Gastro Obscura is an Instagram account with photos and descriptions on unusual foods from around the world. You’ll find Japanese cream puffs that look like kittens, fruit that looks like an exploding planet, fruit that tastes like chocolate pudding, and lots more. It gave me a greater appreciation for just how diverse the world’s culinary options can be. — MF
I follow two bots on Twitter to break up its relentless seriousness. Systemantic Quotes posts one-line riddles about the antics and behavior of all systems derived from the book “Systemantics, or the Systems Bible.” Such as: “In dealing with the shape of things to come, it pays to be good at recognizing shapes.” Every four hours the Magical Realism Bot posts a one-sentence “story” written by an AI. These summaries are surreal, mostly absurd, but every once in a while, it’s a core of a decent idea. Other bots to follow are welcomed. — KK
Last year a college student named Annie Rauwerda launched Depths of Wikipedia, an addictive Instagram account with screenshots of unusual and fascinating Wikipedia entries. I’ve learned about Revenge bedtime procrastination, Broken escalator phenomenon, the Fregoli delusion, and a lot more. — MF
I took one Art History course in college, but everything else I’ve learned about the art world has been piecemealed and picked up through occasional museum visits. But since I created a free account on Artsy my whole aesthetic world has opened up. Every day I get an email digest of contemporary art for sale, current collections in galleries all over the world, and features on up-and-coming artists. (You can set your preferences to receive only one email per week.) I don’t plan on actually buying anything, although I am coveting everything created by Leonora Carrington. When I see something that draws me in, it takes me down a rabbit hole of artist bios and their work and if they’re on Instagram I immediately follow. I’ve been slowly muting the meme accounts, influencers, and friends who overpost selfies, and I’m curating an Instagram stream of beautiful art to inspire. — CD
I am the daughter of two Mexican immigrants and when I was younger I had a lot of shame around my last name, the way that I looked, how poor we were, etc. When I found Brown Girl Therapy on Instagram I finally felt understood. Brown Girl Therapy is an online mental health community for children of immigrants founded by Sahaj Kohli, a mental health therapist in training. Her posts are like mini-therapy sessions for me. Here is a reminder from Sahaj that really hits home: “You can love and be grateful for your immigrant parents’ journey & make different choices than they’d want. You can love and be grateful for your immigrant parents & need time away from them. You can love and be grateful for your immigrant parents & protect your mental health.” Here are a few others: Growth work and White girl ponytail. — CD
Since March of last year, my sister Wendy has been posting a creative cocktail recipe on her Instagram channel, The Quarantini. Even if you don’t drink alcohol it’s fun to see the unusual drinks she has concocted, like The Cure, which pays homage to the Covid-19 vaccine. Bottoms up! — MF
I follow jekiyoo on Instagram. Jeki Yoo is a close-up magician of astounding talent, clever innovation, and immense entertainment. He is prolific, posting often, and a lot of fun, playing around with delightful ways to do magic online. Oh my! — KK
My guilty pleasure is watching people work, watching machines work, and watching people and machines work together. I can’t explain it. I am utterly hypnotized by repeating exactitude. My source for mesmerizing videos of machines at work is the twitter feed of Machine Pix. — KK
I like to follow people who consistently surprise me. Tyler Cowen’s blog Marginal Revolution is a prime source of the unexpected. He collects surprisingly interesting papers and posts he unearths from different corners, plus trivial oddities, and profoundly insightful essays, and all of it thought provoking. He posts at least a handful of items per day. (I follow his blog via my RSS reader.) — KK
If you like Recomendo, I think you’ll like the new longer-form newsletter I just launched. Every week in The Magnet I write about tips I find useful, things that interest me, what I’ve learned, interviews, recipes, quotations, and more. I also include excerpts from my favorite newsletters. — MF
As someone who makes things, I am very interested in new materials, cool ways to hack off-the-shelf products, and innovative techniques for constructing stuff. All these subjects are covered in an occasional free newsletter, Wheelhouse, written for nerdy makers. Wheelhouse also hosts a Discord community whose discussions generate content for the newsletter. — KK
For the past year I have really been enjoying Sci-Fi Daily on Instagram which floats out one beautiful piece of science fiction artwork each day. Some of the images contain an entire movie within them. — KK
With shameless self-promotion I recommend you follow my new Vanishing Asia Instagram. Every day I post one amazing photo I have taken of an exotic part of Asia that is disappearing because of modernity. The images are a few of the many thousand that will appear in my Vanishing Asia book later this year. In the meantime enjoy this ride in a time machine. Also available on Tumblr, Facebook, Pinterest, and Twitter. — KK
This blog is called 9-Eyes because the cameras on cars that take photos for Google’s Street View maps have 9 lenses. The anonymous curator of this site posts unusual photos they come across on Street View. Most of the photos are of people being people: acting silly, fighting, eating, pulling leashes attached to livestock, soliciting prostitutes, taking drugs, nursing their young, etc. Endlessly fascinating. — MF
I’m not a prepper. I did zero prep for Y2K; didn’t even fill my gas tank. A lot of prepper talk is sheer nuts, and even damaging. However in an emergency I aim to be a help not a burden, so some degree of being prepared is needed. The least insane prepper site is The Prepared, which dials back a lot of the paranoia and nuttiness, and is more Wirecutter style reviews of gear. Their intensity is two notches above mine, but at least their advice is sane. I got some good tips about being responsibly prepared. — KK
A delightful Instagram account I enjoy: Accidental Wes Anderson. It’s a curated collection of still images in the style of a Wes Anderson movie. Same symmetry, colors, and tone. The way Wes Anderson would view this Instagram is not in a stream but in grid view. — KK
Artist Olivia De Recat made a cartoon with lines to illustrate different kinds of relationships and how they change over time . The last one might make you a bit misty-eyed. — MF
For my Twitter feed I like following people who surprise me, and ideally, delight me. (Outrage is exhausting.) No one reliably surprises me with delight as much as Kurt Kohlstedt, director of the 99% Invisible podcast. His Twitter feed delivers a steady stream of unexpected discoveries and insights. — KK
In China, Li Ziqi is a huge online star. She is sort of a hippy young Martha Stewart — a DIYer and maker, as well as ancient lifestyle guru. Dressed in traditional garb, Li Ziqi posts hundreds of videos about making traditional Chinese rural things from scratch with traditional tools — in an extreme way. She’ll make a silk comforter by first raising silk worms. She’ll make her own soy sauce by first growing soy beans. She’ll make some bamboo furniture in a day, starting with harvesting the bamboo. Plus she plays guitar and sings! To her 50 million followers in China, her idyllic and blemish-free videos are soothing and an antidote to their overworked urban lives. She delivers nostalgia for the country life they left — without the drudgery and starvation. To her 8 million foreign followers, like me, watching her on YouTube, her impossibly romantic videos are cinematic glimpses of vanishing arts and crafts, of amazing and ingenious ways millions of people thrived in the past. I could watch them for hours. — KK
It’s December, which means it’s time for blinry’s Advent Calendar of Curiosities. Every day this month, Sebastian “blinry” Morr will post interesting bit of little-known history, culture, or trivia. You can browse earlier years by altering the URL (it goes back to 2011). — MF