Need a metafilter to make sense of your info-soaked world? Meet the minds behind five elite email lists.
In the early days of the Net, a group of pioneers emerged to help their friends filter the information available online. They'd gather emails, newsgroup posts, and some links, perhaps stitch them together with a bit of personal commentary, and zap them into a few dozen inboxes. Even before the Web hit full swing, the demand for this kind of focus was clear: We needed a guide – someone whose opinion we trusted – to cut through the clutter.
These days, there are thousands of mailing lists – mostly free, many amateur, some exclusive, some not – filling inboxes on a subdaily basis. Meta-List.net claims information on 177,871 lists, presumably including its own, which reports on lists just launched. ListServ, a popular list management software, counts 182,991 (the favorite, with 5,292,765 subscribers, is called "Amanda's Free Sex Site!"). But because so many lists are ad hoc and small scale, it's a good guess that the true number is in the millions.
The beauty of the form, and what has kept it thriving, is above all its protean nature. Lists spring up in the momentary passion of a cause (the free-sklyarov list is devoted to the case of accused copyright scofflaw Dmitry Sklyarov) or event (sept11firstperson is for witnesses of the World Trade Center attacks). Free of templates, the posts come at any time of day, short or long, trimmable, forwardable, with or without links, alone or in clusters. An additional virtue: supreme convenience. The mere fact that posts come to you – come at you – gives them value that no mere Web page can attain.
But more than that, electronic mailing lists are still in large part all about text, which makes them often literate, data-rich, and focused. The most interesting lists are not operated for money; indeed, the semipublic space of electronic newsletters seems one of the last refuges in an increasingly commercialized Net. They're not mass media. And the best of them tend to feature a single, strong voice. They're one-man shows, and if the faceless star performer doesn't come in one day, the show just doesn't go on.
Take, for example, the Squid List, run by San Francisco arts promoter Scott Beale. Every day, Beale sends out a dozen or so emails, each of which is essentially a press release for a local arts event that might otherwise receive no publicity: an exhibition of explicit sexual photographs, a screening of a movie about American cars in Cuba, a horror show called the Chasm of Spasms Macaberet. Squid is efficient – the subject line often tells you all you need to know – and introduces all but the most plugged-in of its 7,200 subscribers to events they didn't know existed.
Beale doesn't charge his subscribers. He doesn't charge the producers of the events, most of whom couldn't afford advertising anyway. Sure, there's a promo at the bottom of each posting for his Web-hosting service, which brings in some business from list members who like his style. But this isn't finally about advertising. "I love to use the medium efficiently," says the 33-year-old Beale. "Email is the ultimate push technology."
Which explains why Beale hasn't gone the way of the weblog. "I could never do a blog," he avows. "What makes you remember to go to a Web site? You just don't. But everyone still checks their email."
There are hundreds of list mavens just like Beale, men and women who mail to anyone free of charge, who organize, publicize, and comment upon the world in simple ASCII.
Meet five masters of the mailing list form.
-----------------------DAVE FARBER, THE GODFATHER----------------------- >>His list: Interesting People >>Typical subject line: Security, Fear, and National ID Cards >>To subscribe: [dave@farber.net](http://archive.wired.com/wired/archive/10.02/mailto:dave@farber.net) ------------------------------------------------------------------------
Three days after terrorists attacked the World Trade Center towers, an overwhelmed Dave Farber announced he was going to cut back on his email postings. Before September 11, his Interesting People list tended to focus on such hot-button tech issues as third-generation wireless or Icann. Within hours of the hijackings, Interesting People offered something broader and more urgent: firsthand reporting from Farber's readers at the scene; excerpts from contrarian commentators like Noam Chomsky; a moving pledge by a subscriber to give up the abstractions that generate most political discourse and henceforth "bring reality into every discussion in which I participate"; and an extended meditation on the threat to civil liberties ("Two words," wrote one contributor, "Reichstag fire").
But Farber couldn't rest: Too many people were sending him material that demanded recirculation. Another four days and more than a hundred postings later, he announced that he was now "exhausted mentally and physically." "I really wanted to take a break," recalls the 67-year-old professor of telecommunications at the University of Pennsylvania. "I wanted to sit back and get a chance to think where the hell things were." Still he couldn't stop updating. Too much demanded to be said.
Farber, former chief technologist at the FCC, is the founding father of email lists and without a doubt still the most influential moderator around. He estimates his subscriber list is made of at least 15,000 tech executives, professors, journalists, policymakers, and other interested parties. As New York Times reporter John Schwartz wrote to Farber recently, "Bits and pieces of your work [are] showing up in stories you didn't even know about."
