YouTube Channels I Watch

Ten YouTube channels that present interesting and important information, and more crucially won’t make you feel the mental equivalent of downing a 2 liter of Mountain Dew and half a large pizza.

Over the past couple of months I’ve been asked a few questions about my own media consumption habits that lead me to believe that parts of my audience view me as a sort of tastemaker. This was never an intended outcome for this newsletter, but in hindsight it may have been an inevitable consequence of doing so many book reviews of real hidden gems. So be it. These articles take all of around ten minutes out of one’s week to read, and I can understand the desire to take in more relevant, educational, and fulfilling “content” in order to balance out all the garbage that’s on the TV and/or social media. With that in mind, here are ten YouTube channels that present interesting and important information, and more crucially won’t make you feel the mental equivalent of downing a 2 liter of Mountain Dew and half a large pizza.¹

Miniminuteman

Last October I reviewed Milo Rossi’s Encyclopedia of the Weird and Wonderful as a way to justify buying a physical copy of his first book. In that essay I did talk about how far back my appreciation of his work has gone, and he continues to impress. Rossi attacks the misinformation in pseudoarchaeology from both ends: not only does he go after specific theories asserted by fools like Graham Hancock and Filip Zieba as they gain traction in the zeitgeist, but he also works to stymie old theories from rearing their ugly heads again in the future through the Awful Archeology series. I always breathe a sigh of relief when he does cover something pertinent that’s being passed around like a bad cold, because I feel as though enough of my audience overlaps with his that I don’t have to put myself through the trouble of debunking it.

Tom Ayling

It should come as no surprise to my readers that old books are a passion of mine. This doesn’t just go for the content, but the pages that they’re printed on alike. When I was in middle school, I did some odd jobs and summer work for my local library, and one of their big volunteer fundraisers was the annual book sale. Back in a world before Amazon’s ubiquity on the market, first edition hardcovers had a not insignificant amount of value over the trade paperbacks. It was my job to go through the piles of donations and pick out the potential diamonds (especially signed ones) in the rough to give them to a curator who actually knew what would sell well. To do that same job now on a professional level requires a whole lot of know-how, or skill at arbitration and a fair amount of luck. Tom Ayling absolutely provides the former in this case. Not only is he able to make a respectable living off the rare book trade, but he knows the stories behind the stories he handles. It is a nice bit of serendipity that the author whom he claims got him into the rare book trade was Caroline Lawrence, whose Roman Mysteries is something we’ve covered on this newsletter. I particularly like it when he’s able to go on-site to talk about the books he’s covering, like here with Procopius’ Secret History, or here with an individual collector at the British Library.

Pyramid Review

The phrase “global south” gets passed around a lot in academic circles as an area that wants for improvement in the humanities. There’s only so much I can do with my speciality in classical antiquity to further those causes, but that doesn’t mean I can’t keep myself informed about the topics in their field. This channel gives the viewer all the fine details one would want out of a professional tour guide without having to buy a ticket; viewers get to learn about everything from “frozen waterfalls” to the Mayan idea of a lighthouse. Similar to the previous entry, being on location provides a huge amount of credibility to everything Pyramid Review has to say.

Dime Store Adventures 

I encountered this channel while looking for a repository of sources on one of the folklore translations I’m still (slowly) working on. If you could imagine Hunter S. Thompson trading in his drug habit for a New England newspaper archive, you’d begin to understand the general vibe of the format and presentation. I was shocked when he happened to mention my hometown of less than 10,000 people in one video, and learned something brand new instead of the one of five fun facts that get recirculated about it. There are so many fascinating tidbits about history, both natural and man-made, that have fallen into relative obscurity, and anyone taking the time to document them in a more modern format ought to be praised. Dime Store Adventures goes above and beyond to narrate a whole beginning, middle, and end to either the tale or, failing that, the process of his research.

