Recommendation Engines
Aemula Writer Spotlight - 9.19.24
In order to discover new interests, content, and perspectives, it is important to have a robust pipeline of recommendations coming from the people you trust. Historically, we relied on our close friends and immediate communities to guide us, but as the major publications, digital advertisers, and social media corporations play a more prominent role in curating the information we receive, our methods for discovery become increasingly algorithmic.
These algorithms are necessary, as they efficiently navigate the widely expanding universe of online content, enabling billions to learn and converse on previously unheard topics. Yet, our initial iteration of recommendation algorithms were developed with different incentives in mind — capturing your attention for long enough to sell it to advertisers.
As we work to create a platform free of outside influence and powered by a fully-transparent recommendation engine controlled by the community, we want to share a few resources who curate high-quality recommendations for their audiences.
We hope you discover some hidden gems through the recommendations below, and if you have any you would like to share, let us know! You can reach us by emailing community@aemula.com, messaging us, or leaving a comment below!
Become a recommendation engine of your own and share some of these finds with your friends or followers!
Links I Would Gchat You If We Were Friends
Written by Caitlin Dewey, a freelance journalist, adjunct professor of magazine, newspaper, and digital journalism at Syracuse University, and long-time advisor to the Poynter-Koch Media & Journalism Fellowship Program.
“Links is a digital culture newsletter for people who miss the old internet: the one that wasn’t crowded with Elon Musk reply-guys, viral attention-hackers and shrimp Jesuses. It’s interested in big-picture questions about technology and how it shapes our lives and culture. But it’s also fun and serendipitous and sometimes deeply weird — all the things that social media really isn’t now.”
Letters of Rec
Written by Justin St. Germain, an associate professor at Oregon State, teaching courses on non-fiction and true crime, and author of Son of a Gun and Bookmarked: Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood.
“Monthly posts from a nonfiction/true crime professor about what I'm reading, watching, and listening to.”
The Garden of Forking Paths — Brain Food
Written by Brian Klaas, Author of Fluke: Chance, Chaos, and Why Everything We Do Matters, Associate Professor of Global Politics at University College London, Contributing Writer for The Atlantic, and Creator/Host of the Power Corrupts podcast.
“I’m a curious social scientist who loves to read about the mysteries of the world, not just in politics, but in evolutionary biology, history, neuroscience, anthropology, philosophy, and beyond. I love how maddeningly weird and endlessly fascinating our world is, and I will be bringing you some amazing peculiarities of the world through the newsletter, if you’d be so kind as to read it.”
If you want to support any of these writers, we highly encourage you to subscribe to their individual publications. If you want to support independent journalism more broadly, we offer both paid and free subscriptions for you to stay informed!
All subscription revenue is reinvested directly into the independent journalism community.
Interested in sharing your own writing? We would love to see your work!
