford and others, with essays on technology, the internet, nostalgia and mortality.

Top post: Everything Is Broken (2014)

Sam Harris, a neuroscientist and author, writes and hosts the Making Sense podcast on ethics, politics, religion and health.

Top post: The Fireplace Delusion

Tyler Vigen runs Spurious Correlations, a site charting unrelated data series that happen to track each other, such as cheese consumption and bedsheet deaths.

Top post: 15 Insane things that correlate with each other

Reclaim The Net is a news site covering online free speech, censorship by tech platforms, and digital privacy.

Top post: Google is now applying its coronavirus misinformation policies to personal files

Darknet Diaries is a podcast by a cybersecurity professional telling true stories of hackers, breaches, and cyber crime.

Top post: Being spied on by the makers of Pegasus, then lured them into a trap

GiveWell is a nonprofit that researches charities and recommends the ones it finds save or improve the most lives per dollar.

Top post: Our Top Charities

LSE Blogs collects posts from London School of Economics academics on economics, politics, history, academia, and book reviews.

Top post: How Academia Resembles a Drug Gang (2013)

The Public Domain Review is an online journal featuring essays and curated images, books, and films that are in the public domain.

Top post: A 19th-Century Vision of the Year 2000

Online art and design magazine covering unusual art, craft, photography, and design projects from around the world.

Top post: The 77-Year-Old Artist Who ‘Paints’ Japanese Landscapes with Excel