Ben Doherty is an architect, a computational designer at BVN in Sydney, and a course coordinator at UNSW who teaches Python to design students. He also has, by his own admission, a horrible addiction to saving articles to Pocket. So he did what any self-respecting technologist with too many browser tabs would do: he built a printing press for his own reading list. Walden Pond is the result — a monthly zine that pulls from your saved Pocket articles and mails them to you as a physical booklet, complete with an hour's worth of reading and enough white space to scribble in the margins.
The concept is disarmingly simple. You connect your Pocket account, set your preferred article length — shortest and longest — and once a month, Walden Pond selects a mix that fills roughly sixty minutes of reading time. It arrives in the mail, printed on good paper, battery life infinite, screen glare nonexistent. Doherty prototyped the project over two years, iterating on his messy kitchen table, before opening it up to subscribers. The name nods not to Thoreau's pond but to Venkatesh Rao's concept of "Waldenponding" — the deliberate act of unplugging, if only for an hour.
Every copy of Walden Pond is different, because every reader's Pocket is different. A librarian's edition might be packed with literary criticism and museum reviews; an engineer's might lean toward long-form tech reporting and climate science. Doherty handles everything himself — design, software development, customer support — and the service has quietly grown through word of mouth. Subscribers describe it as the perfect digital detox: a magazine where you are the editor, but the physical format forces you to actually sit down and read.
At five dollars a month with worldwide shipping included, Walden Pond occupies a peculiar and lovely niche. It is not a magazine in the traditional sense — there is no editorial voice, no house style, no cover story. It is infrastructure for attention, a machine that converts your best digital intentions into something you can hold. In a publishing landscape obsessed with curation and editorial identity, that radical simplicity is its own kind of statement.
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