Obsidian Wings is the gold standard of hobbyist political blogging. Formed years ago by a conservative who was interested in building dialogue across ideological and party lines, it's evolved into a place where four or five regular posters from various areas of expertise discuss social, economic, and political issues with a depth and a thoughtfulness rarely witnessed in today's media environment. The founder ended up leaving for RedState.com, a more traditional partisan blog, and the commentariat skews leftward now. Still, several of the of the conservative posters remain and top-notch content from writers like Hilzoy, Publius, von, and others makes it a daily must-read.

Karen McGrane is an awesome information architect from Bond Art & Science, a web team in New York that's designed sweet stuff like the Fast Company and New York Times sites. I've had the pleasure of working with her on the Buzzr project: her blog's fascinating posts about content strategy and information management only scratch the surface of her talents.

Brand New is a fascinating design blog that covers brand/logo redesigns. If you've ever wanted to listen in as designers deconstruct the color scheme for Tropicana's new packaging, this is the place to do it. You'll learn a lot, and hear all kinds of fun inside-baseball rumors about different design firms and personalities in the world of high end identity/brand building.

Ta-Nehisi Coates is one of The Atlantic's house bloggers, and his writing is definitely worth a read. Comic book news? Check. Insightful, genuinely moving posts on racial and cultural issues? Check. A willingness to change his mind over time? Also, check. I've only been following him for a week or two based on a link from MeFi, but he's fast becoming one of my go-tos.

Agence eureka is a super-focused blog that firehoses cute French ephemera and papercraft. 1950s postcards, alphabet books, paper dolls... All there. Even better, the posts link through to high-resolution Flickr images for the obsessive readers.

Eunomia, the blog of Daniel Larison, is a voice in the wilderness at the moment. Larison, an Eastern Orthodox Christian, challenges liberal policy positions advanced by the Obama administration, and the intellectual and philosophical bankruptcy of the modern Republican/conservative movement. While I disagree with some of his fundamental positions, he never resorts to the destructive invective that has done so much damage to our culture. He's whip-smart: wonk-heads ignore him at their peril.

Whatever is the blog of John Scalzi, writer of numerous fun and semi-pulpy scifi novels. I've been reading his blog long enough that I forgot I read his books first: he's smart, entertaining, and rarely gets sucked into ugly flamewars about current events. Recently he's also been interviewing other authors and pointing out great stuff going on elsewhere in the fantasy/scifi world. Without Scalzi's blogging, I'd have never heard about Monster, and that would've been a tragedy.