Introducing Hindsight: A Weekly Collection of Last Year's Writing

Last week, Shawn Blanc published an excellent piece on the state of RSS feed reading. Here’s the part that stuck with me:

There is so much great stuff being written and published every day. We’re subscribing to some of the sites and writers who are producing it, and we’re trying to read what we can, but a lot of great things to read fall through the cracks every day. And a lot of dumb stuff gets much more attention than it deserves.

I save interesting things I come across to Instapaper and Pinboard every day. As I explained back in May, sometimes I read the articles I cull, but more often they linger in my accounts until they’re forgotten, tamped down by another layer of links I might one day get to. And yes, I as guilty as anyone of getting caught up in nonsense that doesn’t deserve my attention at all.¹

Shawn’s piece got me thinking about what I could do to prevent great content from getting lost over time. And then it hit me: just read it.

Today I’m introducing Hindsight, a weekly collection of older content you may have missed from around the Web. Hindsight will be published once a week and contain links to longer stories that are one year old. Some ground rules:

• Linked articles should have been published within the same numbered week of the previous year.²
• At least one story a week should be ten years old or older.
• Stories should be at least one thousand words long.
• Stories should be fairly evergreen.

These rules will be broken, probably weekly, but I think they provide a nice starting point. Hindsight is about slowing down the news cycle. It’s about setting current events aside and catching up on great writing.

Hindsight will appear like any other post here on the candler blog. I’ve also set up an RSS feed just for Hindsight.

So fire up your read later app of choice and grab your favorite beverage; the first Hindsight is up. Happy reading.