You can tell a lot about a person based on who they religiously follow on Twitter — or least that’s the driving idea behind this new feature. Every week we’ll ask an influential web editor to share some of his or her most prized feeds with you, along with a few exemplary tweets that will illustrate why you’ll soon be following along too. Our hope is that you’ll get a tiny glimpse inside the creative minds of some of online media’s brightest stars — and a more interesting Twitter feed of your own to boot!
This week’s stellar set of recommendations — an eclectic mix of cultural-, political-, and business-themed feeds — comes to you from Tim Morrison, a former Arts editor at TIME magazine, and the current Mobile Projects editor for TIME.com, as well as the editor of NewsFeed. Click through to check out his top picks, be sure to follow both Morrison and @TIMENewsFeed on Twitter, and peruse past installments of our series here.
When people start talking about ‘curating’ in the sense of something that happens outside of museums I think of Maria Popova. @brainpicker doesn’t necessarily post the newest stuff, or the newsiest. But whatever she tweets out is invariably absorbing and interesting, and worth five or 10 minutes I really don’t have. Some of the headlines are so good I have to physically stop myself clicking on them — Orson Welles on work-life balance! The Milky Way as a subway map! — so it’s entirely possible I need to unfollow now.
TIME’s TV and cultural critic, and yes, I work with him, so this one’s a bit of a ringer. But James Poniewozik is one of very few writers who’s consistently engaging and funny, at 140 characters or across a whole cover story, and always well worth a read. If you follow him, however, you really should tune in to NPR’s Linda Holmes (@nprmonkeysee) and The New Yorker’s Emily Nussbaum (@emilynussbaum), otherwise you’re only listening to one third of a very interesting conversation.
Who is @pourmecoffee? I have no idea, but I like to speculate. He (or she) is an angry, funny, left-leaning political humorist and is probably still waiting on that coffee. For actual political news and analysis, you should really follow @ezraklein (Hey! See below and follow @ezraklein!) but I’ve watched a seriously embarrassing number of GOP debates and late-night primary elections this year, and it’s always been nice to know @pourmecoffee is up doing the same thing.
@sai is one of the feeds that came preloaded when I opened my Twitter account a few years ago and it’s the only one I never deleted. Lots of good links and tech news from Silicon Valley and it makes me feel smarter, younger, and better-looking for having read it.
I probably could have put any one of Klein, Chuck Todd (@chucktodd), Jake Tapper (@jaketapper) or Ben Smith (@buzzfeedben) here, since they all seem to tweet more, and more usefully, than should be humanly possible — all while holding down some of the most important jobs in political journalism. But @ezraklein’s love of sharing interesting charts narrowly beats out Chuck Todd’s goatee for me, at least this week.