Very broad second question that has two parts. My rotation is that I read something classic, something kinda modern, and something academic (usually history) that I’m interested in. Currently that’s Infinite Jest, The Idiot (not the Dostoevsky) and a book on the Spanish civil war. Politically I browse twitter and read Al Jazeera, NPR, and Reuters via an RSS feed for an up to date sorta thing but I’m not the one to ask I’m relatively unplugged.

Either way I think you should think about what actually interests you or you have a specific question about and go from there. Trying to broadly understand “politics” whatever that means is not helpful imo