My wife gave me grief a couple of days ago for sending a link to Slate ‘s home page that, when clicked, took people to the Human Nature home page and ultimately to plain old headlines . She was expecting something I’d written instead of something I’d linked to.
I see her point. Let me explain what I’m trying to do, and I’ll keep looking for ways to improve it. I’m trying to use the new headline-only links— here for News, and here for Hot Topics—to flag stories I find really interesting. I can’t blog or write pieces on all these stories, but I do a lot of scouring and weeding to select them. You don’t have to click on any of them if you don’t want to. But if you’re looking for cool stuff on any given day, I think you’ll generally find them the most efficient way to get it.
The thing I’m getting a sense of as I tinker with the new format is that people expect to hear my voice. I’m a bit reluctant to push my voice into everything. By and large, the Internet, and the blogosphere in particular, is way too full of people opining rapidly, ignorantly, and thoughtlessly. I don’t want to add to that problem. If possible, I’d like to help rectify it. That’s part of why I wrote the old Human Nature news items the way I did: I wanted to lay out the evidence and arguments without injecting my instant opinion all the time. Eventually, I gave in and started adding a line here or there.
I set up this blog in part to create a space for this kind of informal thinking out loud. I’ll try to make sense of things. Often, I’ll get it wrong, and that’ll be OK, as long as you and I keep working to correct the errors and improve the thinking. The lesson I’m going to draw from my wife’s complaint, for the time being, is that when I post new headlines to the News and Hot Topics pages, I should write a blog post announcing them and saying at least a little bit about them. So the blog can be the place where a human voice (mine) introduces you to what’s new each day. And you and I can take it from there.
Got a better idea? Let’s hear it .
