Looking for a unique holiday gift for your favorite curious person? A premium subscription to my long-running blog, Boing Boing ($45/year), is like giving them a year-long ticket to a cabinet of curiosities. Your gift recipient gets our new ad-free site and newsletter covering tech, art, and wonderfully weird cultural phenomena. It's the gift that delivers fresh surprises every day. — MF

In 1987, my wife Carla and I launched Boing Boing, a zine exploring cyberpunk sci-fi, indie comics, and fascinating oddballs. It evolved into a blog with contributions from our journalist friends, covering technology, culture, politics, and wonderfully weird discoveries. After 20 years of increasing ad dependence, we're excited to offer an ad-free premium version that's so much cleaner. Recomendo readers get 25% off their first year – I hope you'll check it out! — MF

During a trip to Europe 30 years ago, I discovered Euronews and became a fan of its "No Comment" video segments. These segments feature short clips of raw, unedited video footage capturing events from around the world without any narration. The lack of commentary make them more impactful. Recent samples:  “El Salvador transfers 2,000 inmates to mega prison” and “Search for survivors continues after deadly Papua New Guinea landslide.” You can watch more here. — MF

I have paid subscriptions to the New York Times, Washington Post, Wall Street Journal, Medium, and others. Some of the publications let you share individual stories to friends who don’t have subscriptions, but some have strict paywalls. When I want to share a paywalled article, I paste the URL into Archive Today. It creates a snapshot of the article and generates a shareable URL. — MF

I’ve been taking psychedelics in a therapeutic setting for almost two years now, and it is important for me to know what other participants are experiencing or what neuroscience researchers are finding in clinical settings. Thankfully, Michael Pollan and the U.C. Berkeley Center for the Science of Psychedelics puts out a free and twice-weekly newsletter covering this new field. The Microdose reports on the new developments as they happen in business, research, and culture and keeps me in the know on this burgeoning world of psychedelic therapy. — CD

To gauge the proper influence of an influencer you need a tool to sort out all the inactive, fake, bots, and low-quality followers they will inevitably have. The higher the follower count, the higher percentage of hollow followers. Sparktoro will rate Twitter accounts for you. It says 21% of my followers are fakish. (But not you!) — KK

I subscribe to over 100 newsletters. With that many, it’s hard to keep track of which ones are worth keeping. Rishikesh Sreehari, who publishes the newsletter 10+1 Things, has a good system: “Every time I receive a newsletter that I don’t like, I add a star against the name of the publication or author in a small note that I maintain in Obsidian. Once there are 5 strikes, I straightaway unsubscribe from the newsletter.” I’m using a Google Spreadsheet to keep track. — MF

This instagram post by artist/writer Morgan Harper Nichols outlines how she uses her Notes App on iPhone to cut her daily screen time in half. She says:

1 - Using the Notes App on my iPhone, I made some graphics that would encourage me to click on them.

2 - I made 9 lists that I knew would encourage me or remind me to do or focus on something. I put the graphics at the top. I spent days working on these lists and I’m still adding and making changes to them.

3 - When I pinned these graphics to the top of my notes app, the image shows up in the previews of the note

When I was done making this list, I told myself this: “whenever I go to my phone now and I’m getting ready to mindlessly scroll, I’m going to go to my Personal Feed instead.”

Some of her list titles are: “List of goals,” “Remember when….” “Affirmations” and “Books to return to.” I’ve already started working on my own, so far I have “Genius Ideas,” of which there is only one at the moment, and “Subtle Images” which is just a growing list of images from daydreams. — CD

If a website allows Google to crawl its articles, it shouldn’t then hide its articles behind a paywall. The website 12ft.io bypasses paywalls by displaying the Google cache of articles. You can either go to the 12ft site and enter the URL of a paywalled article or prepend 12ft.io/ to the URL of any paywalled page — MF

In a recent issue of my newsletter, The Magnet, I listed my 10 favorite newsletters. You can read about them here. — MF

The Sample is a newsletter that lets you sample other newsletters by forwarding you a different issue each day based on your interests. If you like the issue, you have the option to “Subscribe in 1 Click” within the email. You can also rate the issues 1-5 stars so that The Sample learns your preferences. I love this effortless way of discovering new things. — CD

I am convinced that China will make more of a difference in the coming decades than the US will, so I am eager to increase my understanding and awareness of what is happening there. To that end, I pay for The Wire China newsletter and magazine ($19/month), which is a daily feed of news about China in English. It may be more China than most readers want, but I find it a necessary counterbalance to all the US-centric stuff I otherwise get. It’s the best single source of China news, and aimed at those doing business in China. — KK

All paying New York Times subscribers can gift an article behind the Times’ paywall to others so they can read it for free. Subscribers can gift up to 10 articles per month. This includes posting gifted articles on Twitter or Facebook, so followers are not blocked when you share a great piece. The gifted article does not count against reader’s free monthly allotment. To gift an article, look for the “wrapped gift package” button in the row of badges at the top and bottom of an article to get the link. I wish all paid publications would do this. — KK

One of the most anticipated newsletters I receive each week is called Winning the Internet, which is an automated email of links sent out by Russell Goldenberg. Currently sourcing links from 99 newsletters (including Recomendo), every hour a Google Script runs that parses the links shared in those newsletters and then the data is filtered and charted to discover the most linked story and other widely shared links. Also included in each email is “Three Random Links That Appeared Just Once This Month.” Winning the Internet has made it easier for me to clean up my inbox by unsubscribing to a lot of newsletters. — CD

Thanks to this Map of Reddit, an open source library, I discovered more esoteric subreddits to dive deep into like r/LucidDreaming and r/Jung. Each dot on the map is a subreddit and when you click on a dot you’ll connect a cluster of dots. Dots that are in a cluster means that multiple redditors are leaving comments across those same subreddits. You can zoom in and out on the map by holding down both SHIFT and - or + (minus or plus). — CD

I paid for a subscription to the digital version of the Wall Street Journal, but I was tipped off that they offer a steep discount of $1 per week ($4/month) for a year if you are patient. So I canceled my subscription, and then when I visited the site, I’d see declining offers and and waited until they offered $4 month for a year. Signing back up was easy since they remembered me. (It would be worthwhile to pay a bot to do this for all publications.) — KK

I subscribe to precious few newsletters. One I look forward to is Noahpinion a daily newsletter by economist Noah Smith. His range is wide, and his viewpoint flexible. His reports are the most consistently surprising periodical I know about right now. There is a free version for now, as well as a paid version for deeper issues. Back issues are well worth reading. — KK

A few years ago, Mark recommended the no-graphics version of CNN’s website and I just recently discovered the text-only version of NPR. It’s very serene scrolling through news headlines without attention-grabbing images or annoying ads. — CD

I’ve found another way to keep up with what’s happening in the world, that doesn’t involve “doomscrolling,” and that is signing up for The Weeklypedia. Once a week, I’ll get an email summarizing the top 20 Wikipedia articles with the most changes, the 10 most actively edited articles created in the past week and most active discussions on Wikipedia (No. 5 last week was Kamala Harris citizenship conspiracy theories). Here is the most recent issue. — CD

Newsletter Stack is a directory of newsletters grouped by learning topics like COVID-19, Philosophy, Design, Wellness, etc. The website seems to be updated frequently. I signed up for all the Creativity topic newsletters, my favorite one is The Creative Independent, which explores the emotional facets of “creating” with a different working artist each weekday. — CD