★★★★★ Rereading a book you haven’t read in 40 years is an interesting experience. I remembered only the bleakness but little of the story itself. I enjoyed most of the book, though all the decades of Hemingway parodies and copycats stole some of its luster. Still, it is a timeless classic that reinvented the novel. Makes me want to go back and read all those books I read when I was young. If this one is any guide, it will be like reading them again for the first time.
If people bring so much courage to this world the world has to kill them to break them, so of course it kills them. The world breaks everyone and afterward many are strong at the broken places. But those that will not break it kills.
We are sitting on a bench in Madison Square Park in the Flatiron District. Buildings encircle this urban oasis, framed by a blue New York sky. It is our last day in the city, and we have been walking all morning. Small dogs in fancy coats trot by us with their owners. The din of the city is somehow a comfort, like ocean surf. The temperature hovers around 30 degrees Fahrenheit, yet I feel warm in the sunlight, layered as I am in cold weather gear. Lisa sits beside me, taking it all in.
“Would you ever think of moving here permanently?” I ask. It’s a common question we pose when we travel.
“Oh, yeah,” she says without any hesitation. “I’ve always been a city girl.” Her face glows in the chilly air.
When we retired four years ago in our mid-50s, it seemed as if we had life by the tail. We sold the house and moved aboard our 43’ ocean-going trawler, set on exploring the world at a sedate six miles an hour. I’ve always loved the water, and getting this chance to cast off the bowlines was a lifelong dream. We built a home in Arizona in a 55+ retirement community as a mere precaution, a refuge from the soggy Pacific Northwest winters. Snowbirds, or maybe seagulls, might have better described us.
But a family tragedy dashed those plans. Crushed and grief-stricken, we sold the boat and stayed put in Arizona these past three years. We made friends and enjoyed the newness and comforts of a planned community that sprouted from nothing in the desert. Mostly, we worked on finding meaning in an unthinkable loss.
Over the past few months, Lisa and I started brainstorming ideas to escape the heat of these brutal Arizona summers. As someone who spent his entire life a half mile from the beach, I had no idea how scorching the desert during the height of summer could be.
These talks felt like a good sign. We were coming through it, maybe even out of it. Like Odysseus, we have traveled far. We have suffered. We have buried an oar in this place so far from the sea.
As we vetted possibilities, we knew we wanted challenge and variety, not vacation-style leisure. We needed a break from this predictable, curated life that attracts many to retirement communities.
But neither of us wanted the usual travel of flights and hotels and always being on the go. We could live out of a suitcase for a few weeks, but all summer? No. We did that during a family vacation to Europe. Forty-three stops in sixty days, including an attempt to see Paris in a weekend. Ugh. Never again.
As we pored over maps and searched travel sites, New York City kept popping up. I lived there for a year in the 1990s when Lisa and I first started dating. Neither of us could think of another U.S. city that had as much to offer a pair of healthy retirees with ample time on their hands. It would also mean a return to our very beginnings.
So, during an unseasonably warm Arizona January, we dug through our closets for winter clothes and flew to Manhattan. We walked all over the city, through Chelsea, Greenwich Village, Midtown, the Upper West and Upper East Sides, and Harlem. I heard stories that New York had changed for the worse, but in my eyes, the city was even more beautiful and clean than when I left it in 1995.
By the end of the week, we knew we had found our summer destination. We rented a furnished apartment on the Upper East Side from mid-May through mid-October. The brownstone is a half block from Central Park and not far from the five-story walk-up I rented many years ago.
We’ll have all the time we need to explore the city at our leisure, not as tourists, but as starry-eyed transplants. I’ll take writing classes. Lisa will paint. We’ll join a gym. We’ll walk the dogs twice a day through Central Park. I’ll make friends with the docents at the Met, a place I stumbled through in a daze during my only visit, but now I can study methodically.
Figuring out how to live in New York City — where to shop for groceries and how to get around on the subways — is the type of travel that, in time, will change us forever. Paris, to me now, is an irritating blur. After five months of daily life, New York will be woven into our DNA. We will always have it.
Yes, it’s a costly trip. New York is one of the most expensive cities in the world, and we splurged on a deluxe apartment. We wanted the best possible experience for this new mode of immersive travel, which might be something we repeat each summer.
“I can’t believe we rented an apartment,” Lisa says, touching my gloved hand.
“We’re doing this,” I agree.
What is this stirring I feel in my chest? Is it hope? This must be what sunrise feels to the hiker lost deep in the woods. We resume our walk, looking around as if we own the place.
