Leave Me Alone/Ken Burns on Tim Ferriss/Really Good Questions
Fast email unsubscribe
I get signed up to a lot of email lists without my knowledge. I started using a service called Leave Me Alone to quickly unsubscribe to hundreds of them. Unlike other unsubscribe services this one makes money by charging a small fee instead of selling your data to advertisers. You can unsubscribe to 10 email lists for free to see how it works. — MF
A golden podcast hour
I’ve long been a fan of Ken Burns’ epic documentary series about American history, such as The Civil War, Jazz, Baseball, National Parks, The Vietnam War, and his most recent, Country Music. Each are essential watching. But listening to a deep interview of Ken Burns on Tim Ferriss’s podcast, my admiration for Burns increased two notches. In a short hour he managed to be informative, helpful, entertaining, romantic, creative, moving, wise, and spiritually enlightened — a Remarkable Being. It was one of the best hours I’ve spent. — KK
Twitter's best question threads
I limit my Twitter use to less than 5 minutes a day which doesn't leave much time to browse and discover new things, so a newsletter I look forward to is "Really Good Questions" which links you to the best asked questions on Twitter and answer thread. An example of a really good question is Sam Altman's "What advice seems obviously right, is relatively easy to follow, and is usually ignored?" I really liked @KristyT's response: "The best way to produce good outcomes is dealing with reality the way it actually is versus what you want it to be." This newsletter is a side project by Sharath Kuruganty so issues are infrequent, but here you can find the threads he's collected so far. — CD
Find restaurants on Instagram
A helpful travel tip I received from a foodie friend was to find restaurants by searching hashtags on Instagram. This really comes in handy in places where Yelp recommendations are scarce. I was just traveling through Switzerland and searched for #Genevafood to find thousands of pictures of delicious looking food — most of them tagged with the location. This is great for me because I choose places based on Yelp food pics anyway. I clicked on the images that looked the best to me and then looked up the restaurant and its proximity. Searching hashtags also helped me find pages dedicated to local food. — CD
Erase wrinkles
My mother has a garment steamer (The PurSteam Elite, $70) and everyone in my family used it to get rid of the wrinkles in the clothes we packed into suitcases for my nephew’s wedding. The steam from the handheld wand made the wrinkles melt away. We immediately bought one for our house. — MF
Getting close to space launch
A destination that is a lot of trouble to reach, but one I found to be worth the effort, is the Cosmodrome, in Baikonur, Kazakhstan, the only place on the planet currently launching humans into space. This coming Tuesday, September 25, 2019, the Cosmodrome will send up the next three astronauts to the International Space Station. In between launches, regular tourists can get amazing access to the legendary launch facilities, and during launches you get to watch the liftoff way, way too close. Visits are organized by Baikonur Tours. (At home the NASA Live channel broadcasts the Cosmodrome launches live.) — KK
— Kevin Kelly, Mark Frauenfelder, Claudia Dawson