MEDIA DIET
By:
September 11, 2026
A weekly series exploring the media “input” of a group of people — HILOBROW’s friends and contributors — whose “output” we admire.
Marc has been a valued HILOBROW contributor since 2019. His first post was on the topic of DUMMY JACK. His most recent contributions to this publication include: SOFTWARE | (WHAT’S SO FUNNY ’BOUT) PEACE, LOVE AND UNDERSTANDING | RUDY, A MESSAGE TO YOU.
San Francisco…
HILOBROW: What forms of media do you “take in” the most regularly/frequently, during a typical day or week?
MARC WEIDENBAUM: I read books in the morning, during lunch, and before bed: fiction, including graphic novels, whenever; non-fiction mostly during daylight. I read the web all day, though I try to wait until after breakfast and to stop by dinner — ditto social media, where I don’t post over the weekend. I am allergic to having television on during the day, but after the workday I dig serial fiction shows — lots of scripted drama, limited comedy, less reality, zero sportsball. I don’t watch many movies; I appreciate immersion through length — in what I’m reading and in what I’m watching. I’m not much into podcasts because I end up listening to audiobooks instead, mostly for walks (I’m a big walker — earbuds on transparency mode for safety) and household chores. I’m a horrible player of video games (I have poor eye-hand coordination, and I get motion sickness), but I keep trying. I spend substantial time on YouTube for live music performances and tutorials about various topics (musicianship, coding, gaming, etc.) and related technologies. I adore the post-pandemic era of concert livestreams, and I maintain an ongoing list of venues that share performances of electronic music, experimental music, jazz, contemporary classical, et cetera. I buy — and, because I write about music, receive vast amounts of free publicity copies of — record albums. I have a Plex server on an old (M1) Mac mini, and it’s like building your own streaming service. I can even listen to it when away from home. I subscribe to a few print magazines, and to five or six newspapers (just digital), and to a bunch of digital magazine editions, and to more email newsletters than I can count. The rise in free translation tools has multiplied my resources; I love looking at the homepages of newspapers from random cities and towns.
HILOBROW: What work of literature (old or new) would you recommend to someone trying to make sense of today’s world?
MARC WEIDENBAUM: I’m going to list six. It takes a village library to begin to make sense of today’s world. I love half of Neal Stephenson’s instantly prophetic 2019 novel, Fall; or, Dodge in Hell (the near-future half, not the cyber-Miltonic-metaverse half) for helping me get through the pandemic that began a few months after its release, by preparing me for mass consensual hallucination of outright falsities (in lieu of people doubting a deadly global disease, they believe in a nuclear event that never occurred). Robert Coover’s extraordinary 1968 novel, The Universal Baseball Association, Inc., J. Henry Waugh, Prop., prepared me for how isolated individuals can misuse stories to reinforce their personal obsessions. Malka Older’s Centenal trilogy, which began in 2016 with the fantastic novel Infomocracy, goes deep into the way-post-geographic splintering and realignment of regional and global politics. My favorite Annalee Newitz novel, 2019’s The Future of Another Timeline, is a nimble, glitchy time-travel story that manifests Wikipedia editing wars in the flesh, by having people zip around history adjusting what happened (in contrast with merely depicting or framing what happened). China Miéville’s The City & the City (2009) literalizes the concept that two people can walk down the same street at the same time and be in two utterly different worlds. And finally: Ray Bradbury’s 1953 classic, Fahrenheit 451, receives too much attention for the story’s burned books, and too little for what fills the resulting void, including highly personalized media that jettisons community/cannon in favor of automated narcissism-stoking gobbledygook — and, sadly, that part is more timely than ever. I think these stories provide valuable tools — literary, intellectual, narrative, technological, theoretical, practical, philosophical — for navigating our times.
HILOBROW: How do you use social media these days?
MARC WEIDENBAUM: I’m publicly on Mastodon, Bluesky, Threads, and Instagram, and semi-privately on Facebook. I’m also on heaps of things that seem to qualify as social media: Discords, and Discourses, and PHP-based BBSs, and numerous email lists, and group chats on various messaging apps, and so forth. I work by myself for long hours, usually from home. I was an editor for many years, so I gained the skill of having subject-matter experts on hand for all manner of pursuits. It’s nice to be in touch with people; social media provides an occasional water cooler break. I’m old enough to remember that when I signed up for the earliest of these, they were pitched as micro-blogs, which is largely how I treat them still. Also, on my own blog — disquiet.com, founded 1996 — each Saturday I tidy up the previous week’s social media entries into a single post. I find that doing so — knowing throughout the week that I’m going to read back and repurpose what I’ve posted — moderates my tone and my activity.
HILOBROW: Share a media “input” of yours that wasn’t listed above.
MARC WEIDENBAUM: I want to put in a word now not for media so much as a medium, a format. I want to praise RSS, which appeared to disappear when Google shut down Reader in 2013, but is still going, though sadly not in the popular imagination. RSS stands for “really simple syndication.” Put simply, RSS turns much of the internet into a reverse chronological feed. Originated in 1999, it is among the OG non-algorithmic modes. Tons of websites come with RSS built in, ready to be subscribed to by a feed reader. Few if any, however, advertise it. I use Feedly — and I run it, though doing so isn’t necessary, through an app named Reeder. There are lots of other options. RSS is how I receive and read much of what I listed above in this Q&A. I’m not a vanity license plate person, but if I had a vanity license plate, it would read RSS4LIFE. If you’re interested, I’ve created an RSS feed starter kit. Also: while Google did away, tragically, with Reader, the corporation hasn’t abandonware’d Google Alerts, which launched a full decade before Reader. Google Alerts lets you let Google let you know when something you’re interested in pops up on the interwebs, based on search terms. The essential thing with Google Alerts is identifying terms that aren’t too generic or too common, and that are usefully specific to your interests.
PS: As I got my Media Diet answers together, I kept returning to a question: What is “media”? I took a stab at answering the question for myself, because I didn’t want to take the word “media” for granted.
In our digitally mediated times, I think the answer is right there in the era: Just about everything is media because just about everything becomes media in between wherever it starts and by the time it reaches us. Much of my day (and I am far from alone in this) is either enjoyably or begrudgingly filled with text-based (and image- and sound-based) interactions with friends, family, colleagues, internet friends, randos, and branded avatars in various forms of correspondence: email, social media, message boards, shared documents, website chat boxes, and so forth. That is all media, though it is not all of media.
In turn, that reading and viewing slots alongside more “formal” reading (books, magazines, websites, etc.) and viewing (TV, YouTube, etc.). The lines get blurry, especially when you start participating in the comments on a web-based article, or discussing a book in an email thread or social media post. Since a solid chunk of what I read is as a result of a recommendation by someone else, media rarely lacks a social component. And the lines get even blurrier when, as I do, you employ social media as a kind of public scratch pad for ideas: think aloud out in the open about something, then later write about it more thoroughly, and then you end up discussing that writing online. One person’s solipsistic ouroboros is another’s communal virtuous circle. May that circle be unbroken.
MEDIA DIET series: MATTHEW BATTLES | ADRIENNE CREW | HOLLY INTERLANDI | CAROLYN KELLOGG | MARK KINGWELL | FLOURISH KLINK | ADAM McGOVERN | CHARLIE MITCHELL | TOM NEALON | ANNIE NOCENTI | GARY PANTER | LYNN PERIL | JONATHAN PINCHERA | NICHOLAS ROMBES | CARLO ROTELLA | LUCY SANTE | SETH | MIKE WATT | JUDITH ZISSMAN | & more to come! Visit the SERIES INDEX.