Finished: Crossing to Safety by Wallace Stegner 💙📚
★★★★★ What a beautiful and poignant book. Hopeful and joyous at the possibilities of life, but bookended by the realities of disappointment and loss.
You can plan all you want to. You can lie in your morning bed and fill whole notebooks with schemes and intentions. But within a single afternoon, within hours or minutes, everything you plan and everything you have fought to make yourself can be undone as a slug is undone when salt is poured on him. And right up to the moment when you find yourself dissolving into foam you can still believe you are doing fine.
Finished: Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can’t Stop Talking by Susan Cain 💙📚
★★★★☆ Fascinating deep dive into the world of introversion and extroversion. Some meaningful parts of our temperament are genetic and passed down from our parents. If you’re a fussy, highly sensitive baby at four months, there’s a good chance you’ll grow up to be introverted. There seems to be a biological connection between high physical sensitivity and introversion.
This has been an eye-opening book for the ways that extroverts and introverts differ. Bloggers, who Cain suggests are almost all introverts, will share personal details with an online multitude they would never disclose at a cocktail party. This hits close to home!
This month, I finished a multi-year reading of Will and Ariel Durant's The Story of Civilization, an eleven-volume opus considered one of the finest narratives of world history ever written.
Durant published the first volume in 1935 when he had just turned 50. The tenth volume, Rousseau and Revolution, won the Pulitzer Prize for general non-fiction in 1968. Will and Ariel, his spouse and co-author, published the final volume in 1975, a culmination of forty years of writing and scholarship. No author’s body of work has even come close to the scope and duration of this epic history set. Excluding reference notes, the text spans ten thousand pages, covering human civilization from the earliest recorded history through Napoleon’s meteoric rise and fall.
I’ve wanted to read these books since I inherited them from my Grandmother more than twenty-five years ago. I made a few attempts but never got past the first hundred pages. I was too busy or preoccupied with other things to devote the time and focus.
This time was different. First, as a recent retiree, I have the energy to dedicate to a project like this. Second, I approached the reading like a real project. I mapped out the volumes and page counts and calculated that if I read just thirty pages a night, I could read the entire series in a little over a year. I stuck with it, and the little bit of reading every night soon became a habit.
I didn’t finish the books in a year like I planned. The reading stretched out to almost two years. On average, I read just under fifteen pages a day. Yet, it’s striking to see how a little bit of reading each day can add up.
In terms of consistent effort, I’d place the reading of these books on par with the work I put in to earn my MBA degree twenty-five years ago. That two-year program helped me professionally and monetarily; these Durant books changed me in perhaps an even more profound way.
Last year, I wrote about the personal reasons I wanted to read these books. In this post, I’m sharing some reflections on the benefits I’ve taken away from this monumental reading assignment.
Before we get to that, I have some quibbles. While Durant is a masterful storyteller and sometimes poet, the writing feels necessarily dated at times. The focus is too heavily weighted towards Western civilization and Europe. Durant’s interest in the sexual proclivities of historical figures surprised me at first, given the time this was written, but later became tedious. The extended descriptions of famous art and architecture were well-written, but there are easier and better ways to study those now. I found myself skimming a lot of those sections.
Criticisms aside, the Story of Civilization is truly a masterpiece of history. After thinking back on this multi-year reading journey, I'll group the value I've received in three areas:
1. The Past Explained
Before Durant, my knowledge of world history stemmed from high school classes and isolated deep dives into specific events and people. My internal timeline of when and where things happened over the eons was a mixed-up jumble.
The Story of Civilization corrected all that. It starts at the very beginning with a patient professor chatting beside you the entire way. It’s the same wise voice describing the Pharaohs of ancient Egypt as the Goths invading Rome, the dark ages of inquisitions and crusades, a spark then roaring fire of the Renaissance, the return to science and reason, before ending with Napoleon stewing in exile in St. Helena. It’s one continuous story with no gaps or omissions.
These books exposed me to every notable event and person in our shared history. Not just the Kings and Queens, but the composers, the artists, and the philosophers; the writers and scientists and architects; the prophets, the saints, and the heretics. It is not just about major events or people but also insights into the economies, the everyday life of peasants and the middle classes, their religious beliefs, their customs and morals, and their ideas on family and community.
By reading these books in a relatively short time span and taking hundreds and hundreds of notes, I now have a well-calibrated compass of the when, what, and why of human history. I’m able to draw from this knowledge with most everything else I read. I can place the context of practically any historical figure or event in reading that my eyes might have glossed over before now. This has made my post-Durant reading life a much richer experience.
