2026-09-19 00:00:00
Aretha Franklin (1942-2018) began singing as a child in the 1950s at her father’s church in Detroit. Reverend C.L. Franklin became her manager when she was 12, so she could sing on the “gospel caravan” tour circuit. She transitioned to jazz, soul, and blues in 1960 when she was 18, recording “Today I Sing the Blues” for Columbia Records.
By 1967, she was at Atlantic Records, where she released dozens of hits, including “I Never Loved a Man (The Way I Love You), “ “Baby I Love You,” “(You Make Me Feel Like) A Natural Woman,” and her smash single “Respect” (a cover version of Otis Redding’s 1965 song, which sounded a lot different!)
Aretha: From These Roots traces her journey from child prodigy to “Queen of Soul.”
Aretha developed her voice in the gospel tradition at her father’s church. She never forgot her roots, even when singing pop and R&B songs. Your foundation can be a source of power that makes you stand out.
When Aretha performed “Respect,” it touched something universal. As she wrote, “It was the need of a nation, the need of the average man and woman in the street, the businessman, the mother, the fireman, the teacher — everyone wanted respect.”
Of Sam Cooke, Aretha wrote: “Some men can sing, charm, and shine; some are easy with their good looks, others radiate confidence. Sam had all of this and more. Yet for all his abundant talent, he exuded simple humility, the sign of a great person. He treated everyone with respect.” Great people don’t have to remind other people that they are great.
Despite being a global icon for whom the red carpet was rolled out whenever she stepped off a plane, Aretha was a homebody who loved cooking, crocheting, and gardening. She balanced single motherhood with a demanding career, and her public persona with her private self. If you have different “sides” in your own life, you don’t need to choose one over another — learn to accept and enjoy parts of who you are.
“It was the need of a nation, the need of the average man and woman in the street, the businessman, the mother, the fireman, the teacher—everyone wanted respect.”
Book Freak is published by Cool Tools Lab, a small company of three people. We also run Recomendo, the Cool Tools website, a YouTube channel and podcast, and other newsletters, including Recomendo Deals, Gar’s Tips & Tools, Nomadico, What’s in my NOW?, Tools for Possibilities, Books That Belong On Paper, and Book Freak.
2026-09-18 00:00:00
If you will be traveling in Asian countries, research the apps you’re going to need before you get there and set up a payment method in advance. This is especially true with rideshare apps since Uber is far from universal. You may need Bolt, Yandex Go, inDrive, Grab, Didi, MuvMi, MyCar, K-ride, or something else where you’re headed. Then Yandex Maps was the best for getting around Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan when we were there and in Seoul where I’m writing from this week, Google Maps is useless for walking and public transportation. We needed to use an app called Naver.
While Soviet Union era architecture is known for being functional but far from beautiful, the metro stations built during Soviet times often have attractive underground stations that follow a theme. I toured the one in Almaty’s central core, which took 20 years to finish after the Soviet Union collapsed, plus the one in Tashkent that’s larger and has been open longer. See more about the Almaty metro here, with some of my photos.
If you’re from Europe and have had isolated, dictator-led Belarus on your country check-off list, now’s the time to book your train ticket. That’s because passport holders from 38 European countries can visit visa-free through the end of the year. That doesn’t mean it will be easy though. See this balanced article on the real dangers and the real hassles of being a tourist in a very strange land.
As we hit the 25th anniversary of the terrorist attacks on NYC and DC, the Transportation Security Administration has been loosening up its rules. In July they dropped the requirement to take off your shoes in the security line and this week they announced that they will be testing a plan to let loved ones with TSA Pre-check into the gate area to meet arriving passengers. It’ll start with 13 airports first. Meanwhile, here are the airports with the fastest and slowest security lines (San Antonio under 4 minutes, JFK airport 23 minutes).
A weekly newsletter with four quick bites, edited by Tim Leffel, author of A Better Life for Half the Price and The World’s Cheapest Destinations. See past editions here, where your like-minded friends can subscribe and join you.
2026-09-17 00:00:00
Mary Lucia Thao Darst is a filmmaker, writer, and musician. She holds a DPhil in Music from Oxford University and an MA from Columbia University. She is a writer with the Austrian Economics Center, has held three fellowships with the Moving Picture Institute, and is a classically-trained violist and songwriter-composer.
Mary’s substack / digital humanities project: www.oxforddawn.com.
“Structure must be earned.”
Nick Milo quoted this in one of his videos. I don’t know where it came from, but I’ve been batting it around in my mind. I’m someone who tends toward making overly elaborate organizational structures, e.g. too many folders and sub-folders in my note-taking application, but then the structure is so over-engineered that I can’t find things when I need them. This quote has made me slow down and spend several days thinking of how I am using a note, document, music excerpt, etc. before filing it.
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2026-09-15 00:00:00
For the past 8 years Popurls has been my daily first stop on the web.
This single page now replaces my need to directly read Digg, Reddit, Delicious, Furl, Slashdot, BoingBoing, NewsVine, Metafilter and all the others that I subscribe too. This one page encapsulates up-to-the-minute headlines from 15 consensus filters, and top thumbnail images from the social sites Flickr, YouTube, and Google Video. The hive mind on one screen.
