I use this Online Shipping Calculator when I want to find the cheapest and/or fastest way to ship a package. If you type in your package dimensions, weight and the FROM and TO city, you can compare online shipping rates from USPS, UPS, and FedEx. The prices are not exact, but close enough to help you choose the best shipper. [If you have a better online rate comparison tool to recommend, please let me know] — CD

Food is a revealing lens. I really enjoyed discovering what influences African-American food had on the US in the excellent 4-part Netflix series High on the Hog. Subtitled “How African American Cuisine Transformed America,” it tracks foods from West Africa on their way to the early White House, and into the middle of America. It’s a big, sophisticated story I was ignorant of and another nuanced way to see the power and extent of African-American culture in a form everyone can connect with: food. Perfect watching for Juneteenth! — KK

I’m an advocate for journalling because it’s the best tool for self-discovery. I have a dream journal, meditation/poetry journal and a daily (brain dump) journal — most of them are blank books. But by-far the easiest diary to maintain is a guided journal called Moon Lists: Questions and Rituals for Self Reflection. I write in it only once a week coinciding with each new phase of the moon. It enhances my self-awareness, sparks gratitude and encourages me to be more intentional about my goals and dreams. It’s an 18-month journal, and I’m only 4 months in. I’m really looking forward to this finished relic of introspection. — CD

I’ve been using Puracy laundry stain remover for a year and am now on my third bottle of the stuff. For bad stains, I’ll spray a lot of the liquid into the fabric and let it set for a couple of days. I haven’t come across a stain it won’t remove. — MF

It’s super easy to get Amazon to donate money to your favorite non-profit. Go to Amazon Smile (smile.amazon.com) and designate your choice of charity. From now on as you shop on Amazon, they will automatically donate a small percent of your purchase amount, at no extra cost to you. In just the last quarter alone, we (Amazon and I) gave $295 to the Long Now Foundation, my chosen charity. The money came from Amazon’s side of the account not mine. — KK

I bought this $20 Cartman 39-Piece Tool Set for a young relative moving out on their own. It has everything you would need to handle 99% of the simple repair jobs around an apartment. — MF

Four Note Boards is an online app and private text tool where you can paste and drag text around into one of four boxes. It’s perfect for when you need to compare blocks of text. I used it to compare and select poems for the new issue of Phantom Kangaroo. It’s simple and allows you to think multi-dimensionally. — CD

Poetry is my true love. The imagery of poetry and abstract concepts ignite new connections in my brain. A creation of mine is Phantom Kangaroo — an online and print poetry journal. Over the last decade I have published 300+ poems by poets who write about the surreal, supernatural and occult. I chose these subjects because the otherworldly is what awakens me. This year, I stitched together issues 1 through 23 and published them in a hardcover anthology that you can thumb through whenever you need to break out of the mundane. Issue 24 is free to read online and features a creepy rhyming poem about cats, canonization of women, and incarnating into a body that feels like kiwi. Check it out here. — CD

Pundits are calling China’s new diplomacy “wolf warrior” mode. This is in reference to a pair of patriotic films that were the highest grossing Chinese films of all time. If you want to get a sense of China’s new sense of pride and view of itself, watch Wolf Warrior 2. This is a super slick action film (subtitled), with Rambo, James Bond, and the Avengers all rolled into one, and the Americans are the evil bad guys. — KK

This easy-to-use doodad.dev pattern generator has a distinct 1980s graphic design vibe. Use it in your designs or just play around with it to see what cool patterns you can make. It would be fun to use this to make book covers or fabric pattern designs. — MF

When you got to go, you got to go. Flush is a free iPhone app that shows on a map all the nearest public toilets. It is indispensable. — KK

Here is a curated list of Joseph Campbell quotes meant to pump you up before heading out on your own hero’s journey. Here are my favorites:

• “The goal of life is to make your heartbeat match the beat of the universe, to match your nature with Nature.”