2. Perspective on Humanity
Taking in the entire written history of civilization definitely gives you a new perspective on human nature. It’s not good. Reading example after example of the corrupting effect of power held by the few over the many is depressing. Or how organized religions are both awful and necessary to the stability of civilization. Or how freedom and equality seem like natural feel-good bedfellows but are, in truth, mortal enemies. Or how the rich get richer and richer until the poor rise up. Or how democracy as a form of government rarely lasts.
A sorry spectacle of generals climbing over slain rivals to power, to be slain in their turn; of pomp and luxury, eye-gouging and nosecutting, incense and piety and treachery; of emperor and patriarch unscrupulously struggling to determine whether the empire should be ruled by might or myth, by sword or word.1
History provides a needed perspective to help us navigate turmoil and uncertainty. Study enough past civilizations, their rise and their fall, and you can’t help but see consistent patterns and inflection points in the world around us. No one can truly predict the future, but surely our shared history is a powerful guide, given how consistently the past repeats itself.
In so many ways, history shows what a privilege it is to be alive during this time of democracy and relative peace. Our past is riddled with countless atrocities, warfare and pointless bloodshed, inquisitions, dictatorships, and crazed emperors. Yet, witnessing so many civilizations fail over the millennia, we must acknowledge this current peace and tranquility will not, cannot last.
That said, there’s room for optimism. For every hundred tyrants, there’s a philosopher or scientist or artist whose gifts to humanity have pushed us forward as a society. Here's Durant:
Let us agree that in every generation of man’s history, and almost everywhere, we find superstition, hypocrisy, corruption, cruelty, crime, and war: in the balance against them we place the long roster of poets, composers, artists, scientists, philosophers, and saints. That same species upon which poor Swift revenged the frustrations of his flesh wrote the plays of Shakespeare, the music of Bach and Handel, the odes of Keats, the Republic of Plato, the Principia of Newton, and the Ethics of Spinoza; it built the Parthenon and painted the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel; it conceived and cherished, even if it crucified, Christ. Man did all this; let him never despair. 2
3. The Meaning of Life
During the height of my working life and career, I dreamed of one day retiring to my little book-lined study to read and think through the mysteries of life. I'm not religious. I studied philosophy in college and maintained an avid interest in Stoic thinking, but I never had the proper time to bear down on the crux of the problem: why are we here? What is the meaning of all this?
I hoped one day to find the answers buried in the pages of my many books.
I didn’t realize when I started reading The Story of Civilization that Durant was a seeker of these same questions. With every spiritual movement, every religion, every saint, every philosopher, he was there by my side, poking and probing for the answers to questions that bothered us both.
Did Durant help me find what I was looking for? Did I discover the true meaning of life? Not exactly. Maybe the answers I seek can’t be found in a book. And yet, I did find comfort in the parallels between the we-are-all-one views of the ancient Upanishads, repeated and examined so logically by Lucretius and unearthed once more by the 18th-century free-thinking Deists.
You often hear that ancient philosophers conversed with one another over the centuries, adding to, refuting, and affirming each other like some modern-day Reddit thread. Durant’s moderation of these thinkers throughout the books made that conversation come alive in ways I would have surely missed had I studied this piecemeal. I came here for history but found insight in philosophy. I am wiser for Durant's company.
What does it matter by what road each man seeks the truth? By no one road can men come to the understanding of so great a mystery. — Symmachus 3
A Personal Legacy
My Grandfather gave my Grandmother the first six volumes of The Story of Civilization as a Christmas gift in 1959. He passed away five years later, the year before I was born, so I never got the chance to meet him. As a widow, my Grandmother read these books carefully, as proven by her many cryptic scribbles in the margins. I knew her as a devout Presbyterian, but her underlining and exclamation marks show that, like Durant, she also questioned her religion, faith, and life’s true purpose. She donated most of the books from her large family library when she downsized to a senior living apartment. She kept the Durant books and just a few others. She cherished these books.
I wish I had realized she didn’t own the complete set. I would have bought them for her. I ended up buying the remaining five books on eBay. Her marginalia ends after six volumes; mine continues.
Maybe in thirty or forty years, my daughter will pull one of these well-loved books down from her shelves and flip through the yellowed pages, scanning all the scribbles and vertical lines and exclamation points in the margins, stopping to puzzle over why a particular sentence or paragraph was marked. You can tell much about a person from what they write in books. Maybe that is legacy enough. Or, maybe, when the time is right, she will decide to embark on the same voyage as her father and great-grandmother, walking along amiably with Durant and two silent pilgrims.
