These are the sites I most frequently visit and use for material. And, yes, this is the pared down list.
Astronomy Picture of the Day: A astronomy photo site updated daily, usually with a beautiful image coupled a good explanation and lots of links. To digress: humans have been looking at the stars for tens of thousands of years, yet much of our knowledge only arose within the last hundred years. This renaissance in astronomy drastically alters our knowledge of the Universe and should drastically our understanding of our place in it. Many religious beliefs are now archaic cultural artifacts, surviving due to an unwillingness to change old beliefs, as misguided metaphors, or as indicia of ignorance. Astronomy Picture of the Day ("APOD" to fans) has, of course, no religious motive and no cultural agenda other than education. The two scientists who author it succeed in that superlatively. One cannot take in the Universe, however, and continue to believe that humans (or a human-based God) rule over all.Artist-a-Day: Its title is self evident, one thinks. This, anyway, is a curated site featuring one currently working artist everyday, with the work rated by visitors. Some work is great, some, well, not.
Behance Network: Behance Network describes itself as "[t]he leading online platform to showcase & discover creative work. Creative professionals update their work in one place to broadcast it widely and efficiently. Companies explore the work and access talent on a global scale." In other words, Behance is an agency owned website that curates submissions and displays them for review and rating. The work here is wide ranging and often excellent.
Beautiful Decay: Beautiful Decay describes itself as a "daily art blog with a focus on experimental, grotesque, and groundbreaking art." What this means is that it is a commercial site that sells art prints, t-shirts, and so forth, as well as magazines. No matter: the work art here is often fabulous. I don't think I'd use "grotesque" to describe it.
BibliOdyssey: Blog periodically updated with high-res scans of antiquarian and obscure book art. The author/curator Paul ("PK" or "peacay") is an exemplar of a citizen scholar: an individual doing the heaving lifting for us all and putting it out for free. BiblioOdyssey is great and wonderful.
BoingBoing: A group weblog with five main contributors that started on paper (as a zine), boingboing posts on a wide range of topics, with an emphasis on art, science, open access, steampunk, makers, science fiction, human rights, cryptozoology, internet memes, esoterica and offbeat culture (not necessarily in that order). Not all of that may make sense to you -- it doesn't to me -- and not every post is intended to appeal to everyone (the thing is, you know, you can skip over posts) -- but it's a good source for interesting things. A frequent read.
CNN: A good source for fast breaking news and, im my view, not much else. See also ABC News; CBS News; The Daily Beast/Newsweek; Fox News (yes, possibly evil, but not as bad as Fox Nation -- I mean, really, are you kidding me?); MSNBC; Time Magazine, and USA Today. To be fair, only Fox Nation is really worthless, and even it's no World Nut Daily. Which reminds me, are the Drudge Report, Huffington Post, and The Daily Show still used by some as news sources? Baffling.
Codex 99: Lavishly illustrated occasional essays on visual art and historical topics. Every post is great; they're all too infrequent.
Colossal: An art weblog whose solo author and editor, Christopher Jobson, has a great eye and an uncanny ability to find great work. His posts have caused several internet sensations.
Contemporist: A blog of modern architecture and design. Inspiring objects, large and small.
Cosas Cool: A Tumblr art blog routinely showing great stuff.
Crooks and Liars: Liberal leaning blog with emphasis on exposing misrepresentations and the misdealings of politicians and their ilk.
Cynical C: Blog with often interesting posts on politics, religion, memes, and the like. The author [whose name I'll omit for his privacy, not that it's that big a secret] is more smart than cynical, and he's been at this, and I've been reading him, for a long long time.
Daily Banter: Five person political group weblog, notably of Oliver Willis, who reputedly is "like kryptonite to stupid." The other bloggers are responsible for using wood and the color yellow, binding submission bracelets together, and furnishing the adamantium.
Daily What: Part of the ineffable I Can Has Cheeseburger network, this ... look, folks, this is the internet.
Deviant Art: An art website with art posted by its tens of thousands of users, some of it excellent, some not so much. Its moderated with favorites available in various categories. Sure, there's a lot of dross here but there's the occasional shiny bauble as well. The baubles sort of jump out at you.
