Could you add a bit more to this submission? As it stands, it is not in-depth enough for this subreddit.

For general current events, my high school teacher assigned, or at least strongly recommended, The Economist. (This was, sadly, more than a decade ago.) She was right to do so. I don't know what country you're from, but it's an English centrist "newspaper" (magazine) summarizing politics and business on a week-by-week basis. For American affairs, especially the weekly column "Lexington," it leans center-left. The writing is quick and witty and if you really read it avidly you'll get up to speed pretty quickly.

For day-to-day American politics I'm also fond of Vox, but it is left-leaning with a few deviations. They do, however, go more into depth than you might get from more traditional news outlets. Just be mindful of the bias. Following both the Times and the Wall Street Journal would also lend a diversity of opinions on major national issues.

As for literature, do you mean important fiction from the Enlightenment on? Or non-fiction about the Enlightenment on? If the latter, the book list might be a good place to start, but some of them assume significant prior knowledge. If you're an American, one that doesn't, and gives a good overview of Europe AND the early Americas, is Russell Shorto's Island at the Center of the World on the history of New York. He's also in the papers this week for an article he wrote on the 350th anniversary of English rule in New York.

I hope this helps. I was going to suggest you consult another subreddit, but honestly, I don't know where else one would go.

Eep, that's a large question.

I'll sidestep recommending historians for now to encourage you to read Ta-Nehisi Coates' stuff in The Atlantic. Coates reads a lot of professional historians and aggregates this info into often really great analyses of contemporary American society. The best example of this is "The Case of Reparations," which will give you a very good primer on racial politics in the United States. "Fear of a Black President" was also excellent, if less historical.