Reading Advice
The physical books that make up The Story of Civilization are long out of print, but you can sometimes find a nice set collecting dust in a used bookstore. eBay usually has sets for sale in the $100-$200 range, which is considerably cheaper than the cost of an MBA.
You can buy the complete set on Kindle, but I don’t recommend it. The file size caused my Kindle to lock up, though the individual books work fine. When I traveled, I left the hefty physical books at home and read on Kindle instead. Amazon has periodic sales of various books within the series for as low as $2 each, and I ended up buying most of them that way.
You can buy or borrow audiobook versions on Libby. I listened to parts of the series on walks and drives but found them more challenging to follow than in print.
My advice is to buy the set in hardback. Put the books on your shelf. Let them marinate. Pick up a volume and thumb through it every once in a while. And when you’re ready, go easy. Read a little every day. Harvest the time you might have wasted on social media. Savor the writing and the story. Write notes in the margins. Reflect on what you’ve learned. You might be amazed at the distance you'll travel.
Have you read The Story of Civilization or have plans to read it? Let me know in the comment section below.
★★★★★ This short book oozes with wisdom with the help of Ken Liu’s wonderful translation and notes. Read this one slowly and set aside time for reflection. So much of the advice is contrary to conventional western views that it can seem non-sensical. But try, you must.
Can you open yourself to your senses—quieting the mind like water?
Death is good. Senescence is good. The beginning is good. The end is good. You are, like all things in the cosmos, swimming in the flux of Dao.
Om Malik recently launched a separate “daily” blog, which looks like a subdomain off his Wordpress site. For folks who keep a Wordpress blog, have you considered this as an alternative to separate Wordpress/Micro.blog sites for short and long posts? Puzzling through a longer term solution to POSSE.
To solve the hard you must begin with the easy; To do something big you must start very small. All difficulties must be resolved through simple steps. All grand deeds must be performed through tiny details.
Finished: Creative Nonfiction: The Final Issue by Lee Gutkind 💙📚
★★★★☆ An interesting selection of essays from the print run of the Creative Nonfiction literary magazine. There were some essays that appeared to stretch the boundaries of truth, but that’s the creative part I guess.
One of my minor complaints about the Matter read-it-later app was addressed in a big way today. “Co-Reader” provides AI assistance at the paragraph level. Tap any paragraph in an article and to see AI-generated questions and answers. All within the app. Immersive reading at its best.
★★★★☆ The eleventh and final volume of the Story of Civilization, covering the years from the beginning of the French Revolution through Waterloo. Napoleon’s rise, dictatorship, stunning victories and ultimate defeat were thrilling to read.
From the sublime to the ridiculous is but a step. — Napoleon
A few weeks ago, I came across a blog post about the author’s reasons for switching to a different everyday-carry notebook. I love posts like these, and this one had me clicking on websites, blog posts, and videos about notebooks and pens until long past bedtime.
For some, it can be difficult to resist the possibility that a new notebook or pen might help squeeze more insightful words onto a blank page. There’s a reason I highlighted this passage from Todd Henry’s Daily Creative:
Sometimes the feel of a new tool in your hands is all it takes to create a spark: a new keyboard for your computer, a new pen or notebook. There’s no magic in the tool; it’s how the new tool makes you feel about working, how it invites you back into your craft.
I love digital note-taking and spend a lot of time organizing and linking my reading and knowledge notes. But I sometimes question whether that investment will ever pay off.
A few months ago, I traced my last dozen writing projects back to where the ideas first originated. I hoped many spawned from insights born out of the interconnected links and backlinks in my note-taking system. But, no. Every one took shape in the pages of my handwritten journal, often followed by mental acrobatics played out on the surface of 4x6 index cards. Only later did a keyboard take part. Even after I had a working draft of an essay, I almost always returned to my journal to question my thinking. Many essays took a new direction after these mid-stream journaling sessions.
Despite a fascination with digital tools, pen and paper is where my real thinking happens.
That being so, I may have written too much about apps and software if the creative spark takes place elsewhere. So, today, I’m sharing the analog tools I use daily. And surprise, surprise: writing this post led me to a rewarding discovery.
STM Notebook
For the past three years, I’ve used this notebook from Scribbles That Matter (STM) as my paper journal. I wake up early and write in this notebook every morning over coffee. I love the larger B5 size for more expansive thinking. The STM has 213 high-quality dotted and numbered pages (120 GSM), a few index pages, a pocket in the back to stash notecards, two place-marking ribbons, a loop to hold a pen, an elastic band to keep it closed, and even a slipcase for storage. The notebook lays flat when opened, yet its binding remains tight even after a year of daily use. This notebook hits all my buttons.