Discover: The People's science magazine, Discover has gone from being sort of a rag years ago to a high quality, reliable, and informative website. It's popular journalism done right.
Fark: Historical Americana consists of apple pie, coon skin hats, faded dimestore copies of the declaration of independence tacked up on paneled walls, civil war flags, and images of Thomas Edison. Modern Americana consists of Fark.
From Up North: A site updated daily with exemplar images from graphic arts. Great stuff, generally.
Gawker: This is a New York gossip blog -- and, hey, I'm not above that -- but I'll let it be a stand-in here for the whole Gawker/Nick Denton empire (at least the ones I look at): io9 (science and science fiction), Gizmodo (gadgets and technology), and Jezebel (sort of like Gawker for women, yes, really). Not actually read that often.
The Guardian: My paper of record from "across the pond." Sorry The London Times, News Corp in general, and the Beeb in particular (which has possibly the worst science coverage in the Universe, in my opinion).
Gurney Journey: Personal art blog of realist/fantasy artist James Gurney, bristling with painting and visual perception insights. Usually read by me daily.
How Appealing: Blog by appellate attorney Howard Bashman providing timely updates on U.S. Supreme Court cases and significant federal and state cases. How Mr. Bashman is able to do this so well and so fast I have no idea (great LEXIS or Westlaw updates and the like? hmmm...), but the site is an excellent resource.
In Focus: A several times weekly collection of photos at The Atlantic, In Focus originated as The Big Picture at the The Boston Globe. The Atlantic hired editor Alan Taylor away as part of an aggressive effort to expand its presence on the Web, an effort which also involved hiring super-bloggers Andrew Sullivan (now with The Daily Beast and Ta-Nehisi Coates.
Instapundit: Blog by a libertarian law professor whose numerous pithy posts rapaciously spin the day’s politics and events. Yes, it’s biased; it’s often misleading; it makes no effort to provide a balanced view. This is “punditry,” er, “insta” pundity. The blog’s author, Glenn Reynolds, has occasionally suggested he is just being funny. Yet, the blog is influential in Republican/conservative/libertarian circles. It is a litmus test for what may play more widely in the media if it plays well here. This is not, for me, a daily read, but it is useful to get an influential perspective one might miss from only reading balanced sources. Instapundit’s blog roll is also a great resource to find other blogs.
Kottke: Author Jason Kottke says his blog is dedicated to "liberal arts 2.0" and "people are awesome." I guess I share those interests. The husband of Blogger co-developer Meg Hourihan, Kottke invented the internet. His blog is a daily read.
Longform: A site that presents links daily to long form magazine and newspaper articles, allowing them to be read or saved for reading later, as well as easily printed. I read fewer books than I used to and more longform articles, perhaps two or three a day. This is the remiere resource for these.
MetaFiler: My love of this site has steadily grown and I probably hit it as much as any other. MetaFilter is a community weblog that publishes lightly moderated work from a wide variety of contributors, which results in some of the most interesting and informative links and comments on the web. Its founder and lead moderator, Matt Haughey, has created an atmosphere where intelligence and insight are cherished and trolling avoided. A great resource.
Miss Cellania: Humor blog by the main editor of Neatorama, who is also a frequent contributor to Mental Floss, both worthy blogs (and sometime sources here) in their own right.
My Modern Met: A well curated open community weblog focusing on art, My Modern Met consistently has interesting content from around the web and the worlds of art and architecture.
National Geographic: Great natural and physical science photographs and short articles. Awesome in subject and execution.
National Public Radio: A national treasury.
The New York Times: The most reliable news source in the United States.
Nothing to Do with Arborath: Blog of an English gentleman who finds odd things on the internet. None of these have anything to do with his hometown.
The Onion: "America's Finest News Source."
Pharyngula: Blog by a biologist and outspoken atheist with a large, fervent group of followers and commenters. P.Z. Meyers, the author, has a "take no prisoners" approach on religion and has been at the center of several controversies, such as desecrating a host -- a catholic religious symbol -- calling it a "cracker." (NB: while in fact I share many of PZ's beliefs and opinions, in my view the "desecration of the cracker" thing was wrong.) PZ is an excellent and insightful writer; though the posts here have become redundant. I used to read his blog at least daily, but it is now I might glance at it once a week.
