People sometimes ask what I read and watch to stay informed.

I read quite a few magazines and newspapers regularly. I like the Economist because it provides good background knowledge. Scientific American is very good and so is the New Yorker. We get the Washington Post, the Wall Street Journal, the Financial Times, and the New York Times. I tend to read the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal online, but I read the Economist almost entirely offline. I read Slate quite a bit, too. Slate is good because if you go there, you always find three or four things that are very interesting.

I don’t watch a lot of television news. I mostly watch it if someone sends me a link to something they think I would be interested in.

I’m amazed at the number of great seminars and lectures that are available online. In an area like how the brain works, for example, I’d say there are at least 10 really good videos worth watching every month. In fact, I used to be able to watch all of them on a topic that I was interested in, but as there are more things out there, it’s not as easy to do that.

There are some great sites that make it easy to find interesting courses and lectures online, including Academic Earth and the TED Conference website. There are also good courses that you can buy online. Teach12.com is the main company for this and while their stuff costs money, the quality is extremely high.