I have been reading Heather Cox Richardson since 2017, when she started posting on Facebook. Back then she was a history professor at Boston College writing about American politics through the lens of American history. The posts were long, carefully argued, and entirely without hype. They were also, depending on your appetite for American political drama, either essential reading or something you had to pace yourself with.
She moved to Substack in November 2019, and I have read her almost every day since. She now has more than three million subscribers. I mention that not to appeal to popularity, but because it tells you something about what happens when good writing finds a direct path to its audience.
That is roughly the point I want to make in this article.
A lot of people I talk to have pulled back from the news. Not because they are disengaged, but because they have found that the volume and noise of most media leaves them feeling worse informed, not better. The incentive structures of advertising-funded media, whether television, social platforms, or much of what passes for news online, reward outrage and speed over accuracy and depth. That is not new. But it has got worse, and a lot of thoughtful people have simply stopped.
What I want to suggest is that good journalism has not disappeared. It has moved. And some of it is better than anything I was reading ten years ago, precisely because the people writing it no longer have to answer to editorial hierarchies or advertising clients. They answer to their readers. The funding model has changed, and in some cases, that has genuinely improved the product.
Where I actually go — a reading list worth having
Heather Cox Richardson, Letters from an American (Substack). Daily. American political history mapped onto current events, written by someone with thirty years of academic expertise. She connects what is happening now to patterns that run across decades. Essential if you want to understand American politics rather than just track it.
Paul Krugman (Substack). Daily. He left the New York Times in late 2024 and launched on Substack in early 2025. Nobel laureate economist, writes about US and global economic policy in plain language. He signals when he is writing a technical piece, which I appreciate, because those I sometimes skip. The others are invariably worth reading.
Anna Fifield (Substack). Recent. She left the Washington Post after their restructuring and launched independently a few months ago. Exceptional knowledge of Asia and international affairs, and she writes with a New Zealand perspective on geopolitics that I find genuinely useful. Not something you find much elsewhere.
Anne Applebaum (Substack and The Atlantic). Essential on one topic. Her writing on democracy and authoritarianism is, I think, the best available in English. Her podcast, Autocracy in America, is worth your time if you want a serious treatment of why democratic institutions erode and what that means in practice. I have been reading her for a couple of years and recommend her without reservation.
Ezra Klein (New York Times). Long-form podcast and writing. I came to him only about six months ago and wish I had found him earlier. Wide-ranging, genuinely curious, and consistently careful. His podcast conversations cover technology, policy, economics, and society in a way that holds your attention and usually teaches you something.
Gideon Rachman (Financial Times). Geopolitics. Chief Foreign Affairs Commentator at the FT, with about as much accumulated knowledge of global politics as anyone writing in mainstream media. He also interviews people who have actually held power, not just commentated on it. I have been reading him for around three years.
Many of these require a subscription. I pay for all of them. I say that not to be virtuous about it, but because it matters. The funding model is the point. When a journalist's income comes directly from readers, the incentive is to be accurate, useful, and worth returning to. That is a different incentive structure from one where the revenue comes from advertisers chasing attention.
These are the ones that work for me. Some will suit you, others won't, and there are good writers I have probably never come across. The point is less about this specific list and more about the principle behind it.
For those of us making sense of a genuinely complicated world, where geopolitics, technology, monetary policy, and democratic institutions are all shifting at once, the quality of your information sources matters. I make investment decisions, and I advise clients on financial plans that will run for twenty or thirty years. Being well-informed is not peripheral to that work. It is part of it.
But this is not really about investing. It is about being an informed person in a world where the noise-to-signal ratio has become genuinely difficult to navigate.
The good news is that some of the best analytical minds writing about that world have found a way to fund themselves directly through their work. You can follow them there. For what it costs per month, it is one of the better decisions I make.
