The [Tuesday Evening] Media Diet with Brian Sholis

On RSS, NPR’s plain-text site, and Unwound

We’re taking the week off this week to rest + share some cuts from the archives, but we do have a fresh new MMD from Brian Sholis. He’s been an avid reader and supporter of WITI since the start and I thought this was great. Be sure to go subscribe to his excellent Frontier Magazine. -Colin (CJN)

Tell us about yourself.

I’m a Chicagoan in Toronto, a husband and father, and an autodidact. John McPhee once said everything he’s written has descended from his teenage fascinations; I trace most everything back to my simultaneous discovery, circa 1993, of punk rock music and online bulletin boards. It’s been independent culture and community for me ever since.

I spent two decades in contemporary art and photography as a writer, editor, museum curator, and nonprofit director. Since last autumn I’ve been editorial director of Frontier, a design office in Toronto. I run Frontier Magazine, an ideas-focused weekly newsletter that advocates for fairness and creative flourishing through stories from the arts, the built environment, tech, and education. I also host its podcast and lead “editorial as a service” for its clients.

Ask my wife or my onetime doctoral advisor: I’m better suited to making lateral connections than to diving deep on any one topic. So I’m lucky to have just about always had “editor” or “curator” on my business card.

Describe your media diet.

Gluttonous, and the feeding tube is RSS: I keep up with hundreds (thousands?) of publications, blogs, email newsletters, and museum and gallery mailing lists in Feedbin. Some faves & friends: Mandy Brown, Greg Allen, Christopher Butler, Devon Zuegel, Piper Haywood, Patrick Tanguay.

Everything that doesn’t have an RSS feed goes into Hardly Everything, which is like a bookmarks tool with cadence: I see my friends’ Instagram accounts every seven to ten days, literary quarterlies’ websites every seven to ten weeks, and great design and architecture firms’ portfolios every seven to ten months. Very little TV, very few movies, no theater, and, with the dissolution of Twitter, less and less social media. (So if any of this resonates, email me!)

I follow so many things because I’m serially obsessive—my euphemism for ADD—and once I develop a fascination or a hobby I don’t let it go. I just stack ‘em up. So even though I gave up Premier League soccer when my second son was born (and my weekend mornings were shot), I still follow Arsenal. Add to that baking, landscape history, typography, the media & publishing businesses, technical analysis of the stock market (?!?), literary criticism, ambient & experimental music, and NBA basketball (nighttime games work with young kids).

What’s the last great book you read?

Deb Chachra’s How Infrastructure Works: Inside the Systems That Shape Our World, which convincingly describes power plants and telecommunications systems as “care at scale,” weaves in autobiography and first-person reportage, and theorizes an exciting energy-abundant future. I interviewed her about it here.

What are you reading now?

I’m really enjoying Kate Briggs’s The Long Form and Teju Cole’s Tremor. And I’m waiting eagerly for Mary Ruefle’s The Book to show up on Toronto indie-bookstore shelves.

What’s your reading strategy when you pick up a print copy of your favorite publication?

In my twenties, I read issues cover-to-cover; in my thirties, I looked first for pieces written by or about people I knew; at about forty, I began the sacrilegious practice of cutting the few articles I wanted to read out of periodicals and saving them in a little pile near my desk, to be read as a little treat. Thanks to exorbitant international-shipping rates, since moving to Canada nearly all my non-comped subscriptions have shifted from print to digital. I miss print.

Who should everyone be reading that they’re not?

Arthur Krystal, whose new collection A Word or Two Before I Go is on my nightstand; Rosa Lyster, whose book on the global water crisis I’m eagerly anticipating and whose essays on art and other subjects I devour in the meantime; Christian Wiman, who makes both poetry and religious feeling accessible to ingrates like me; Eliot Weinberger, whose hunger for the world’s stories is intoxicating; Emily Fox Gordon, whose Book of Days is a model of ambitious, idea-driven autobiographical writing.

What is the best non-famous app you love on your phone?

The deepest cut—both because it’s no longer available and because it pains me not being able to share—is V for Wikipedia, a beautiful, functional iOS app that re-skinned Wikipedia. But since you can’t download it, let me instead recommend using your phone as if you’re still on 3G, forgoing apps for lightweight, often text-only websites. I skim the headlines with NPR’s plain-text site and CBC Lite and get my teams’ scores from the indispensable Plain Text Sports.

Plane or train?

I’m now firmly on Team Train. Watching my wife and friends get COVID and get jerked around on nearly every trip by weather delays, technical issues, and other interruptions these past few years means I’m in no hurry to return to the skies.

What is one place everyone should visit?

Since visiting a few times in the 2000s, I’ve described Bergen, Norway, as a meteorological expression of my soul. Imagine the Pacific Northwest with even more rain (!), quaint, narrow streets, a few hundred more years of history, and a cable car that takes you up a mountain to visit a large sculpture of a troll. Barring that, visit and support your nearest public library branch.

Tell us the story of a rabbit hole you fell deep into.

Earlier this year, I traveled to Philadelphia with friends to see the 1990s post-hardcore band Unwound on its reunion tour. We spent nearly the entire drive trying to stump each other with obscure early-to-mid-’90s screamo and hardcore music. That inspired me to slowly reconstruct my teenage vinyl collection via MP3, with sites like Sophie’s Floorboard and Canadian Wasteland being particularly helpful. I’m at 279 records and counting …

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Thanks for reading,

Noah (NRB) & Colin (CJN)

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