What I'm Paying to Read These Days
I think you have all figured out by now that I read a lot. I read a lot of books, a lot of academic journals, a lot of newsletters, a lot of literary journals. When I was a kid, I was a devoted reader of the backs of cereal boxes. If there are words, I will read them.
I pay for as many of the words as I can afford. I have a few regulars that I've subscribed to for years, but I like to keep a few other subscriptions rotating to spread my meager dollars around. In this fractured mediascape, that's my number one recommendation: Set a budget first, then subscribe for a month or a year without the auto-renewal option. When your subscription is up, assess if you want more or if you want to spread your meager dollars around and read something new.
Here's the current KHG rotation:
Scratch
If you're a writer of any kind, Scratch will hit home. It is entirely about the money part of writing: what we get paid, how we get paid, how we scrape together gigs and part-time jobs and book advances and fellowships and supportive partners and tiny inheritances, Virginia Woolf-style, to make a writing life work in any kind of way. If you feel like you're making it up every day, you are! And so are the rest of us! Scratch is all about that. The people who put this newsletter together know what they're doing and they are in it with us. I paid for a yearly subscription before they even published their first weekly issue, I think.
Hearing Things
Julianne Escobedo Shepherd
Hearing Things is run by a scrappy team of longtime music journalists. If you feel like Spotify and AI and everything else have wrecked your taste so you don't even know what you like anymore, these folks are writing the path back to your music-loving self. You will be reminded that music is more than background sound while you do other things. You will find new artists. You will remember that you have a Bandcamp account. You will rediscover the cohesiveness of the album as opposed to the scattershot nature of the playlist.
London Review of Books
LRB
I have been a subscriber to the LRB (pronounced lurb in my house) for years, and I plan on keeping this one around. The essays are thousands of words long and cover far more ground than the book under review. This is either your jam or your nightmare. If I could live inside the LRB, I would. Yes, I have visited the bookshop and cafe in London.
Paris Review
I go back and forth on my Paris Review subscription. I'll stick with it for a while, drop it for a few years, then resubscribe when they do an interview with an author I love (this time it was Sigrid Nunez). It's a classic for a reason; PR does publish a lot of stellar work.
Longreads
adminnewspack
I was a longtime subscriber, and then somehow my subscription dropped off. Did I forget to update a credit card? Did I drop it on a day when I was feeling frugal and forget I had done so? Did they get a new system and I got lost? I may never know. But I do know that eventually I noticed that I missed getting the weekly email with the Longreads Top 5, a selection of the best essays and in-depth reporting that week, plus a piece or two commissioned by Longreads itself. If you love a curated list, this one is a must.
Jane Friedman
Amazon
Jane Friedman is one of the most knowledgeable people in publishing. I direct new authors to her website at least once a month. She has two newsletters now: Electric Speed has been around for nearly 20 years (!) and is good for most writers; The Bottom Line is a business-oriented, insider-baseball newsletter, and this is the one I subscribe to.
The New Yorker
Condé Nast
I had a subscription to the New Yorker for years and years, and then I let it go. I was one of the few people who kept up with the regular stream of issues that landed in the mailbox most weeks, but then I just didn't want to anymore. I would read the occasional free article, or I would get an issue using the library's Libby app. But I was reading more and more articles, so I resubscribed last year. I'm not sure if this will make the cut long term, but I'm enjoying it for now.
TLS
(I think the preview link might look weird? You can just go to the-tls.com.) More British book talk! The reviews are shorter than the LRB but the coverage is wider. The frustrating part is that they often review books I would really like to read, but they're only available in the UK. I make notes to check for US publishing dates, and sometimes I'm lucky. It's a reminder that not all culture is fully global, which I kind of appreciate. French books remind me of this too.
NewsBlur
This isn't a magazine or journal; it's an RSS reader. It's where I collect dozens of magazines and journals and news outlets and newsletters in one place, and I happily pay for it. RSS was the technology of the last decade, and it will rise again! NewsBlur is easy to use and very customizable. I keep mine on the less fancy side and have a bunch of integrations and AI stuff turned off. NewsBlur is my first stop every morning while I drink coffee.
Sign up for the Wingback Workshop email newsletter (including the email-only Sawdust!) using the Subscribe button at the bottom of your screen.
Get the Wingback Workshop RSS feed here: https://wingbackworkshop.com/rss
Follow the Wingback Workshop on the Fediverse (including Mastodon): @khg@wingbackworkshop.com
Buy KHG's books on Bookshop.org: https://bookshop.org/shop/khg