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Today I have a special hybrid Newsletter Wednesday where you'll be required to purchase a book as well as subscribe to a newsletter. We have collectively reached semantic satiation with the phrase fake news but there's a reason we talk about it so much. Understanding the history of hucksters and media manipulation is important context for the reality distortion field we’re living through. Last year, old guard blogger and Cold Fusion holdout Rex Sorgatz put together a fantastic collection of the ways we have been duped through the ages called The Encyclopedia of Misinformation. It is extremely entertaining, well-designed, and a nice reminder that truth exists somewhere. (Even if it takes the distance of time to find it.)

On to the newsletter! Rex recently started a newsletter called Recs (pun intended) that has recommended links around these themes. His latest had a pointer to the Our Fake History podcast that looks great. These newsletters have been packed with fun so far and I'm looking forward to more.

(ok, you aren't required to purchase the book but subscribing to the newsletter is mandatory, sorry.)

Hello, it's time to revive Newsletter Wednesday where I post about an email newsletter I subscribe to. On Wednesdays. (As the name implies.) I know next to nothing about "business" or "finance" and that's why I love Matt Levine's Money Stuff. Just about every day he describes some aspect of the day's financial news in a way I can understand. Of course you could read all of his articles in the Bloomberg Opinion section. But receiving them in a calm email with no other bits of the page vying for my attention is a superior experience. To get a feel for it, here's his latest: Who Can Say What California Means? Ha! He also recently described Slack's unorthodox IPO which I found helpful: Bankers Can't Feel Great Helping Slack Go Public.

"...email has stayed, and has largely stayed decentralized, and from that — its ubiquity and lack of central authority — email has become one of the most boringly powerful publishing platforms around." Newsletters, amirite?! I agree that it feels like an exciting time for email and I really need to get back to posting my favorites. Are you thinking about starting your own newsletter? There's a guide for that: Newsletter Guide. And here's the obligatory Simpsons reference.

Good evening Newsletter Wednesday fans! :crickets: If you’re reading this you’re probably already familiar with kottke.org, one of the last surviving general interest weblogs (or “blogs” for short). It survives because Jason finds amazing things and describes them in ways that make us amazed with him. What you might not know is that he teamed up with frequent kottke guest-blogger Tim Carmody to produce a weekly newsletter recap called Noticing. Even though I keep up with the site in near real-time, I appreciate the way the weekly version ties posts together into themes. The newsletter has been going for a year now and it’s always a must-read.

Good morning newsletter Wednesday fans! :tumbleweed: This is my favorite weekly newsletter from O'Reilly with industry news about all things data: storage, visualization, and machine learning. I feel like it has a slice of news that I don't see from other sources. I also enjoy their web platform newsletter I just happen to already subscribe to many, many web news sources. While I have you here, check out their Product Manager and Design humble bundle happening for the next 12 days. You can get a virtual stack of great books about design for under $15. It includes Articulating Design Decisions which I've always been curious about.

The folks who produce Cool Tools have a side hustle (?) newsletter called Recomendo. Each week they send six recommendations of cool stuff. Most of the time it's a product or tool (like Cool Tools) but sometimes it's a tech tip or an article. It's always great. And they recently packaged up 500 of their recommendations into a book: Recomendo: 500 brief reviews of cool stuff. Now we have an answer to the age-old question: who will recommend the recommenders? This guy.

If you work in a pixel-adjacent industry, you'll enjoy this newsletter by Kai Brach who produced Offscreen Magazine. This newsletter recently changed its name from Offscreen but it's the same focus: humane design & developer news. Kai also recently wrote a behind-the-scenes look at producing DD: A look behind Dense Discovery: creating a fully customised weekly newsletter.