Like nearly every newsletter editor, Farber started casually. In 1985, Erich Bloch, then director of the National Science Foundation, complained that he couldn't keep up with what was happening on the Internet, so Farber offered to forward him select emails. Later, Bloch suggested some friends at IBM would like to be in the loop, and eventually Farber gave his news service a name – Interesting People, a reference to its recipients. IP's public history dates from May 16, 1993, when Farber established a Web-based archive for the list. The first item: a jokey tale from The Miami Herald about a computer being fined 60 Mbytes of memory for sending erroneous bills.
That's a little lighthearted for Farber. More familiar Interesting People topics include the long-running battle over encryption, ethical lapses in the get-rich-quick dotcom era, the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, the meaning of democracy. Interesting People "is a little like magazine as edited by Susan Sontag," says Stewart Baker, former general counsel of the National Security Agency and a devoted subscriber, "or maybe The Nation as edited by Walt Mossberg." Baker sums up Farber's sensibility this way: "Dave has an acute sense of what matters and a lively willingness to learn something new, right now."
There's nothing new, however, about how Interesting People material is presented. An Internet pioneer who worked on networked computing at the University of California in the mid-'70s, Farber has stuck with a format that hails from the same era: no animation, no graphics, no Flash or flash. Just plain vanilla text. No ads. Farber administers the site by himself (to subscribe, you send an ordinary email directly to him), and he posts late at night and early in the morning, usually forwarding messages from subscribers (To/From/Subject lines intact) that are either excerpts from newspaper or magazine stories or pieces of original commentary. Some postings amplify or contradict previous postings; some lead off with Farber's own comments, some don't.
Not infrequently, Farber gets flamed by subscribers for circulating stories they don't agree with. (Saying something good about Clinton used to be a flash point; after September 11, it was saying something bad about Bush.) But to forward email is not necessarily to endorse it, the editor warns repeatedly. "I never try to tell people what to think," Farber says. "That's their business."
Occasionally, though, some subscribers get so stirred up they demand to be taken off Interesting People. And Farber accommodates. "One of the principles of a democracy," he shrugs, "is that you're allowed to have your head in the sand."
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--------------------------IRA STOLL, THE IDEOLOGUE---------------------- >>His list: Smartertimes.com >>Typical beefs: Bad grammar, sloppy fact-checking, and >>going soft on the enemies of Israel >>To subscribe: [smartertimes.com](http://archive.wired.com/wired/archive/10.02/mailto:smartertimes.com) ------------------------------------------------------------------------
Every morning at 6 o' clock, Ira Stoll wakes up in his crummy Brooklyn Heights studio and immediately goes out to fetch The New York Times from a vending machine. Within minutes he's home again, sitting at his kitchen table with blue pen in hand, so stoked he doesn't even need coffee. Stoll starts with the back of the paper, discarding the irrelevant – the stock tables, the food section, the sports columns – while searching for articles that enrage him. He always finds a couple, which is only to be expected when a registered independent, Libertarian-leaner – and, if things work out, managing editor of a new print newspaper – confronts the establishment media bastion.
Here's one passage that sticks in Stoll's craw, tucked into a national story on immigration: "Before passage of a Republican-backed law five years ago, only an immigration judge could order the deportation of someone who arrived without valid travel documents. Now, an immigration officer can exercise that power, called expedited removal, on the spot, a move intended to cut down on fraud."
A Republican-backed law? What does that mean? Just what are those pinkos trying to insinuate? The bill behind this law – Stoll checks – passed the House on a 370 to 37 vote. President Clinton hailed it. Is the Times bigoted or merely confused?
Newspaper pages zoom by. A metro story mentions "the National Right to Work Committee, a conservative advocacy group in Washington." But it's not in Washington, it's in suburban Springfield. There's a strange reference in an obituary to both Conservative and Reform rabbis performing conversion ceremonies. Why not mention that Orthodox and Reconstructionist rabbis do too? Is the Times suggesting there are only certain kinds of Judaism?
By now it's 9 am, and the 29-year-old Harvard grad starts writing up his results. Within an hour, Stoll's daily email critique – Smartertimes.com – is on its way to more than 3,600 subscribers.