Joshopedia

This channel is similar in content to the prior, but with a more serious tone and a keener focus on the natural world, although there is some overlap in folklore that involves features one might encounter in the woods. I really enjoy his botanical content, again from the perspective of growing up in the general region and learning things about some plants that I’ve passed a hundred times on hikes without ever looking them up. His style of presentation is also rather unique; he doesn’t look (or dress) like someone you’d expect to see in the woods, but he could place high at a Jack Harlow lookalike contest with very little effort. It’s a very interesting juxtaposition. 

Polyblank

I consider myself pretty well versed in art history; I can tell my Rembrandts from my Renoirs with a reasonable amount of certainty. The area I struggle with is finding interesting criticism of the artists that few have heard of. It’s easy to prattle off a half-dozen reasons why Pablo Picasso’s paintings were important to later artists, what’s harder is to list the qualities of his individual paintings that make them emotionally valuable. The anti-Hitler piece I did a few weeks ago was meant to be my stab at real criticism, on top of a few other jaunts I’ve taken into the genre. Polyblank makes criticism look easy; their tastes and mine happen to align very often, but the host is able to look at paintings from obscure artists and make relevant and fair observations on the merits. What’s more, the videos cover the contemporary art world as well, which is sorely underrepresented in this medium.

Fort Collins Productions

This channel focuses on the impact music has on our experiences. Sometimes this comes in the form of video game ambience or earworm commercials, but it’s just as much about music as an art form other times. Most other people covering “music” on the platform are either speaking on the history or on music theory, which are fine topics in their own respect, but my aspirations in the field only go as high as translated covers of popular music. FCP did also nudge me in the direction of a potential connection to Goethe that I’m not sure they fully fleshed out, so if there happens to be any overlap between their past videos and my future articles, you’ll know the source of the inspiration.

Cambrian Chronicles

Even the most jingoistic historians from England will admit that their big island went through a dark age when Roman colonization left. Maybe that’s why they spent so much time trying to conquer other native peoples. Anyway, the precise details of that period are especially difficult to come by besides Bede’s English History because of the general drop in literacy. Even then, Bede’s biases are centered around covering the affairs of the church rather than history as a whole. Cambrian Chronicles has read the sources of the narrower accounts of individual British kingdoms, and has worked towards painting a more complete picture of the period than the patchwork accounts of myth, opinion, and legitimate annals. In doing so, the channel has dug up stories of the dissemination of misinformation as a byproduct, and has demonstrated Wikipedia’s unreliability more effectively than the hypotheticals of the average adjunct professor have. The relevant period and region in history is a bit far outside what I typically study, which makes it perfect for casual listening without giving me the desire to dig any deeper into the subject. Considering the number of other topics that have spurred me into rabbit holes, this is a much-appreciated feature.

BobbyBroccoli

Well, we had to have something STEM-related on the list. This is another channel we have briefly covered; I got the inspiration for my own coverage of similar issues of fraud from him back in December of last year. There are a few outlets like Retraction Watch that do a good job covering the day-to-day issues that cause academic articles to be retracted, some of which are fraudulent, but what sets BobbyBroccoli apart is his editing style. The host freely admits that he takes inspiration from Jon Bois, whose videos have already garnered much attention or else he would have also appeared somewhere in here. The information that he covers is always interesting as well; usually he ties some interesting political issue of the time into the overall thesis.

Literatur.e with John K. Noyes

I thought I’d end the list with something closer to the typical fare of articles that appear on this blog that most subscribers don’t get to read in full. I discovered this channel at some point after writing about Heinrich Heine when the wider Goethe project was merely an inkling, and found that the host covered a lot of concepts I wished I’d talked about in my own essay. Ultimately, it matters little because these works have had less impact on the broader literary and social landscape, but we will get to a few particular cases when they arise. It’s unfortunate that the host seems to have put the videos on an indefinite hold, but they’re clear, concise summaries of the great stories of German literature.

1. This isn’t a condemnation of the junk food, by the way.