Notsu Index Cards
About a year ago, I graduated from cheap Amazon basic 4x6 notecards to Notsu dot grid index cards. These are made from thick (350 gsm) card stock with subtle dots and rounded edges. Unlike cheaper ones, my pen glides over the smooth surface of these high-quality cards. They are thick enough to handle permanent markers without bleeding and withstand almost any abuse without crumpling.
The Allure of Fancy Pens
I’ve managed to stay away from using fancy pens in my notebooks and journals. I’ve bought a few nice pens over the years, only to realize I didn’t enjoy writing with them. I tried fountain pens but found them fussy and precious. I’ve come to accept that my southpaw scrawl is more suited for ballpoints than nibs and special ink.
For the past three or four years, I’ve written every day with a Pentel Energel 0.5 Needle Tip pen. The Energel’s water-based gel ink flows evenly on the page without smearing or skipping, even with my awkward left-handed slant. The 0.5mm fine tip lets me write with uncanny precision. I prefer blue ink in my notebooks and journals. Traditional black is far too grown-up for me. Pentel’s shade of blue is perfect. And it’s affordable. The pen costs just $1.39 when purchased in bulk.
After discovering the Pentel, I bought several dozen from Amazon, fearing they might one day be discontinued. After a while, throwing away an entire pen felt wasteful, so I started buying just the refills, which cost a mere $0.60 each.
After reading the aforementioned blog post and researching the Mark Two pen and its companions, I began to examine the body of the Pentel more critically. While the ink flows like magic, the pen itself is a plasticky piece of junk.
I was still pondering this illogical allure of fancy pens a few days later when I had an idea. What if someone makes a nice pen body that accepts Energel refills? Is that even a thing?
I asked ChatGPT. “Certainly,” it replied, and it spat out five higher-end pens that accept the Energel refill. My heart began to beat a little faster.
Two suggestions didn’t fit my style, and two required trimming the refill to fit. But one, the AI’s top recommendation, looked very, very promising.
Two hours later, after studying another slew of videos and Reddit posts, I ordered the $100 Big Idea Design Dual Side Click Pen in stonewashed titanium.
Big Idea Design Dual Side Click Pen
I’ve been writing with this pen for two weeks now. Due to its unique adjustable design, it accepts Energel refills and a hundred others. The refill fits snugly and doesn’t wiggle or wobble. The titanium version weighs 28 grams, a little over twice as much as the Pentel. It’s just enough extra weight to coax the ink to flow even better on the page. The copper or zirconium (!) versions would be too heavy to hold for long stretches.
Engaging the pen feels more like chambering a round than the bouncy click of the Pentel. Pressing either side button gives a satisfying thunk as the pen disengages. When I pull the pen out of the loop of my journal, a sound like a crisp finger-snap erupts from the titanium clip (yes, even the clip is titanium).
It took no time to fall in love with this pen—a beautiful, understated, utilitarian badass that accepts my beloved refills.
And since it’s backed by a lifetime warranty, this could be the last pen I ever buy.
Of course, I’m already eyeing the bolt-action model and perhaps a mini version to carry with my pocket notebook.
This, my pen enthusiast friends tell me, is how it begins.
★★★★★ Donald Sutherland did a wonderful job narrating this audiobook. It was nice to reacquaint myself with Hemingway’s short and simple sentences, yet so full of energy. Made me yearn for the ocean.
Finished: Babel by R.F. Kuang 💙📚
★★☆☆☆ I tried to like this book. It has all the elements of a book I would love: etymology, 19th century England, a diverse set of characters, magic, and an academic setting (Oxford, no less!). But I found it slow and repetitive, filled with one-dimensional, unlikable characters, and lecture after lecture on how the rich and powerful mistreat the poor, especially those who aren’t white and British, except for those that are poor and British. It took me almost two months to finish this, and it was a struggle.
I appreciate the idea behind the story, but not how it was told. Not every book is for every reader.
Question for @manton: I notice that sometimes when I make small changes to my site, like changing the category of a post, my website won’t reflect the change. I’ve switched devices, browsers, etc. No difference. The only thing that works is rebuilding the site. Is this normal or a sign of a problem?
I love the idea of a read-it-later app. The premise is simple: Save articles and blog posts that arise throughout the day with a single tap and read them later when you have the time. This way, you stay focused and never worry about misplacing or forgetting an important article.
A good read-it-later app can transform almost any web article into a clean, ad-free format with a consistent layout and font. It organizes newsletter subscriptions without clogging email inboxes. The best ones allow highlighting and annotations that carry over to popular note-taking apps.
