💡 WiseUp! Vol. 57 — Manage your to-read list and create Mastery cards

📍 Let's start with a reading recommendation

Treat your to-read pile like a river, not a bucket

Here's the reading advice nobody wants to hear but everyone needs: you will never finish your to-read list. Oliver Burkeman calls this the problem of "too many needles"... it's not that you can't find good things to read, but that you've found too many of them. His liberating solution? Treat your reading list like a river, not a bucket. ⁠“It's not a question of rearranging your to-do list so as to make space for all your "big rocks", but of accepting that there are simply too many rocks to fit in the jar.”

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From the support inbox

Have questions about using Readwise or Reader in your workflow? We'd love to be your guide! Reply to this email with your question and you might be featured in an upcoming issue. Even if your question isn’t featured, we’ll respond to every message.

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❓ A Readwise question from Dan W:

How do I remove highlights from Readwise that I already deleted on my Kindle?

You can remove highlights you’ve deleted on Kindle to make sure your account reflects the current version of the book. In the Books view, click the down arrow next to the title and choose “Refresh Highlights.” It’s also helpful for reordering highlights if you tend to jump around while reading. Kindle will update on the next sync, or you can manually sync from the Import page.

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❓ A Reader question from Annie Z:

My company doesn’t allow any browser extensions to be installed on company-issued laptops. Is there any way for me to save articles to Reader?

When a helpful idea pops up during your workday, you can save it right from your work laptop so it doesn't get lost. Go to the Reader resources page and add the bookmarklet to your browser. Unlike a traditional extension that runs in the background, a bookmarklet is simply a saved link you click when you need it. It helps you capture ideas without adding extra software.

📖 New help doc of the week

Transform passive highlights into active recall

Your highlights deserve better than a quiet life in the archive. This guide shows you how to transform them into Mastery flashcards to help you resurface key ideas until they’re second nature.

Read the guide

🎬 New video of the week

Add these to your iPad

This week, we’re sharing a video from the tech reviewer FromSergio, who included Readwise and Reader in his list of 13 apps that make his iPad worth it.

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📰 Feb 14 - Feb 20 updates

What's new in Reader and Readwise

⌨️ Fixed Keyboard Shortcuts — Mati overhauled our shortcut handling. The tilde key (~) no longer switches to the info tab when you're typing in a document note, Dvorak and Colemak keyboard layouts should no longer trigger two keypresses, and the Shift+D shortcut text now correctly says "Download PDF".

🔀 Improved Google Docs Exports — Rasul fixed timeout errors in Google Docs exports by splitting large request payloads into smaller chunks. If you were seeing export failures for documents with lots of highlights, those should be resolved.

🔮 Fixed Random Sort — Arek fixed an issue where pull-to-refresh wasn't re-shuffling documents when using Random sort in Library and filtered views. Now pulling to refresh re-randomizes the order everywhere, instead of only in the Feed.

📖 Fixed Paged Titles — Arek fixed a bug where documents with very long titles could take up the entire first page in paged scroll mode, hiding the actual content. Titles are now truncated to three lines with improved support for scripts like Thai, Arabic, and Devanagari that need extra line height.

🎨 Fixed Paged Sheet — Mati fixed a bug where tapping outside the Customize Appearance sheet in paged scroll mode didn't properly close it.

📂 Fixed File Uploads — Piotr fixed an issue where uploaded files with a UTF-8 Byte Order Mark weren't being processed correctly. Now, CSV uploads and OPML imports should properly import their documents.

🎱 Fixed API Word Count — Tristan fixed a bug where documents saved via the Reader API with raw HTML always showed a word count of zero. The word count is now computed properly when the document is created.

📝 Fixed Notebook Styling — Mati fixed an issue where raw CSS style tags could leak into the notebook page view instead of being properly stripped.

🎧 Fixed Double Listen — Mati fixed a bug where long documents like EPUBs showed "Listen" twice in the action menu when Ghostreader was turned off. They now offer "Appearance" and "Listen" as options.

🏷️ Fixed Tag Icon — Arek thickened the stroke width on tag icons so they no longer look pixelated on Android tablet displays.

🟡 Fixed Extension Highlights — Piotr fixed an issue in the Safari and chromium browser extensions where the annotation popover wouldn't always appear after highlighting text on YouTube and Facebook.

💬 Fixed Highlight Chat — Piotr tracked down a bug where Chat with Highlights could stop working if it tried to reference highlights from a book you'd deleted. Broken conversations will now recover automatically the next time you send a message.

🛜 Parsing Updates — Tristan, Mati, and Krzys improved how Reader handles posts from X/Twitter. Formatting, video embeds in list digests, private/subscription tweets, and several edge cases are now handled more reliably. Private tweets should no longer get "stuck" loading, for example. Mati and Tristan also improved parsing for podcasts and alignment.anthropic.com, respectively.

👍 Three featured finds from the CX team

From support specialist Angie

Something to read 📖
Angie discovered We Found a Hat while waiting in a Marshall’s checkout line and read the whole thing. The children’s book closes Jon Klassen’s beloved hat trilogy, delivering a gentle moral about fairness and restraint that feels aimed just as much at adults as kids.

Something to focus 🖊️
Angie picked up journaling this year and accidentally fell in love with a pen: the uniball™ JETSTREAM 4&1. She used to think pens came in sad plastic packs, but this $20 gift set (with refills and extra erasers!) has her doodling and wanting to write on all surfaces non-stop.

Something to unwind 🗑️
Angie’s been leaning hard into the analog world of junk journaling, which is now drifting into sketching and collage. A small rebellion against the AI-flooded feed, and a slower way to spend time with her own thoughts.

💬 From the Readwise group chat

Watch the ducks

Seems like we can't get enough of our love for Ireland. Adam did an amazing job showing us around his side of the world during an offsite, and now we're all big fans of the craic adventures, both big and small.