What's your goal (knowledge, broader perspective, informed opinion)? I ask, because as someone who works in media, I tend to avoid reading about world affairs..

What's your goal (knowledge, broader perspective, informed opinion)? I ask, because as someone who works in media, I tend to avoid reading about world affairs... It's just too general for my taste, and my brain ultimately ends up feeling mushy from the overdose of infotainment. Don't get me wrong, I read constantly, but I imposed a strategy and hard limits, because I realized I wasn't retaining information in a meaningful way (a lot of the information I was absorbing was fluff). With a blog roll, the NYTimes, or even the Economist as your guide, you can spend hours skimming from a financial disaster in Argentina, an airline crash in Malaysia, military exercises near the Ukrainian border, and a populist Islamist uprising in Syria, and never come away with anything meaningful except the vaguest notion that those things are happening... somewhere. In point of fact, many of the people paid to write on those topics don't know what they're talking about, so you'd probably just be wasting your time. I changed up my strategy and you might find it useful. Pick a region and do a combination of things to learn about it: read local online publications in the major cities, read some of the local literary figures, dabble with the language(s), pick up a broad history and follow that with exploration of specific topics (a coup, a revolution, a period of cultural revival), learn about the geography (and how that affects the history), then go there. Finding a local's blog is also a good way to get insights.