Almost immediately, they're answering back. "What the hell is a Reconstructionist rabbi?" asks one. Another salutes him for renewing the correspondent's "intellectual energy," while a third gleefully points out, "You're not getting invited to the Times Christmas party again this year." But if there are more than a half-dozen pieces of praise for today's column, there's flak too. One writer, who happens to be right-wing pundit Jude Wanniski, chides that using terms like "Butcher of Beijing" to describe Chinese leader Jiang Zemin "really devalues your product." Another, who hails from the college town of Davis, California, likewise denounces the Zemin "slander." "For a newspaper that prides itself on being 'smarter' than The New York Times," this woman writes, "you sure can learn some basic journalistic principles from your supposed competitor."
Born in Massachusetts, Stoll was president of The Harvard Crimson, then briefly a reporter at the Los Angeles Times before becoming a reporter and then managing editor of the Jewish newspaper the Forward. He left that paper two years ago to start Smartertimes, motivated mostly by righteous anger. "I wanted to break through to those liberal friends of mine who get almost all their information from the Times and take it as the truth from on high. I wanted to show them it is not infallible." His first column, on June 20, 2000, excoriated the paper for seeking a tax break for its new office tower; this, he argued, was just the sort of handout the paper would otherwise denounce. Stoll sent that column to 35 friends, they sent it to their friends, and he was in business.
Ever since, he's tried to keep Smartertimes short, timely, and relatively impersonal. Even that first email used the phrase "our view." His name is never on the post and is buried deep on the list's Web site. "It's not a me-zine," says Stoll. "I don't want the Times to say, 'Oh, it's just Stoll.'"
The Times, evidently, does not. In fact, Stoll is now on the paper's radar: In August, a spokesperson from the publication wrote Stoll an unprompted defense against one of his columns, and today at least 12 of his subscribers have nytimes.com email addresses.
Stoll is on duty 365 days a year, and so far the Times hasn't failed him. Never has he read an edition and said, "Looks great to me. Nice work, guys." There's always been a grammatical howler, a factual inconsistency, or some slippery reasoning – and often all three.
For all this, Stoll doesn't make a cent on either subscriptions or advertising, though the mailing list is doing wonders for his mental health. "If I didn't have Smartertimes as an outlet," he says, "I'd be foaming at the mouth." But the newsletter has had another, largely hidden, function: It's become a stalking horse for the New York Sun, a new print newspaper – expected to launch late this spring and funded by Chicago Sun-Times owner Conrad Black and others with a reported $15 million. If all goes as planned, under his old boss at the Forward, Seth Lipsky, Stoll will soon get to upbraid his nemesis in hard copy.
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---------------------MARYLAINE BLOCK, THE EXPLORER---------------------- >>Her list: Neat New Stuff I Found on the Net This Week >>Typical link: HortiPlex Plant Database >>To subscribe: [marylaine.com/neatnew.html](http://archive.wired.com/wired/archive/10.02/mailto:marylaine.com/neatnew.html) ------------------------------------------------------------------------
There's nothing like prowling the stacks of a library, pulling down obscure volumes, and flipping them open to surprising facts that, hey, you might someday actually use. But who has time? Marylaine Block, a former university librarian, delivers that indulgence to the inbox of 2,200 people, many of whom are librarians themselves. Block surfs the world's biggest library, gathering links for her newsletter, Neat New Stuff I Found on the Net This Week.
Here's a sampling from a recent post: the 2002 Almanac of American Politics, a dictionary of medical eponyms, the Internet Archive Wayback Machine, and the AlterVistas search engine for strange sites. Preparing the newsletter involves test-driving an assortment of sites that list new sites, looking for "referency" links that do what hasn't been done or improve on the status quo. Each post includes a Rock Music Quote of the Week and ExLibris, Block's own crisply written essay on matters of information dissemination.
"There's more chaff out there now than there used to be," says Block, who lives in Davenport, Iowa. "Back in 1995, there was a lot more 'Oh wow.'" But she remains capable of awe. "I get to the point where I think I've found a complete collection of tools. And then I find something else, and I think: We needed that."
And she really means needed. Along with promoting the pleasures of hushed reading rooms, Block is dedicated to teaching Web users to research well and research responsibly. She likes to cite the case of the Johns Hopkins doctor whose inadequate search of electronic databases of medical literature missed key research on the side effects of the drug hexamethonium. A woman taking the drug in a Hopkins study died, sparking recriminations in the scholarly community.