Physics ArXiv: The blog of the Technology Review website at MIT, Physics ArXiv has up-to-date breaking science news and valuable insight into science and technology developments.
Rayogram: A site providing PDFs of a some leading US newspapers and few from around the world, with links to the paper's online presence. Rayogram is a great way to see on one page various takes on the news, including some outside the US. For a other high profile English language foreign news sources, see Buenos Aires Herald (Argentina); Australian Broadcasting Corporation (Australia); Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (Canada); The Tornoto Star (Canada); China Daily (China); The People's Daily (China); Euronews (European Union); AFP (French news service); Le Monde Diplomatique (French monthly); Deutsche Welle (Germany); Der Spiegel (German weekly); Daily Yomiuri (Japan); Japan Times (Japan); Hindustan Times (India); The Times of India (India); Jakarta Post (Indonesia); Jerusalem Post (Israel); Haaretz (Israel); Corriere Della Sera (Italy); Adnkronos (Italy); The News (Mexico); Al Jazeera (Qatar); Moscow Times (Russia); Pravda (Russia); Al Arabiya (Saudi Arabia); IOL (South Africa); Mail & Guardian (South Africa); Costa News (Spain); El Pais (Spain); The Korea Herald (South Korea); The Korea Times (South Korea); BBC (United Kingdom); The Daily Telegraph (United Kingdom); Economist (United Kingdom); The Financial Times (United Kingdom); The Guardian (United Kingdom); The Independent (United Kingdom); The London Times (United Kingdom). While I've listed what I view as the top international English language news sources (either by influence, reliability, or readership), there are many other solid news sources out there, many of which do not have good English counterparts. For general reference, both for state-by-state U.S. papers and international news sources, see World-Newspapers.com.
Reddit: The front page of the internet.
Scientific American: Years ago Scientific American was a highly respected general interest science journal whose articles were slightly out of reach of the average reader. While I enjoy its web site, the magazine has, in my view, dumbed itself down, and not with great success. It panders now to what it sees as the topics that will sell magazines, mixing speculation (not well labeled as such) with real science insight; it has poor columnists and bad editing. Yet, I've not let my subscription lapse. So I spend too much time with Scientific American on the web and in hard copy.
Talking Points Memo: A liberal leaning political blog with an emphasis on analyzing national politics, polls, and political disputes. Begun by Josh Marshall in 2000 as a one man effort with high journalistic standards, it broke a number of scandals and news stories in the 2000's. Since then "TPM" has grown into a collection of several blogs covering news, electoral politics, political scandals, polls, and the like. Despite its evident liberal bias, TPM covers the political issues on all sides and has broken news about Democratic misdealings as well as Republican. A read several times a week; more often leading up to elections.
Volkh Conspiracy: Group blog of academic law bloggers. Volkh Conspiracy, founded by two brothers, has a conservative/libertarian bent with a few token members not sharing those views. I read it because I remain interested in what academia thinks is important (sometimes to my own humorous delight) and this is a window, slightly frosted, to that world..
The Wall Street Journal: Often silly editorials coupled with usually reliable news and an excellent roster of bloggers. The WSJ's photoblog is excellent.
The Washington Post: The paper of record in the United States if only it wasn't for the NYT.
Wikipedia: The information source on the web. Yes, not everything on Wikipedia is correct, nor are its entries always complete or typographically perfect. One does not take it statements as definitive but as a starting point and typically a good general reference.
Wired Blogs: A great source for blogs on technology, Wired Magazine itself also is chock full of informative tech goodness.
Wonkette: Political and legal snark, but we are all adults here, aren't we? (Well, probably not.) Much less read by me now than under its original editor, but it's still good fun.
xkcd: Randall Monroe is a "Great American"TM (and forms an elite group with Kottke, Mike Judge, and, um, ah, well, GF of former physics majors who went on to something better). If only there was like a super comics page that had xkcd, Calvin & Hobbs, The Far Side, Pogo, Peanuts, Bloom County, and Doonesbury, wouldn't that be great? But most of those are gone; Doonesbury is a shell of its former self. We do have The Oatmeal, so I guess that's good.
