Reading for Currency
Attack the news
Reading for currency is an essential skill for graduate students.
High-quality podcasts and video sources are an increasingly important resource for graduate students.
But daily reading uniquely develops qualities of retention, forensic power, and analytic sophistication. Active reading helps us transcend the news and cultivate critical judgment.
My graduate seminars emphasize analysis of contemporary developments in the context of the material under study. Plan to bring your observations, analysis, and conclusions into each class:
- What did you observe? Why did this stand out for you?
- What's the significance? What are the first- and second-order implications?
- What action is implied?
Here's some advice on how to read for currency and prepare for those conversations.
Be Discriminating
Expand Your Horizons
Be Discriminating
Find important writers and outlets. You can waste a lot of time on recreational news sources. Find the writers and journalists doing good work. Follow them and explore the outlets where they publish.
Develop a Toolkit
Expand Your Horizons
Be Discriminating
Use AI. AI tools can give you a synoptic view by sweeping hundreds of sources (including those in foreign languages) and will help you drill down. Use these tools to interrogate authors and their sources.
Expand Your Horizons
Expand Your Horizons
Expand Your Horizons
Range widely in your reading. Move beyond your comfort zone. Include international sources, scientific and technical outlets, blogs and Substacks. Use AI tools to help you integrate multi-disciplinary insights.
Read Actively
Expand Your Horizons
Attack the news with a framework of policy principles. Be critical. Read the headline first and decide in advance what you think is important about this and what you'd expect to read about. Then compare that with what you find on the page. Adjust your assumptions.
Develop a Bias for Action
Connect insight to action. Think about first- and second-order implications. To make the exercise of reading an article fun, ask yourself, “What securities trade or policy change does this imply?”
Diversify Your Sources
Read a combination of the Wall Street Journal, the Financial Times, The Economist, Aviation Week, Nature, Inside Defense, Defense News Early Bird, and Marginal Revolution and Our World in Data.