My favorite websites are Poetryfoundation.org, APNews.com, and Wikipedia.
These three balance my need for emotional association and expression, my need for information that feeds my reason, and my desire to explore and discover.
Poetry magazine can be read for free on a laptop, although using the app requires an annual fee. I often listen to their podcasts of my favorite poets reading their poetry in the Essential American Poets podcast series.
I scroll APNews.com throughout the day. Many of their articles result in government action. They ran an article on the 1000 deaths at the hands of police last year, along with many others, exposing the government at a time when it could be dangerous to do so. AP was ejected from the White House for refusing to refer to the Gulf of Mexico as “The Gulf of America.”
Wikipedia is losing many of its readers to ChatGPT. According to Wikipedia, traffic has declined because of AI accessing their content, whereas previously, readers engaged directly. I enjoy starting with a subject and then exploring a rabbit hole, following links to various philosophical tidbits, but now I also do this in Claude or ChatGPT. And I can save the chats and develop them into a work in progress.
For example, beginning with “Edmund Husserl” from Wikipedia, I can follow links to countless other topics. I learn about Brentano, Heidegger, the earlier and later Husserl, and more. Now, in Chat, I can ask specific questions like “What is the difference between Hegel’s phenomenology and Husserl’s? Husserl’s and Ponty’s?” And get an essay with verifiable references. I can also program Chat to create learning modules and combine my findings into meaning, such as “how do we sense the world as Merleau-Ponty did?” Chat is a research assistant that can produce an essay on any given topic and give a summary with references that I can verify. This is indispensable to my creative faculties.
The questions you can ask Chat are limitless, and when it researches these topics, it references Wikipedia and, unfortunately, Academia.edu. But neither is considered acceptable research in academic circles. I always treat the information I find on Wikipedia as interesting reading, which I verify with reputable reference sources.
As a writer, as an individual, Poetryfoundation.org, APNews.com, and Wikipedia provide the mental grist to make sense of the phenomenology of my existence.