Block's personal mission is to prevent such disasters, to steer learners toward good data and instruct them in how to navigate it. "She separates the gold from the glitter," says Barbara Quint, editor in chief of Searcher magazine. Says another fan, search consultant Chris Sherman: "You never know what you're going to read from her, but it's always worthwhile."
Block critiques sites by studying the way content is referenced, organized, and sourced. "A key difference between librarians and normal people," she says, "is that librarians understand the structure of information."
Block, 58, may never have been normal. A voracious reader, she grew up telling her friends what books to read. As a young woman, she became an English teacher and then a librarian. During her 22 years among the shelves at St. Ambrose University in Davenport, she started a Web site devoted to the craft, first called Where the Wild Things Are and then, more prosaically, Best Information on the Net. Although it was originally designed with only the school's students and faculty in mind, the site's quality soon attracted fans from all over. The companion newsletter, Neat New Stuff, proved popular as well, and Block took it with her when she left St. Ambrose in 1999.
Neat New Stuff doesn't bring in any money. Neither does ExLibris. But they've brought Block enough repute in research circles that she's able to make a living as a writer and Internet trainer. These days, she offers lectures with titles like "Mental Maps of the Information Landscape" and "Lies, Damned Lies and the Internet." One talk, which she gave to the staff at a college in eastern Iowa, sums up in its title both Block's wry take on the Internet and her own value as filter: "28,000 Hits, Some of Them Good."
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---------------------MICHAEL CADER, THE ENTREPRENEUR-------------------- >>His list: PublishersLunch >>Typical buzz: ebooks, Amazon, Jonathan Franzen >>To subscribe: [caderbooks.com](http://archive.wired.com/wired/archive/10.02/mailto:caderbooks.com) ------------------------------------------------------------------------
If you call the main number in Manhattan for Cader Books, you'll get a honey-voiced recording offering the familiar push-button prompts: press 1 for publicity, 2 for editorial, 3 for rights and permissions, 4 for general information. But whatever button you push, you're going to end up with Michael Cader, the founder, president, and only permanent employee of Cader Books.
From this obscure base, the 40-year-old Cader has become an important player in the publishing industry. He developed and compiles the PublishersLunch newsletter, a collection of links and added commentary emailed every weekday morning. A characteristic Lunch includes stories from sources such as the Associated Press, The Guardian, the New York Daily News, and The Wall Street Journal – not the most surprising of news outlets, but in the parochial world of book publishing, where most folks read no more than The New York Times and The New Yorker, the aggregation of book coverage is a real service.
Since 1988, Cader has worked as what's called a packager, a guy who takes a raw idea for a book and produces a finished manuscript so that its publisher need only stamp a logo on it and send the pages off to a printer. After packaging novelty items (That's Funny, a compendium of jokes from the likes of Letterman and Seinfeld), riffs off cultural infatuations (Mad About Martha, a parody of Martha Stewart), and once-over-lightly collections (Brush Up Your Shakespeare!), he decided he was more interested in packaging information than books. Puzzled that no one else had started a Web site for those in his profession, he created PublishersLunch as a Web page in the spring of 2000.
The site began capturing attention when Cader took on Martin Arnold, who writes a weekly column on the book industry for The New York Times. Arnold has an enviable perch, but from the beginning he was widely criticized by publishing insiders. He had nothing to say, they muttered, and he said it poorly. Cader ridiculed Arnold week after week. People noticed. So in June 2000, Cader began emailing his daily links as well as posting them. Shortly thereafter, he went email-only. Circulation rose – 2,000, 3,000, 4,000. Email offered freedom but plenty of control: Cader could see just which items interested his readers because when clicking on a link they went through his proxy.
But Cader isn't at heart a newsman, nor is he particularly self-sacrificing. Just because people were liking what he was doing wasn't enough of a reason to keep doing it.
So he experimented. He started holding real lunches at places like the Blue Water Grill in Manhattan, with publishing executives and media discoursing on assigned topics. He had enough eyeballs to sell an advertisement at the top of each post – usually to the likes of epublishing startups iUniverse or RealRead – at which point he started seeing some profits. He began a weekly newsletter covering industry deals, a message board, a job board. Cader never tried to charge for Lunch itself, perhaps because he knew the audience would instantly dwindle. But he realized that if the newsletter wasn't particularly pliable, something else was: his subscribers. For about five minutes a day, he had the attention of 7,000 people. "People care about what Cader says," comments Stuart Applebaum, a senior vice president at Random House, "and the more sensitive react to it."
