💡 WiseUp! Vol. 69 — New lookup in Reader and how to bulk restore deleted documents

📍 Let's start with a reading recommendation

‘Mind-blowing’ baby chick study challenges a theory of how humans evolved language

Lovers of books tend to be lovers of language, which is why this piece caught our eye. It explores how certain sounds feel intuitively tied to certain shapes: “Why does ‘bouba’ sound round and ‘kiki’ sound spiky? This intuition that ties certain sounds to shapes is oddly reliable all over the world. For at least a century scientists have considered this reliability a clue to the origin of language, theorizing that maybe our ancestors built their first words on these instinctive associations between sound and meaning.”

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 Derek G:

Is there a way to get a reminder from the Readwise widget to complete my Daily Review?

On iOS, you can turn on Daily Review reminders by long pressing the widget, selecting Edit Widget, and enabling Receive Notification. If you haven’t finished your Daily Review yet, the widget will display your first highlight alongside a helpful prompt so you can open the Daily Review inside of the Readwise app. If you don’t have the widget installed, you can find directions on how to add it here.

❓ A Reader question from Erik U:

I accidentally deleted a lot of my documents. Is there a way to bulk restore them?

You can restore everything from your Trash all at once along with any highlights and notes attached to them. Just open the Trash from the left-hand sidebar and click Restore all in the lower left corner to return the entire list to your Library. One thing to keep in mind is that the Trash is device-specific, so you'll need to restore the document from the same device where it was originally deleted.

📖 New help doc of the week

Adjust text direction for multilingual reading

Reader defaults to left-to-right text, but not every language does. This week’s documentation update walks you through flipping text direction for RTL languages like Arabic and Hebrew, whether you’re reading on desktop or mobile.

🎬 New video of the week

What did Ralph Waldo Emerson, Virginia Woolf and C.S. Lewis have in common?

These prolific authors all kept a commonplace book, where they organized snippets of literature and ideas into an easily searchable index. This week we’re sharing a tutorial from Greg Wheeler on how to assemble your own (using Readwise of course 🤭)

📰 May 16 - May 22 updates

What's new in Reader and Readwise

🆕 NEW! Lookup in Reader — Reader now has a dedicated way to look things up without leaving the page. Previously, defining a word, translating text, or getting a bit of context on an unfamiliar name meant reaching for a Ghostreader preset prompt: selecting the text, opening Ghostreader, and running the right prompt. It also added the response as a highlight note, which could clutter up the notebook when you just wanted a quick definition. Lookup turns that into a single step. Select any word or phrase and Reader explains it right away in a dedicated lookup panel. Props to Adam for spearheading this feature!

📚 Fixed Kobo Duplicate Highlights — Rasul fixed a bug where importing from Kobo could pile up thousands of duplicate copies of the same highlight. Kobo imports now recognize highlights you already have using Kobo's own stable annotation ID, so your library stays clean.

📥 Fixed Library Imports — Rasul fixed an issue where Readwise was treating the notes field as required in Library exports, causing note-less highlights to halt the entire import. Highlights without notes now import normally, so all your Library highlights sync through reliably again.

📄 Improved Export Reliability — Rasul shored up three export integrations. A Google Docs export no longer fails outright when a single image can't be embedded, allowing the rest of the document to still come through. Notion exports now stop cleanly when a database is misconfigured, instead of generating hundreds of broken pages. And when your Microsoft connection has expired, OneNote exports now send you a clear prompt to reconnect rather than failing quietly.

🔊 Fixed Audio Daily Review Stalling — Mati fixed a bug where an audio Daily Review could stall mid-playback when the next segment was still being generated. The player now waits and resumes from where it left off, so audio reviews play smoothly from start to finish.

⚡ Faster Audio Daily Reviews — Piotr removed an unnecessary ten-second pause baked into audio Daily Review generation. Your audio review should now be ready noticeably sooner.

📑 Fixed Re-Importing Deleted Articles — Previously, if you imported articles by CSV, deleted some, then tried to import them again, the importer skipped them as duplicates. Thanks to Tristan's fix, CSV imports (Instapaper, Matter, and custom) now ignore deleted documents, so you can re-import an article after deleting it.

✅ Fixed Daily Reviews Not Completing on Mobile — Tristan tracked down why a Daily Review finished in the mobile app would sometimes not register as done, causing progress and streak credit to quietly go missing. Completed Daily Reviews on mobile now reliably register as finished.

🔗 Fixed Highlight Webhooks — Rasul fixed a bug where some highlight webhooks silently stopped firing, so new highlights synced in from Reader weren't triggering the readwise.highlight.created event that powers Zapier and custom automations. Affected webhooks now repair themselves, so your automations receive new highlights reliably again.

🛜 Parsing Updates — Krzys improved how Reader handles documents from The Verge, Reuters, Substack, and Medium, and now routes X.com /article/ links through the Twitter parser so long-form X posts come through cleanly.

👍 Three featured finds from the team

From community manager Erin

Something to read 📖
While she loves her full-length novels, Erin’s enjoyed rotating in some quirky short-stories from T.C. Boyle’s If The River Were Whiskey. If you enjoy obscure, mildly uncanny situations, you’ll probably enjoy it too. So far, "Sinking House" is her favorite in the anthology.

Something to focus 🍊
Now that things are heating up in NYC, Erin’s reconvening with her iced coffee. This orange sparkling coffee has been a welcome twist.

Something to unwind 🕯️
Erin admits she spent way too much money on this candle, but the scent lingered in her memory months after she first smelled it in the Byredo store. If you love the smell of sea salt, basil, and tomato vines, you might spend $95 on it too.

💬 From the Readwise group chat

First line is free

The real AI safety risk nobody's talking about: pricing tiers. Once you need it like water and gas, they start sharing the bill!