The biggest problem with read-it-later apps is that saving articles is too easy. All those well-intentioned essays and posts languish in your queue, unread. You feel guilty about not reading them, so you archive everything and start over, only to repeat the process. And, maybe even worse, you end up reading the wrong articles.
Readwise and Readwise Reader
I have long been a fan of Readwise, a reading app and service for organizing book highlights and notes. About three years ago, Readwise launched Reader, its own read-it-later app that integrates with its book service.
I’ve been using Reader for the past two years, and it's ... okay. It has been a long development effort for the Readwise team. There are updates to it almost weekly, and the app continues to improve and evolve. It can handle most of my read-it-later needs, but I’ve honestly never enjoyed using it.
The user interface is choked with features. There are too many ways of customizing views and gestures. I can never remember the difference between a short or long swipe or a left or right swipe. The article queue is cluttered with menus, yet I often struggle to find a function when needed.
I feel guilty for not loving Reader. It is “free” with my Readwise subscription—who doesn’t like free? But I prefer apps that prioritize minimalist design and style, even at the cost of fewer power features. Readwise Reader abounds in power but lacks the finesse I expect from a well-designed app.
Testing read-it-later Apps
After a frustrating search through multiple menus to send an article to my Kindle, I decided to look for an app that better suited my tastes. I spent an evening installing the leading read-it-later apps on my iPad, Mac, and iPhone.
(A quick disclaimer: I have no financial interest in any of the apps I’ve evaluated. No one is paying me for this blog post.)
I tested Pocket, Instapaper, Inoreader, Goodlinks, and Matter using a checklist of needs and wants. I made some quick decisions. Pocket lacked export capabilities and felt dated. Inoreader’s fixed reading layout was a turnoff. Goodlinks was fantastic but didn't integrate with Readwise.
Instapaper impressed me with its aesthetics and how it imported articles behind paywalls. Matter, the one I knew the least about, surprised me the most. It matched Instapaper’s immersive reading experience but offered a wealth of additional reading selections as part of the subscription.
I spent the last four weeks pitting Reader, Instapaper and Matter against each other in my daily online reading. The odds were stacked in favor of the incumbent. I did not relish the notion of paying for another app subscription.
After four weeks, the choice became obvious. Matter is my new read-it-later app.
Matter: “1% Smarter Every Day”
Matter is a subscription-based read-it-later app that has been around since 2021. At $80 per year, it costs more than Pocket, Goodreads or Instapaper, but less than Inoreader or Readwise Reader (though you get both Readwise and Reader for the same price).
What sets Matter apart beyond its well-designed reading app is its ability to follow favorite writers and its unique algorithm that suggests complementary articles. I didn’t expect to value this, but as you’ll read, I found these content offerings compelling.
Saving Articles
Matter makes it easy to add articles to its reading queue. Use the share function from an iPhone or iPad or tap a button in your browser’s toolbar. I tested Matter with Safari, Chrome, and Brave, and they all worked well. A double-tap on an article from Unread, my RSS reader, sends it to Matter automatically.
The Reading Queue
Matter’s uniqueness begins to show up in its reading queue. Its minimal design focuses on reading content, not menus or decoration. An iPad mini displays twelve articles in Matter without scrolling. Readwise Reader, with its extra fluff and clutter, shows just five. For each article, you see the estimated time to read, the percentage you’ve already read, and the number of annotations you’ve made. The queue can be sorted by the usual parameters: article length, date added, author, etc. But a flick of your finger launches an article to the top of the list, or for a bit of whimsy, a shake of your device shuffles the order. Archive any article with a simple swipe.
Immersive Reading
Reading an article in Matter is an understated pleasure. The font and screen layout can be adjusted to your liking. Swiping down from the top of the screen gives you an AI-generated article summary. After the title, you see an estimate of the article length in minutes.
Menus and buttons quietly disappear as you read, leaving you alone with the text. When you reach the end of the article, the buttons return and stay present as you continue to peruse what you’ve read, knowing you’ll need to take some action now that you’re done. This is very thoughtfully executed. Here’s a look at the same article on Reader and Matter.
I often read on my iPad at night. There are several dark mode reading choices, and none blinds you with the bright white text glare of less sophisticated apps (like Reader).
Matter provides a brilliant way to explore links within an article. In most read-it-later apps, following a link takes you out of the app into your browser, disrupting your concentration. Matter does something so much better. When you tap the link, a window appears with a scrollable view of the linked article and the option to save it in your queue for later. A single tap on the perimeter of the window brings you back to where you left off.
