I love reading newsletters. I also write two newsletters: The Magnet, which is my personal newsletter of things that interest me, and Recomendo, which is a weekly newsletter with over 50,000 subscribers that gives you 6 brief personal recommendations of cool stuff. I write Recomendo with my Cool Tools team members. Here's the latest issue:
Silent mouse
I had a mouse that made a loud noise when I clicked it. It distracted peopled I Zoomed with, so I replaced it with a Logitech M590 Silent Touch Mouse, which hardly makes a sound, yet has the same click feel as a regular mouse. — MF
Video Poem
The Diamond is a gem of a short 16-minute documentary. Utterly brilliant. People come to shift though the dirt in crater looking for rough diamonds, but what are they really hunting for? Bigger things. — KK
Find yourself a third place
I love the concept of a third place — a public space that is not your home or work that can offer respite from your daily routine. Examples of third spaces can be a bookstore, pub, cafe, or park. "Third places offer a neutral public space for a community to connect and establish bonds." Wellness blogger Patricia Mou wrote a great 3-part series on third spaces where you can learn more about the definition of third spaces and the state of them in America today, as well as their future. This past year I've mostly had one space, but there is a library that just re-opened within 5 blocks of me that I hope to become more familiar with. — CD
Education in money
A free newsletter I find myself reading more than I thought would is Money Stuff by Matt Levine. I am not that interested in finance, debt structure, bond rates, macro-economics, or really money itself, but Levine makes it so easy and clear, I can't help reading and learning. Here is a typical sentence: "Your job, as an investment banker, is to become close to the people who possess giant piles of money, in the hopes that one day they will do giant deals with their giant piles of money and give you some of it." Money Stuff seems to arrive every weekday, and most days I read most of it, always learning. — KK
Easiest way to watercolor
It was always a painstaking process for me to color in between lines, and painting is too slow and methodical for my messy ways. I wish I had these Faber-Castell Watercolour Pencils when I was a kid. It's the easiest way to watercolor paint — and the fastest! I just scribble in a little color here and there and use a water brush pen like this to transform the pigments into paint. I started with the 12 color set for around $20 and then upgraded myself to the 36 color set ($50) after I got more consistent with it. Maybe someday I'll earn the 120-color set. — CD
Thousands of book covers
I love book cover design so it was a treat to discover Ivan Checkov's Flicker gallery of book covers from the 1900s to the 1960s. Two of my favorites are the cover for The Monster Men (1913) by Edgar Rice Burroughs, illustrated by J. Allen St. John, and the cover for A Silver Spade (1950) by Louisa Revell, illustrated by Denis McLoughlin. (This review of A Silver Spade makes me want to read it). — MF
