We have done podcasts recommendations, content creator recommendations, and food recommendations but we haven’t recommended websites and/or writers to check out that don’t focus on games. Waypoints has become so great for me because they’ll recommend articles that I would never have discovered on my own. Then you have Danielle say on this week’s Waypoints that she loves the writer of the NYT piece they discuss. How do you discover these people, follow their writing?
The first person that came to mind for me was Jon Bois from SB Nation. I suppose he’s kind of gaming-adjacent since I was introduced to him through his Breaking Madden series. After that I ended up reading pretty much anything he writes just because of how much I enjoy his style of writing. He seems to mostly do video essay sort of work now but it’s basically just reading with my ears instead. 17776 is a really wild piece of work he did in 2017 that I find nearly indescribable and incredibly enjoyable.
(These are all sports, because games and sports are what I use the internet for)
I really enjoy the writing and personalities over on The Ringer, which mainly covers sports but also ranges through different media and culture (e.g. they recently ran a several month podcast series involving a chapter-by-chapter binge of Harry Potter). Not to mention they broke the most ridiculous story of the internet age last year (which should be weird and wacky and entertaining even if you don’t know a thing about basketball).
Also, in addition to the deity that is Jon Bois and his series, Pretty Good and Chart Party, SB Nation has some neat video series. My favorite is probably Rewinder, which takes an iconic moment and spends ten minutes or so digging into what led up to it, how all its participators got to where they are, and basically just giving greater context to things you might only be kind of aware of. It’s a simple, but typically really engaging core conceit.
