I adore niche corners of the internet. Small projects, independent developers, targeted publications, and so much else can only exist because the internet helps them connect to a sufficiently large captive audience. So many companies and industries view the internet as a game of Hungry Hungry Hippos—who can capture the most delicious little spherical bits of yummy data? My kinds of people aren’t trying to win capitalism and aren’t pushed by metrics besides “Am I making something cool?” and “Can I find just enough people who also think it’s cool?”
That brings me to Quiche Browser and its default favorites on their new tab page.
Note that the last two favorites, “All Ten” and “Six Colors”, are mine. The rest are in Quiche by default.
This page is wonderfully different from other browsers, which either do nothing or suggest various news sites and other mainstream options that, frankly, I don’t at all care about.
I eventually tapped through each suggestion, and was most enamored by Longreads. While it’s owned by Automattic, the company behind WordPress.com, it appears to run independently.1
The opening of their About page is clear:
Longreads…is dedicated to finding and sharing the best longform nonfiction storytelling on the web. We publish personal and reported essays, criticism, reading lists, and occasional book excerpts, interviews, and more in-depth features.
The first essay I read was Into the Darkness by Kendra Atleework, a personal exploration of Germany’s Black Forest. It’s just over 4,000 words, the length of a solid chapter in a modern novel. It’s a tremendous piece of writing. Although I haven’t yet committed to subscribe, I did add their RSS feed containing select free works so I can continue to get a taste of what they do and, in the spirit of the site, focus my reading time on chunkier pieces that represent meaningful work.
A similar publication I have previously subscribed to, also owned by Automattic, is The Atavist Magazine. Its focus is narrower in genre, though not in topic. They publish one piece of narrative investigative journalism each month, longer than those in Longreads.2
These wonderful pieces are also aspirational. You can look through this updated version of my blog and see the word count of every post. Most aren’t very long. That’s not bad—many topics don’t deserve thousands of words. But I hope to build the sensibility to identify ideas that have the opportunity for breadth and depth beyond a normal post, and the skill and patience to create the subsequent essay. There’s a huge, fascinating world available, yet my longest post might be my review of my friend Timothy’s movie. I’m worthy of the challenge of writing a piece around that length once or twice a year.
While we all await for me to act on that impulse, check out Longreads and The Atavist Magazine. They’re outstanding.
And if you’re a huge nerd, I also recommend Quiche Browser.
I’m sure Automattic is interested in the bottom-line. According to the About page, Automattic matches each membership dollar Longreads earns. ↩︎
Outside the scope of this post: I’ve always struggled on choosing how to spend time reading, because I’m a tracker. I track what books I read, so those “count”. If I spend hours on these deep, robust essays and journalism, they don’t “count”. That’s a me problem, though. ↩︎