Ask HN: More magazines like Quanta and Noema?
I find the level of writing quality in the essays and articles of these two magazines quite impressive.
What other online magazines do you read?
What other online magazines do you read?
Quanta https://api.quantamagazine.org/feed/
Noema Magazine https://www.noemamag.com/feed/
Aeon https://aeon.co/feed
Nautilus https://nautil.us/feed/
The Point Magazine https://thepointmag.com/feed/
Asterisk Magazine https://asteriskmag.com/feed
Symmetry Magazine https://www.symmetrymagazine.org/feed
n+1 Magazine https://www.nplusonemag.com/feed/
Harpers Magazine https://harpers.org/feed/
Low←Tech Magazine https://solar.lowtechmagazine.com/feeds/all-en.atom.xml
Public Books Magazine http://www.publicbooks.org/feed
The New Atlantis https://www.thenewatlantis.com/feed
While not all of their content is of high quality, there are some fascinating gems hidden in there. For instance, their February 1992 issue has a section on Archie, one of the earliest internet search engines:
> For many people, particularly programmers and engineers, the Internet means "info- booty": shareware and freeware source code, documents, graphics, and data sets available by file transfer downloads and from E-mail servers. Sites like UUNET and The World each have several gigabytes' worth of publicly available archives. These are but two of the hundreds of sites with archives accessible via these methods. Even admitting a fair amount of redundancy among archives, it still adds up to about 100 gigabytes, and new sites and offerings are coming on-line every day.
> With so many different archives, it can be hard to figure out where (and at what network address) to access the items you want. If you don't know what you want beyond compilers or CP/M applications, it's even more overwhelming.
> The "archie group" at McGill University (Montreal, Quebec, Canada) has one solution to the problem: archie (archive without the v), the Internet Archive Server Listing Service (for access, see reference 2). Archie is a central database of information about Internet-accessible archive sites, plus server programs that provide access by telnet, anonymous file transfer protocol (FTP), E-mail, and the Prospero distributed computer system.
https://worldradiohistory.com/Archive-Byte/90s/1992/Byte-199... (page 147)
Also, there is Communications of the ACM (https://dl.acm.org/magazine/cacm). Many of their articles are free to read.
Not just beginner, intermediate, etc., but software and low level hardware for specific chip sets.
Raspberry PI mag is the closest thing. Maybe I should just downgrade my desktop to a RPI and enjoy the hobby again. Maybe, build a robo-dog/cat/creature.
See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8758915 for the 'end of it' and for the archives https://archive.org/details/DDJDVD6 or https://archive.org/search?query=creator%3A%22Dr.+Dobb%27s+J...
Quanta magazine is financed by the Simons Foundation (Hedge Fund billionaire).
Noema seems to be a pet project of Nicolas Berggruen (Hedge Fund billionaire).
The name sounded familiar: https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nicolas_Berggruen#Berggruen_be...
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/43889703-the-man-who-sol...
It's not perfect, but it's become essentially the only place I consume "long-form articles about interesting stuff"-type content, which I think they still do better than anyone.
Right now I print articles I'm interested in, which is far from the most efficient solution.
I get Communications of the ACM, IEEE’s Computer and Software that way.
But I still miss BYTE. The articles are half the fun only - the ads painted a colourful portrait of the computer scene back then.
Nautilus magazine also publishes excellent science journalism (https://nautil.us) with high-quality writing comparable to Quanta. In contrast with The Conversation, the contributors are typically professional journalists and writers—the writing quality is therefore often much higher and more literary than The Conversation's, though Conversation contributors have relevant specialist knowledge more often than Nautilus contributors.
Also, Lapham's Quarterly (https://www.laphamsquarterly.org) is perhaps comparable to Noema, as the magazine publishes essays and analyses of modern issues, often via making comparisons between current affairs and important parts of history. This looks similar to Noema's approach of analyzing current events from an academic perspective, from noticing references to academic publications in several essays featured on Noema's front page.
Lapham's and The Conversation also don't have any paywalls, though Nautilus does have a soft paywall of two articles a month (this is comparable to the magazines mentioned by other users in this discussion, with similarly fairly relaxed or stricter paywalls).
