Some Newsletters Worth Reading

I'm finding that reading email newsletters is a better use of my time than browsing the web looking for news or especially, analysis of current affairs. (Also better is using an RSS reader like Feedly, but I'll save writing about that for another time).

These are some of the newsletters that I subscribe to. They are all free, though some have a paid tier for more posts or features. 

• Field Notes is a weekly newsletter of urban nature writing and photography from author Christopher Brown. His latest book is A Natural History of Empty Lots which incorporates some material from this newsletter.. He has also written three dystopian, near future novels, including Tropic of Kansas, which I recently read and recommend. 
• Letters From an American is a daily newsletter from historian Heather Cox Richardson. She is especially good at putting current events into their historical context. This newsletter is my main tool for understanding what's going on behind the daily flood of US political news. 
• Ground Truths by Eric Topol, a cardiologist, still practicing, with some expertise in genomics, digital and artificial intelligence, at the Scripps Institute. Weekly, mostly about medical topics, including COVID-19.
• The Status Kuo by Jay kuo, a lawyer who takes "a deep dive each weekday into important political and legal topics, broken down in plain English and easily digestible morsels." He also writes for The Big Picture.
• The Big Picture, founded by George Takei publishes two in-depth articles a week on social and political issues. 
• The Munro Report by Alasdair Munro, a senior clinical research fellow in paediatric infectious diseases in the UK. Topics include child health, clinical research, and infectious diseases. 
• betakit, a weekly newsletter about Canadian startup and technology companies. If you're interested in Canadian tech news, betakit is the site to go to.
• Thinking About.... by Timothy Snyder, a professor of history at Yale and author of the books On Tyranny, Our Malady, and most recently On Freedom. This is a good complement to Letters From an American.
• Transfer Orbit by Andrew Liptak, an author and historian who writes about cosplay and science fiction and fantasy. 
• Phil Plait's Bad Astronomy, by Phil Plait, astronomer and author of Death From the Skies: The Science Behind the End of the World. "Everything, the Universe, and Life".
• Your Local Epidemiologist by Dr. Katelyn Jetelina, an  an epidemiologist and data scientist. The newsletter covers a wide range of medical topics including the pandemic and other infectious diseases. Of all the medical newsletters I read, this is the best. 
• Unapocalyptic by Karl Schroeder, a professional futurist and science fiction writer. His goal is to provide "a community of dedicated people putting their heads together to find out how to use one to amplify the effect of another—to turn a jumble of ideas into a system for change."

I get several other newsletters, but most of those are published by the newspapers that I subscribe to and provide links to daily news stories that they want to promote.