In Search of “Big Pudding”

I admit it, I like “Big Pudding.”  It’s a term we’ve coined in our house for big brains, big ideas.  Now there are lots of types of pudding, and I'm the first to mention my small portion.  But the truth is I enjoy clever people who know more about the world than my pitiful scoop.  They tease and sharpen my thoughts, and I view thinking as an essential component of my writing space.

One of the more satisfying aspects of the media onslaught is access to this “Big Pudding.”  Creating meaningful insight from the global world requires multi-disciplinary thinking.  The internet captures some really intelligent writing, but there is a lot of noise.  The challenge is how to find the right complement of “Big Pudding” authorities who correspond to your interests--who move your thinking and writing to the page.

I’m currently interested in the new navigational strategies being developed to capture the moment amidst a torrent of media--ways to cancel the clamor and tap the right amount of “Big Pudding.”   For convenience alone, I gather most of my news and information from the internet.  My toolbar reveals that my daily internet reading is booked with three national papers, a couple of online magazines, and a number of websites like 3quarksdaily, Big Think, or Arts and Letters Daily.  It has become rather cumbersome, and I rarely get to the lot.

However, I recently discovered a site called TheBrowser that filters content into what they call an “intelligent general reader.”   Their byline is “The World in a Window.”  And their slogan is, “Give us 15 minutes of your time, and we will give you everything that matters in the world.”   The site was developed in late 2008 by the editor Robert Cottrell, formerly a journalist for The New York Review andThe Economist, along with founding partner and economist Al Breach.

Creating Global Discourse

The Browser serves as a writing tool for staying informed and creating insight into the global context in which we write.  It is structured into topical themes that cover the full cultural conversation.  The site organizes articles of top publications around the world culled from over 250+ RSS feeds.  The linked articles have their own writing spaces in their active comment sections that add to the global discourse.  The responses often go beyond a simple "thumbs up" or "thumbs down" pronouncement.  It is not just another communication tool like so many others.  It serves up some serious “Big Pudding.”