In short, HN is awesome
However, it's also fair to note that many articles in their weekly issue—often at 600-800 words—just don't have the space to go in-depth enough into an issue, in contrast to a feature in The New Yorker or another long-form magazine like Foreign Affairs.
I've found The Economist to be a useful publication to hear about interesting problems I might otherwise have never heard of, and to read a fact-checked concise overview of a particular topic, before looking for a more in-depth source if there is a motivation to read further into the topic.
Please, start a blog or something. I mean you don't have to...but, yeah. Thanks.
Nautilus: https://nautil.us/
* https://asteriskmag.com/ - they just published the second issue. I really enjoy the topics covered and the quality of writing.
Noema has some good stuff, although check out their advisory board. So many high profile neoliberal ghouls that the first time I saw it I thought it was a joke. It introduced me to Byung-Chul Han, for which I am forever grateful. Hope they can keep it up since they were hiring for a senior editor for a while there recently…
It's along the lines of Quanta or Nautilus but with more of an investigative type of work, the main goal being bringing under-reported science-adjacent issues to light.
They do have a slightly leftist tilt but it's still mostly professional. I haven't really noticed them doing that thing left-leaning publications do where they act as though some matter of opinion is fact, and can't conceive of counter-arguments. They do a good job investigating all angles, in my experience.
I had the pleasure of accidentally meeting one of their editors for something entirely unrelated, but we did chat about the magazine and I was pretty impressed with her desire for rigor rather than agenda.
Very, very interesting articles. Fiendish crossword.
They don't much cover any technical material, but they cover all kinds of everything else. The reviews are often much better than the original material.
https://hung.su/slow-news-movement/
Some magazines that no one has mentioned:
You wont agree with every writer, but every article is at least thought provoking.
Come to think of it, I think imagination is one of the qualities that makes Quanta so magical. Ostensibly it's a magazine about the interactions of formal and natural sciences, but they're not afraid to include a bold dash of imagination.
Decades ago I enjoyed Spex, some writers are still around (Diederich Diedrichsen, Dietmar Dath).
Telepolis from Heise Verlag is somewhat boring but not so bad:
Do I miss anything?
They have interviews in german and in (some sort of) english.
Unfortunately, that is the only important one you missed.
I still remember vividly reading things from it back in college days and amazed by the quality of the links.
Not specifically science oriented though.
Most articles are focused on public policy but there is a good spread of topics. Strangely, it was acquired by Stripe last year.
E.g.
History related: acoup.blog
Physics: backreaction.blogspot.com
For more in the same style, try https://asteriskmag.com/.
The key differentiator in this digital magazine is that it offers science stories as told by scientists. And that's quite rare in a clickbait-y world.
https://libcom.org/article/fiery-anniversary-special-review-...
It blows my mind that some people think communism hasn't been tried enough times.
"Yes it failed 999 times before, but THIS flavor of communism will definitely work!"
> Coal supplied about 55% of China’s total energy consumption in 2021
https://www.eia.gov/international/analysis/country/CHN
> It was one of the fastest decimations of an animal population in world history—and it had happened almost entirely in secret. The Soviet Union was a party to the International Convention for the Regulation of Whaling, a 1946 treaty that limited countries to a set quota of whales each year. By the time a ban on commercial whaling went into effect, in 1986, the Soviets had reported killing a total of 2,710 humpback whales in the Southern Hemisphere. In fact, the country’s fleets had killed nearly 18 times that many, along with thousands of unreported whales of other species.
> The Soviet whale slaughter followed no such logic. Unlike Norway and Japan, the other major whaling nations of the era, the Soviet Union had little real demand for whale products. Once the blubber was cut away for conversion into oil, the rest of the animal, as often as not, was left in the sea to rot or was thrown into a furnace.
https://psmag.com/social-justice/the-senseless-environment-c...
I didn't write that 'comunism' is inherently better in the environmental aspect.
At last it is just another ideological idiocy and kakistrocacy.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Excess_mortality_in_the_Soviet...
I'm sure the millions of Ukrainians who were forcibly starved during the Holodomor really appreciated the low calorie diets supplied by the USSR.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holodomor
Characterizing the forcible starvation of millions as "a period of food insecurity" is peak techie-communism for me. Thanks for the laugh! :)