Here’s how I use it. On one page I can scan the latest headlines of what the web collectively thinks is either popular or interesting. A simple mouse over the headline will cleverly reveal a small box of expanded text on the article. If I want even more, a click will open the original entry in the filter. In five minutes I can scan 18 social site sources thoroughly. I get an excellent feel for what is new and what is worth following up (a small amount of overlap between sources helps).
The design of PopUrls is brilliant. There’s two flavors, black on white or white on black. Function drives form, buttons are minimal. It feels like a well-designed command post for a concise debriefing. Even on a large screen, like the 21-incher I use, there’s a bit of scrolling. But I’ve come to realize that I MUCH prefer this single fixed sheet to endless RSS feeds in a reader. In fact, the page is essentially an improved interface for multiple RSS feeds, which keep PopUrls constantly updated. The dashboard doesn’t move, while all the streams flowing into it keep it lively.
There’s no better way to watch the hive mind. — KK
Stumble Upon is a community-based website recommendation engine that serves up fantastic random websites. Completely addictive, it still does that. But now that they have added search (including video and image search), it has moved from frivolous to useful, and Stumble Upon is beginning to replace Google as my primary search engine. You cannot yet add Stumble Search as the primary search engine in your browser, but the Stumble Upon tool bar makes it nearly as convenient.
Let’s say you are looking for a new dining room table. If you put “dining table” into Google you get a gazillion crappy tables. If you put the same search entry into Stumble Upon you get 100 of the coolest tables on the net. The same is true in its video and image search engine. For instance, when I wanted to find a video for my wife who was learning Roller Derby, I searched You Tube and got thousands of results, almost all of them below mediocre. But when I searched Stumble Upon Video I got only 10 results, and all of them were awesome.
The key to the system is that for every site that you “stumble upon” in your web surfing, you can give it a thumbs up or down (or tag or comment it). Really cool content propagates through the network fast, yet people trying to game the system to give their pages high stumble ranks get voted down very quickly. When I met the founders of Stumble Upon recently I asked how they managed to do this so well, and they said that they did not write a single line of code until they had worked out the anti-spam strategy. While there are several recommendation engines on the web like Digg, Delicious, and Reddit, Stumble Upon’s interface, huge active community, and easy tools make it the one that always delivers the highest level of cool stuff. It is basically how I find everything that I blog about. — Alexander Rose
Just because anyone can edit Wikipedia doesn’t mean it’s easy. Sure, you can edit anonymously and say anything you like, but if you want to make edits that last and if you want to participate in a meaningful way that complies with community guidelines, well, there’s a lot to learn. Guidelines can be hard to find on the site, and for better or worse, they’re always evolving.
As the pull-quote on the cover of this book indicates, Cool Tools has previously-recommended other Missing Manuals from O’Reilly. Like the other books in the series, Wikipedia: The Missing Manual is logically structured, includes lots of screen-shots, and is infinitely skimmable. A great introduction and a handy reference, the manual starts out with the basics: editing, creating articles and maintaining them (yes, that’s just the start). More advanced topics include collaboration, advanced formatting, broader site structure, and interface customization.
Documentation at the website is not particularly searchable given the site’s relatively simplistic one-box-fits-all search interface; browsing through documentation and discussion can be difficult and, frankly, overwhelming. In addition to the quite readable, cover to cover flow, the book has a comprehensive index that allows for quick navigation that delivers precise answers to the myriad questions that inevitably arise, especially when you’re just getting familiar with this medium.
Make no mistake, community consensus is always the last (ever-changing) word. But John Broughton, who has also overseen the Editor’s Index to Wikipedia project, can help you ease into editing without committing any major blunders.
The Manual has been migrated to Wikipedia. Checkout the dynamic incarnation at Help:Wikipedia: The Missing Manual. — Camille Hartsell
Once a week we’ll send out a page from Cool Tools: A Catalog of Possibilities. The tools might be outdated or obsolete, and the links to them may or may not work. We present these vintage recommendations as is because the possibilities they inspire are new. Sign up here to get Tools for Possibilities a week early in your inbox.
