What I want to know at this moment (Wednesday afternoon) is: What's happened to Discover Blogs?

I ask because Discover Blogs is (not "are"—it's a single line item) one of the stops on my morning trawl through Google Reader. I click on that stop and up comes a list of posts from half a dozen science blogs, with a bias towards the life sciences. There are several posts every day: a mean of 5.58 for the past month, with mode 6, median 6.48, and standard deviation 2.64…sorry, science blogs do that to you.

Yet when I clicked this morning I got Internal Server Error. I tried getting at the blogs via Discover's actual web page, but still no result. I guess the techies have been at work and fouled things up somehow. Grrrr.

All right, it's been a trivial disturbance to my daily routine. But those of us who write for a living need something to write about, and we all have a sweep of favorite news sites and blogs set up. You get thrown off stride like this, it's distracting.

Google Reader is a key aid to the daily sweep. If you don't yet use it, go to the main Google page, choose Reader, hit the Subscribe button, and into the box put the URL for your favorite website — , as it might be. From then on, any time there's a new posting on VDARE.com, you'll see it in boldface in the Reader panel. If you want to do daily checks on a lot of sites, this is the easy way to do it. (There are others.)

I actually need to cull my Reader roll. I have 57 sites on there, but several are defunct. OneSTDV went invitation-only in June; Cold Equations the same; and War Nerd's last original post was over a year ago (he's re-posted some golden oldies since).

Some others have lapsed for weeks, though whether they have ceased posting altogether I don't know. Your Lying Eyes, who used to post weekly, has been MIA since September; Inductivist, a fine quantitative blogger (whose top-of-page banner seems to have me at dead center), has said nothing since mid-October; and our own poor Nicholas Stix is still bailing out his ground floor Far Rockaway apartment from Hurricane Sandy.

Here, with thumbnail reviews, are the currently active blogs I find most useful (other than VDARE.com of course! and Taki's Magazine, in which I am also an interested party). The order is alphabetic—no invidious distinctions here!

Once, when midnight smote the air,

Eunuchs ran through Hell and met

On every crowded street to stare

Upon great Juan riding by:

Even like these to rail and sweat

Staring upon his sinewy thigh.

Those Who Can See doesn't post often, but is always worth my time: long, judiciously illustrated, and data-rich.





West Hunter is the joint blog of Greg Cochran and Henry Harpending, joint authors of The 10,000-Year Explosion, which has probably done more than any other book to demolish the misconception that evolutionary change only happens across geological eons of time.



On West Hunter the geneticist and the anthropologist pursue themes related to that book: here, for example, taking up Hbd Chick's remarks on the decline of violence. Not many posts (14 in September, 8 in October, 6 to date in November) but serious and original, always worth reading, often with links to peer-reviewed scientific papers.

You want more? I got more … for another time, maybe.

And that's just the start of my morning trawl: about two-three hours. There are some worthwhile blogs — Andy Ross, Larry Auster, Fred Reed — that Google Reader can't pick up; I keep them in a separate bookmark folder. Then, Drudge, the BBC, the newspapers; and then, after a glass of something fortifying, political commentary.

You think it's easy, staying well-informed? Feugh!

John Derbyshire [email him] writes an incredible amount on all sorts of subjects for all kinds of outlets. (This no longer includes National Review, whose editors had some kind of tantrum and fired him. He is the author of We Are Doomed: Reclaiming Conservative Pessimismand several other books. His writings are archived atJohnDerbyshire.com.

Readers who wish to donate (tax deductible) funds specifically earmarked for John Derbyshire's writings at VDARE.com can do so here.