Cader kept building. "There were huge opportunities," ran his thinking, "in using the electronic space to meet each other, to trade information, to lay the groundwork for deals." In November, he launched PublishersMarketplace, a site where publishers list projects, freelancers post their résumés, agents and packagers host homepages to lure new business – and Michael Cader makes a buck on access fees.
Meanwhile, his subscribers keep increasing – 8,000, 9,000 – and Cader is planning a book fair for New York, to run in collaboration with the Frankfurt Book Fair. "This is something I wanted to do 10 years ago," he says. "But I didn't know enough people to pull it off. Now I can tell 10,000 about it – every day."
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-------------------------PHIL AGRE, THE OBSERVER------------------------ >>His list: Red Rock Eater News Service >>Typical essay: "Some Notes on War in a World >>Without Boundaries" >>To subscribe: [dlis.gseis.ucla.edu/people/pagre/rre.html](http://dlis.gseis.ucla.edu/people/pagre/rre.html) ------------------------------------------------------------------------
His homepage boasts no photo, no résumé, no autobiography. He doesn't like parties, and he doesn't seem to care about money. "He's a very shy person," says Michele Cloonan, his department chair at UCLA. "He likes to do whatever he can via email."
Turns out he can do quite a lot. Phil Agre is one of the most prolific and provocative email editors on the Net. His list, Red Rock Eater, which goes out to 5,000 subscribers whenever he has something to send, is a combination of public service enterprise, research tool, and soapbox. "I confess that 90 percent of the material I send out is because I agree with its agenda," says Agre, an associate professor of information studies. "It's something I want to flog." And there's no mistaking what he agrees with. When he sends out lists of links, each is presented with a clipped, usually brusque descriptor: "Another sickening Republican campaign ad in Virginia," for instance, or "Wartime is giving [the administration] an excuse for their worst authoritarian tendencies." As for the Redmond-related links, suffice to say they're grouped under the heading "news from Planet Microsoft."
But what Agre flogs most is the nonpartisan notion that knowledge is a virtue. His links range far afield: the "404 Research Lab" investigation into the creative use of error messages at plinko.net; the alleged creation of negative gravity; how a new law is making it possible to successfully sue spammers in Washington state; an apparently authentic instruction manual, in English but otherwise unsourced, about mental and physical preparation for holy war ("Jihad is tough and difficult," it warns, "which is why the rewards for it are so great"). This last appeared on Red Rock Eater weeks before September 11.
Last fall, Agre sent out more than 4,000 war-related links, culled from recommendations from anonymous subscribers: an interview with bin Laden from Esquire magazine; a good scholarly overview of "The Historical Context of Muslim-Western Relations" from an Australian Parliamentary Library publication; a Pakistani American news portal. "Some made sandwiches for the firemen in New York," says Agre. "I went and gathered URLs."
But the list is more than links. Last June, Agre sent out his own 4,200-word essay on "The Wired Car in the Wired World" that corralled the trends in automotive tech: in-car entertainment centers, roadside electronic billboards, Internet-enabled cars that might be prone to the same viruses as desktops. Over the summer, he wrote a 5,700-word critique of biometric scanning in public, "Your Face Is Not a Bar Code." In November, he posted his plans for a community-based Web-filtering service that would be a cross between a discussion list, a weblog, and a bookmark file.
Agre's a first-class wonk whose expertise goes to the heart of what the Internet is, does, and can become. He began using bulletin boards as a teenager, and his education led him to the very core of human social communications. In 1989, he earned a PhD in computer science from MIT, having completed his dissertation research on computational models of improvised activities in the Artificial Intelligence Laboratory. He wrote Computation and Human Experience and coedited Computational Theories of Interaction and Agency.
In the early 1990s, realizing that the geek technology he'd been using for 15 years was becoming a mass medium, Agre went looking for a role; he wanted to be a voice of reason in a storm of hyperbole. So he started Red Rock Eater, taking its name from Bennett Cerf's Book of Riddles : "What is big and red and eats rocks? A big red rock eater." It was a nonsense name, which offered one big advantage: It could mean anything Agre wanted it to.
Good thing, too, because the 41-year-old professor's intentions are in fact pretty broad. Combing the Net for intelligence and composing reams of thoughtful electronic essays doesn't pay the bills or boost your academic standing, but Agre's heart is elsewhere. For all his personal reticence, he maintains a convincing obsession with the greater welfare. "In order to be sane," he says, "you have to believe that lots of good people are out in the world doing lots of good things – I'm trying to be helpful to them."
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