💡 WiseUp! Vol. 79 — Clean up your Reader, explore the new Readwise, and upload your MD files

📍 Let's start with a reading recommendation

There will come soft rains

In 1950, haunted by the shadows burned into Hiroshima, Ray Bradbury imagined a California house that outlives its family after a nuclear blast. He set it on August 5, 2026, which is today (later editions push the date to 2057). The prose is lyrical and the imagery is devastating. "Today is August 5, 2026, today is August 5, 2026, today is..."

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.

❓ A Readwise question from Lertad S:

Did the Readwise mobile app just get updated, and what exactly has changed?

The rebuilt Readwise mobile apps make reviewing and saving highlights feel more polished, responsive, and enjoyable without changing the workflows you already know. You’ll find a refreshed Home screen, a smoother Daily Review, and new ways to capture highlights from paper books or by voice. Search, library browsing, highlight chat, and stats have also been upgraded throughout. It’s still the same Readwise, just with a more modern look and feel.

❓ A Reader question from Keith G:

Is there a way to clean outdated articles out of Reader?

The Readwise MCP or CLI can help you find outdated items in your Reader library without sorting through every saved document yourself. Ask it to review your Later and Inbox sections, flag time-sensitive content that may no longer be useful, and present everything in a numbered table. You can then choose which items should be moved to Archive, where they remain available if you need them later. Reach out to our team if you’d like a ready-to-use prompt to help you get started.

📖 New help doc of the week

Roll out the welcome mat for Markdown files

Markdown files now upload to Reader just like PDFs and EPUBs, from any entry point on web or mobile. This week's docs update covers the how, plus what to expect for the document's title and metadata once it lands.

🎬 New video of the week

Introducing Readwise 2.0

In case you missed it, we’ve shipped a bevy of updates to Readwise, including a completely fresh design that finally matches our current decade. Here’s everything new 👀

📰 July 25 - July 31 updates

What's new in Reader and Readwise

🧠 Fixed Mastery Cards on Mobile — Ibai and Tristan rebuilt Mastery card creation natively in the Readwise app, fixing reports of cards that showed a "created" toast but never actually saved. You can now create Mastery cards and review them right on your phone.

🗂️ Fixed Library Discards — Ibai brought back the Discards section in the Library, which went missing in the move to the new Readwise app. Every highlight you've discarded lives in one place again, so if you swipe one away by mistake or change your mind about it later, it's easy to rescue.

📷 Fixed Multilingual Scanning — Johannes moved the Readwise app's photo highlight scanning to a new OCR engine, so scanning book pages in languages other than English should work smoothly again. And if automatic detection can't find your marks, the app now falls back to manual selection so you can grab the passages yourself.

🖼️ Fixed Highlight Share Images — Johannes restored text sharing and dark mode in the highlight share sheet, brought back highlighted words in Classic share images, and made long highlights stay readable when exported as an image. Sharing beautiful highlight images should feel polished again.

🎚️ Fixed Review Frequency Controls — Ibai squashed a batch of frequency bugs in the Readwise app: the book review page no longer claims "Never" when it shouldn't, the review frequency slider responds properly on Android again, Themed Review frequency and schedule changes now save, and the recency slider on mobile now offers the same fine-grained steps as the web tuning slider. He also shipped a fix so Daily Review keeps working smoothly for anyone who dials recency weighting all the way down to zero.

📆 Improved Daily Review — Thanks to Ibai, highlights being reviewed for the very first time now show a small indicator (with a tooltip explaining it), so you can tell fresh material from cards you've seen before, and the frequency feedback buttons now stay visible as you move through your review. Johannes also tidied up the action icons and fixed tag navigation, so tapping a tag mid-review now takes you where you'd expect instead of looping back on itself.

🔊 Fixed Audio Highlighting — Artem fixed word-by-word highlighting drifting out of sync during text-to-speech playback on documents with custom pronunciations, so the karaoke-style following now stays aligned with what you hear. As part of this fix, ampersands are now appropriately pronounced as "and".

🧩 Improved Extension Highlighting — Adam made highlighting in the Reader browser extension more resilient: highlights now survive on sites that rewrite or wipe the page after it loads, and pages with long embedded scripts no longer stall the highlighter.

📝 Fixed Note Popovers — David fixed the note popover drifting out of position in narrow Reader windows, so your notes now open right where you expect, even in a slim side-by-side setup.

🤏 Fixed Image Zoom on Android — David rebuilt image pinch-to-zoom in the Reader app on modern native gestures, so zooming into images works smoothly on Android again.

⚡ Faster Loading — Tristan overhauled how the web app serves its assets, with content-based caching and a CDN, so pages like the Daily Review should load noticeably faster, especially on slower connections.

🔗 Fixed MCP Streaming — Tristan fixed the Readwise MCP server dropping its connection when a document contained unusual Unicode characters, so AI tools connected to your library should stay connected.

➗ Fixed Math Formulas — Krzys fixed inline math formulas getting mangled during document cleanup, so articles with mathematical notation now render their equations properly in Reader.

🐦 Improved Twitter Import Settings — Rasul made every import destination option visible when configuring how your Twitter/X bookmarks are saved, so you can see all the choices in one place instead of a partial list.

🛜 Parsing Updates — Krzys improved how Reader handles documents from mp.weixin.qq.com, reddit.com, Bluesky, hbr.org, fastcompany.com, outsideonline.com, postimees.ee, the-american-interest.com, dynamed.com, reuters.com, science.org, bain.com, g1.globo.com, and linkedin.com. Tristan also fixed saving pages from github.com.

👍 Three recommendations from our team

From Principal Designer Kris

Something to read 📖
Kris is in the middle of The Expectation Effect by David Robson. The part that got him: open-label placebos. A placebo can still work EVEN after you've been told that it's a placebo. In one study, cyclists were handed a sports supplement, told it was physiologically inert, and they still rode faster anyway. So if a certain drink or playlist or a lucky shirt makes you feel sharper, use it! Your mindset is the active ingredient.

Something to focus 🍊
Kris has jumped on the Polar seltzer bandwagon and keeps two flavors in his fridge: Black Cherry and Orange Vanilla. They have great flavor and the bubbles and hit different than your average LaCroix. They make him 20% more productive (see above).

Something to unwind 🚗
Kris has also jumped on another bandwagon: Formula 1. He's been binge watching Drive to Survive in the evenings and has gotten hooked. It is a fun combination of personalities, competition, and technology. He recommends starting with season 4, which has a strong mix of all of the above.

💬 From the Readwise group chat

Our biggest signing yet

Big news from the Irvine office: we've onboarded our most decorated intern yet. Four championships, an Olympic gold, and zero experience with Fable. So far he's been quiet in meetings, hasn't touched his onboarding checklist, and is holding up surprisingly well under pressure. Literally. He's being held up.