2026-09-14 00:00:00
Paper2Audio converts text documents into audio files. Feed it a PDF, EPUB, plain text, Word document, or URL, and in a few minutes it generates an audio file playable on your computer or a smartphone app. The free version satisfies my needs: up to 56 hours of audio per week, a variety of AI voices, adjustable listening speed, and a reader view so you can read along while listening. The plus plan, $9.50 a month, gives you 168 hours a week and lets you export audio files. I haven’t needed to do that yet. — MF
Wow, a whole new genre is emerging: real-time AI video generation. Exhibit A is Infinite Slop, which calls itself “an endless AI-generated TV channel that chat decides what airs next.” Thousands of commenters vote up prompts in response to what is playing, and new video is generated instantly, soliciting more prompts, ad infinitum, in a cycle. The result is a 24-hour stream of absurd, surreal, bizarre, silly, astounding, meme-maxing video slop from the hive mind – that is also weirdly mesmerizing, and even satisfying. Hard to look away. Some bits are genius. The new ability to generate video as fast as you can watch it will be used in other ways, such as in games, but this infinite slop is the first crude step as performance art. It is one week old and already has millions of fans and ads. — KK
For the past couple months, I’ve been photographing feathers I find on my favorite hiking trail and feeding each one to AI for identification. No matter the markings, colors, or patterns, it kept telling me they belonged to a turkey. Turns out there are a lot of different-looking turkey feathers. But then I found one I was certain was from a Cooper’s hawk, and AI called it a turkey again. I got a more accurate ID from The Feather Atlas, a database run by the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service. Its Identify Feather Tool lets you narrow things down by pattern, color, and size until you land on a match, and it confirmed what I was hoping for. The interface is clunky, but I like that it isn’t AI. — CD
The Slice 10400 Box Cutter is a utility knife with a curved design that lets you cut open boxes more stably, as the curved part rests on the box while you cut. You can adjust the blade to 3 different positions. The 1st position extends the blade slightly, which is good for cutting the tape on a box without worrying about cutting through the cardboard and into the contents. When you extend the blade further, it’s good for breaking down larger cardboard boxes. The blades are ceramic rather than metal, and Slice claims they last 20 times as long as a metal blade. I’m not sure, since I haven’t had it long enough to test that, but the ergonomics alone make it worth it. — MF
I’m getting my garage replaced with a 410-square-foot studio guest house in my backyard, and I want it to feel as spacious as possible for visitors, so this article with five clever design tricks for making small homes look bigger got instantly bookmarked. The tips are basically this: get furniture off the floor, float pieces away from the walls, hang curtains higher and wider than the window, commit to one color throughout, and size furniture to the room to avoid the “dollhouse effect,” where too many small pieces make a room feel more cluttered instead of bigger. We’re installing a Murphy bed to help free up floor space, and I’m most intrigued by the tip to float furniture by pulling sofas, chairs, and tables away from the walls, leaving 18 to 24 inches of walking room behind them. Apparently that gap creates the illusion of depth by introducing more light, shadow, and overlapping sight lines, so I think I’ll try that out. — CD
One of the best tutorials on story writing I know is this hour-long YouTube lecture by the author of Toy Story 3. He explains Pixar’s story process – which anyone can borrow – and then goes through all the ways he failed and the lessons he learned from finally getting it right. The coolest parts of this lecture, Toy Story 3, Mistakes Made, Lessons Learned, are that he shows very early versions of the film that clearly don’t work, despite months of work. The general lesson of creating things iteratively applies to all art forms. As a bonus, you get a master class on how the story of Toy Story works, and why it’s so powerful. — KK
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2026-09-11 00:00:00
Four years ago I mentioned these travel extension cords with multiple plugs that I use when taking a checked bag to Europe, but this time I’m in the ‘Stans with just a carry-on and didn’t have room. So I did what I’ve advised before in this newsletter: went to the local market and found an appropriate adapter after landing. Around $2.10 later in Almaty, I had a small device that can accommodate a U.S. plug and two USB cords at once. It’s handy since European-style outlets seldom get installed as doubles and I have yet to find a hotel or apartment in Central Asia that has upgraded to USB chargers. The one I got looks sort of like this if you want to plan ahead and that one’s a bit better if you use USB-C to USB-C cords a lot.
Are you old enough to remember Couchsurfing? It was a cool community platform for finding places to crash for free around the world… until it wasn’t. The founders turned it into a for-profit venture in 2011 and it quickly went downhill. Now there’s an offering with the same original spirit called Couchers. It’s a 501(c)(3) non-profit organization and you can sign up as a host, a coucher, or just find the meet-ups, all for free. See more about it here.
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Every week or two I get an e-mail about some study showing the best or worst places to live abroad. Usually it is funded by a brand or a digital PR firm working for a brand, an attempt to have stories picked up and get mentions/links. The people writing it are crunching whatever stats they can find from behind a desk, with the aid of AI. One received this week told me that two of the places rated highest by nomads actually booking apartments—Medellin and Da Nang—were among the 10 worst places to live in the world. (No, I’m not linking to it!) It’s a reminder not to take these studies at face value, especially when the methodology is flawed. The only real way to find out if a place is perfect for you or a “Get me out of here” nightmare is to go there and spend some real time on location. You might hate Da Nang in the end, but decide for yourself based on your own criteria.
A more reliable study is this one from TripAdvisor that looked at six months of booking data for day tours to tell us what’s changing in the patterns. Experiences with real locals are overtaking the check-the-box sightseeing jaunts, though somehow already packed Vatican City tours saw a 61% increase. Percentages are deceiving since those with a lower starting level have more room to run, but the activities rated the highest are on an even playing field. The highest-ranked global ones over six months were cooking classes, surfing/windsurfing, craft classes, and activities on two wheels. See the options where you’re headed here.
A weekly newsletter with four quick bites, edited by Tim Leffel, author of A Better Life for Half the Price and The World’s Cheapest Destinations. See past editions here, where your like-minded friends can subscribe and join you.