• “When you find a writer who really is saying something to you, read everything that writer has written and you will get more education and depth of understanding out of that than reading a scrap here and a scrap there and elsewhere. Then go to people who influenced that writer, or those who were related to him, and your world builds together in an organic way that is really marvelous.”

• “If you can see your path laid out in front of you step by step, you know it’s not your path. Your own path you make with every step you take. That’s why it’s your path.”

• “We’re in a freefall into future. We don’t know where we’re going. Things are changing so fast, and always when you’re going through a long tunnel, anxiety comes along. And all you have to do to transform your hell into a paradise is to turn your fall into a voluntary act. It’s a very interesting shift of perspective and that’s all it is… joyful participation in the sorrows and everything changes.”

— CD

This is a gruesome recommendation, but necessary. It’s a better mouse trap. We live in an old rambling house at the edge of wilderness, with no cat, so we have a plague of mice and rats in the basement and garage. As fast as I remove them, they are replaced by newcomers. I’ve tried dozens of different traps, including live traps, and sticky traps, and classic traps, and all fail over time. The best, most reliable, and most re-useable one is Tomcat Rat Snap Trap, which is a pedal type trap. (There are now other pedal type brands I have not tried.) Its main advantage is that it works for both mice and rats. Mice can eat the bait on an ordinary rat trap without tripping it, while a rat can escape a mouse trap. With peanut butter bait this one consistently gets both. — KK

My family loves watching this YouTube series about the day in a life of various people in Japan. The creator, Paolo, spends an entire day with different workers — a game programmer, a firefighter, a butcher, a ramen chef, a hotel staffer, and so on. He records them from the moment they wake in the morning until they go to bed at night. Each episode is about 15 minutes long. — MF

Tvtropes.org is a repository of all the tropes you find in advertising, film, print, music, art, etc., along with examples. Tropes are not cliches — they are storytelling devices and shortcuts for evoking emotion and getting you “up to speed.” It’s hard to avoid tropes altogether, so it’s better to get to know them. This is a growing wiki that you can add to and easily get lost in. Here is a list of Forgotten Tropes that have dropped off from mainstream media. — CD

I bought a 48-foot string of these Edison-style LED bulbs for our back patio. They’re bright enough to provide light without being harsh. The bulbs are plastic so they won’t shatter. They add the perfect ambiance for evening get-togethers. — MF

My wife and I both devoured a series of graphic novels penned by a French-Arab cartoonist Riad Sattouf. In a five-volume set (so far), called The Arab of the Future, Riad recounts his family’s time in Lybia, Syria, Saudi Arabia and France. A graphic novel is the perfect format for this intimate, yet cinematic, and at times, disturbing story. It superbly conveys the texture and details of everyday life in the Arab world with the unfiltered gaze of a child. And it reads very fast, perfect for my current short attention span. I can’t wait for more volumes. — KK

My daughter introduced me to this terrific YouTube channel that presents the history of life on Earth as if it were a giant multiplayer video game. The creator presents real facts about plants and animals, but calls them “builds” and “upgrades.” Start by watching this video on the Cambrian Explosion, called “When Earth Was in Beta.” — MF

I’ve been a paying subscriber to Setapp for years. It’s a subscription service to over 200 Mac apps. They carefully curate the apps and find ones that are well made and useful. Some of my favorites are CleanMyMac X, Luminar, Downie, CleanShot X, Permute, ClearVPN, World Clock Pro, and CloudMounter. It’s $10 a month, but new users can get their first year for $70. — MF.

The single unequivocal benefit that civilization, science, and modern life has given us is: longer lives, on average. Extra Life, a new book by Steven Johnson, investigates the origin of this gift. Johnson tells the story of our longer lives quickly, easily, with tons of news. Longevity is an enabling invention that has opened up many other benefits, and its story is important because this miracle has many parents and most of them were institutions. To further the extra 20,000 days we been granted, or to birth other meaningful inventions in the future, we need to continue to improve our institutions. Extra Life: A Short History of Living Longer is a great, fast, important read. The book has a good companion 4-part PBS miniseries (streamable) that summaries the story in the context of Covid-19 vaccines and current events. — KK