Reviewing links without leaving the app in Matter
I love this ability to follow an author’s train of thought and references without losing my own in the process. I seldom clicked on links in Reader because of the inherent disruption in flow. Now, I’m a link-clicking demon, and I feel like I’ve engaged a new level of learning and understanding from what I'm reading.
Capturing highlights is as simple as dragging your finger (or Apple Pencil) over the text. No pop-up menus or distractions. Just yellow highlighted text. Tap again to delete the highlight, add your own notes, copy the text, or create a beautiful image of the quote for sharing on social media. If you add a note, linking brackets and tag symbols hover above the keyboard for those who keep notes in apps like Bear or Obsidian — a subtle but helpful touch.
You have the option to listen to articles with a choice of high-quality AI narrators. As you listen, blue highlighting tracks along with the text. If you’re listening on a walk with your AirPods, a double-click of the stem highlights the sentence or paragraph you’ve just heard. I thought AI narrators were a gimmick until I started using Matter with AirPods. This works with YouTube videos and podcasts as well. I'd love this feature in audiobooks, but sadly, Matter doesn’t offer that.
When you reach the end of an article, you can archive it, share it as a link, or save it as a PDF.
A swipe up from the bottom of the screen provides a “more like this” selection of similar articles sorted by algorithmic match. The recommendations are startlingly good. I’ve been presented with my own blog posts as options a few times, so I know they’ve cast a wide net for the population of articles to include in the matching process.
A swipe from left to right on the screen returns you to the reading queue. I love apps that use universal gestures.
Readwise Integration
If you’re a Readwise subscriber, highlighting a passage in Matter, including notes, tags, and links, automatically flows through to Readwise and your notes app. This removes any mental overhead of having to think about where or how to save what you’re reading. It just works.
Obsidian Integration
I’ll briefly mention the Matter plug-in for Obsidian for readers who use that note-taking powerhouse. The Matter plug-in is fantastic, rivaling the Readwise plugin in options to customize how highlights and annotations are presented in your notes.
Reading PDFs
Matter did the best job among the three of importing PDFs. Instapaper doesn’t support PDFs at all. Reader accepts PDFs but doesn’t transform them. Here’s the same PDF in both Matter and Readwise Reader:
Kindle Integration
It takes two taps to send an article to your Kindle if you prefer to read longer articles that way. Matter automatically adds a “Sent to Kindle” tag, which shows up in the queue list so you don’t forget.
The article format in Kindle is the best I’ve seen. You can send a group of articles in bulk, and they show up on Kindle as a digest with an interactive table of contents for easy navigation. Unlike Instapaper or Readwise, article metadata is preserved when highlights are imported to Readwise and your notes app. Limitations by the Kindle prevent wireless syncing, but Readwise parses and saves all highlights and annotations perfectly via side-loading or emailing the Kindle Clippings.txt file.
Reading Better
When you subscribe to Matter, you get a terrific read-it-later app, as I’ve described. But there’s another part to Matter that delivers even more value, so much so that the $80 annual subscription cost might be a bargain.
Your Personal Daily Digest
In addition to your saved reading queue, Matter offers a changing selection of articles as part of a daily digest. Some are curated staff picks, but most are articles that Matter thinks you will like based on previous reading. The articles presented aren’t always new. Some of the most interesting articles I’ve read from the digest were written three or four years ago, yet are still timely based on my current interests.
If you find an interesting article from the digest, you can read it on the spot or add it to your queue. If you swipe up from the bottom of one of these articles, you can find even more related articles, and so on.
Following Favorite Writers
Matter allows you to follow your favorite writers no matter where they publish. For example, essays from Paul Krugman from both The New York Times and his Substack Krugman Wonks Out can be found on his Matter author page. The depth of writer selection is astonishing, with many available articles only accessible via paywalled subscription sites, and then, only with distracting ads sprinkled through the text. I already subscribe a few of these publications but prefer to read them in Matter because of the comfortable reading experience and power reading tools.
Once I understood the scope of the published writing available in Matter, I took a different stance on its subscription cost. It’s a reading app, yes, but it’s also a potential replacement for many of my magazine and newspaper subscriptions.
Finding Your People
A few weeks ago, I wrote an essay about why blogs matter. In it, I described the long-pull value of connecting with others through writing and sharing one’s particular interests. If you write it, they will come, goes the theory. Eventually.
Matter’s “more like this” tool provides a much faster way to find and connect with like-minded people.
Here’s an example: I sent my blog post to Matter to test the article import process. On a whim, I swiped up from the bottom of my essay to see if others had written something similar. And, of course, they had.
