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How do people deal with the torrent of information pouring down on us all? What sources can't they live without? We regularly reach out to prominent figures in media, entertainment, politics, the arts and the literary world, to hear their answers. This is drawn from a conversation with Sasha Frere-Jones, staff writer and pop-music critic at The New Yorker, who loves Instapaper but believes in printing things out, and wants to start an Edith Wharton book club.
I enjoy the Twitter. There are a lot of things it does. Aside from the entertainment and amusement on Twitter, I take in weird things and find links to things that make my life easier. Twitter replaced my RSS with a curated feed (that's the worst word ever). But with Google Reader or NetNewsWire, which was what I was using before, I was constantly confronted with articles I didn't want to read. On Twitter you find who you trust and admire, and boom, you've got a hit, that's the best Downton Abbey recap or whatever. Or it circulates and you hear it first there. And then you've also got stuff like @Horse_ebooks, which is in and of itself amusing. I'm following about 500 people. Everyone knows there are people on Twitter who are smart and valuable and great, but they tweet 9,000 times a day and you just can't follow it. You have to pick: Who are the news organizations, the people who seem to be next to things that happen, and the lunatics that say things? You're going between news about Syria, Obama's new ridiculous thing, and then someone will be like "I just ate some plastic." The poetic rhythm of Twitter is really lovely. It's like the best newspaper you couldn't possibly design. You get tons of hard news. Throw a bone to the skeptic, if I just looked at headlines and didn't read though the reported stuff, that would suck, but here's a way the new world is better.