This morning I was sitting outside of my coffee shop, sipping on a cortado and reading the news on my phone while the NY Times, which I buy for The Gotham Gal every morning, sat folded up next to me. I gave up on mainstream news media two decades ago and have been relying on the Internet for news for a long time now. By “Internet”, I mean blogs, Twitter, and increasingly, email newsletters.

What I was reading this morning on the bench sipping coffee was News Items, an email newsletter by John Ellis. News Items is a subscriber-only newsletter, as opposed to the free stuff you can get on Axios. But you get what you pay for with John. His newsletter is smarter, edgier, and out in front of most anything else out there. The topics that interest John the most are technology (lots of biotech), geopolitics, and finance.

The way John describes it is:

Three baskets: (1) World in Disarray, (2) Financialization of Everything and (3) Advances in Science and Technology. Bonus basket: Electoral politics in the US and around the world. Six days a week, not Sundays.

I paid $3 for the New York Times at my coffee shop this morning. I pay $99 a year for News Items. And I get things every day from News Items that I never get from the New York Times. And I don’t have to read the nonsense that the New York Times churns out non-stop these days.

If you want more news and less nonsense, you might want to give News Items a try. You can do that here.

You can also listen to John five days a week on our portfolio company Recount’s podcast network. He and his co-host Rebecca Darst cover the same news stories that John puts in his newsletter.