A few taps later, I read this passage from Henrik Karlsson:
It is crazy-beautiful to have a stranger arrive in your inbox, and they are excited by exactly the same things as you! You start dropping the most obscure references, and they’re like, yeah, read that, love it. The first handful of times it happened, Johanna asked me what was wrong. I was crying in the kitchen.
I had never heard of Mr. Karlsson, but here in a blog post from 2022, surfaced for me in Matter, I found a kindred spirit. His post led me to a half-dozen others. I would never have found any of these through a conventional Google search. For anyone with interests that border on the fringe or unusual or mildly obsessive, a “more like this” journey with Matter can be fascinating.
Making Reading Fun
The final benefit I’ll mention deals with that awful, soul-sucking dread that comes with opening your read-it-later app, knowing you’ve accumulated far too many articles to read on a Sunday afternoon. For read-it-later veterans, you know the feeling. You’ve got 30 minutes to read six hours of articles. Your good intentions turn to despair as you survey your reading list.
Matter offers several innovative solutions to prevent reading queue angst. First, the audio narration and AirPods integration I mentioned earlier can help you read more during otherwise dead times in your schedule.
But the surest way is to read a little every day. Matter encourages this through goals and streaks. You set a daily reading goal, and Matter rewards you with a fun recognition when you finish. Later, it reminds you to keep your reading streak going.
Many apps do this, and I’m sure it’s annoying for some (it’s optional), but it definitely motivates me. These little recognitions likely explain why I’ve conducted 1,500 straight Readwise reviews and 4,500 consecutive Day One journal entries.
Wish List
There are a few things I would love to see added to Matter in the future.
Improvements to Article Parsing. There are some niggling problems with the way Matter imports certain articles. Photo captions are sometimes jumbled with text. Markdown-style tables don’t carry across. Footnotes within articles are often missing.
Kobo/Android support. If I finally give up on Kindle, reading articles on Kobo devices or Android e-ink devices would be helpful.
Multi-word dictionary lookups. Matter allows you to look up single words in its onboard dictionary, but there’s no easy way to look up a person or place on Wikipedia. I’ve often been reading an article when I had to exit the app to look something up. Instapaper and Reader both do a better job at this.
The last item on my wish list doesn’t count as software improvement. I wish Matter provided potential customers with a more feature-laden free tier or a more robust trial to understand the app’s capabilities better. Matter offers a seven-day trial of its premium app, but users still can’t explore RSS feeds or its excellent writer feeds, which represents a good chunk of the value of the subscription, in my view. I suspect the high annual cost turns off many would-be customers without understanding what they’re really getting. At a minimum, Matter should explain the limitations of the free trial.
Is Matter Worth It?
Matter and Readwise have a lot in common. Both apps target readers who want to be more thoughtful about how and what they read. They both require eye-watering subscriptions to pull this off. One reason for the high cost is the tiny size of the population that values such a service.
In Matter’s case, the potential market is even smaller, as it exclusively targets the Mac/iPad/iOS ecosystem. If you have an Android device, you’re out of luck.
There are many less expensive (or free) read-it-later alternatives. Safari’s built-in “Reading List” function is free. Goodlinks is a terrific read-it-later app with a $10 yearly subscription fee. And, of course, Readwise subscribers get its Reader app for no additional cost.
And yet, for its intended market, the value is extraordinary. Matter gives you an immersive environment that helps you focus on what you’re reading, even when you roam outside the bounds of the article by following links. It suggests additional reading to help you learn even more. It provides a central access point to a vast library of world-class writers and thinkers, many whose works are accessible only through paywalled subscription services. It does all of this in one aesthetically pleasing and thoughtfully designed app.
I came looking for a read-it-later app, but after using Matter daily for the past four weeks, I am staying because of the depth and serendipity of its content.
If you use a Mac, an iPad, or an iPhone and want to get more out of your online reading, you owe it to yourself to try Matter. If you’re on the fence, subscribe for a month and see what happens. If you’re anything like me, you’ll be happy you did, and wiser for it.
Questions about Matter or any of the read-it-later apps I’ve mentioned? Let me know in the comment section below. Learning about Matter’s full capabilities can be difficult without first committing to a subscription, so I’m happy to assist.
Productivity is often a distraction. Don’t aim for better ways to get through your tasks as quickly as possible, rather aim for better tasks that you never want to stop doing.
Apple is launching a new product this week — probably an iPhone SE. But what if they unveil an e-reader and a subscription reading service? Books are in the cross-hairs of the intersection between arts and technology. Amazon and e-readers are ripe for Apple-style disruption. A man can dream!
