🎃 WiseUp! Vol. 90 — Halloween edition: Ghostreader's spooky talents and a gothic reading list

📍 Let's start with a reading recommendation

A gothic autumn reading list

We’re sharing our Halloween issue a week early so you have time to squeeze in a Gothic read. Lauren Sands of A Whimsical World has plenty to choose from: 57 Gothic novels spanning 250 years and 14 countries. This one caught our eye: The Sundial by Shirley Jackson (1958) — Apocalyptic Family Gothic: "After a death brings the spectacularly unpleasant Halloran family together at their grand estate, Aunt Fanny receives a supernatural message: the world is about to end, and only those inside the house will survive. Mystery and madness ensue."

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❓ A Readwise spooky tip from our team: 

This Halloween, bring your favorite author's words back from the dead with Chat With Your Highlights. Open Chat from your Readwise dashboard, or tap Chat With Your Highlights on the mobile app's home screen. Copy the séance prompt below to summon the author you've highlighted most and hear what lessons they think you've been ignoring. Don't be surprised if they have a few haunting words for you!

We are holding a séance. Summon the spirit of the author I have highlighted most, and let them speak to me from beyond. The spirit may ONLY speak using ideas from my actual highlights of their work, and must quote at least one of them. Speak in a cold, echoing voice from the other side. Tell me what I have failed to learn from them, and warn me what will happen if I keep ignoring it.

❓ A Reader spooky tip from our team: 

Make your reading a little more festive this Halloween by turning Ghostreader's document summaries into spooky stories. You can customize its summary prompt to give every document a haunted, campfire-story feel without changing the original text. Here's how to update your prompt and switch it back whenever you'd like. Feel free to reach out if you'd like to try the spooky prompt we've been testing on our own accounts!

📖 New help doc of the week

Is your article haunted? Ghostreader can tell

Ghostreader has always been a ghost, but now it can sense its fellows and judge whether a human wrote your article or a machine ghostwrote it. The updated AI Content Warning prompt in the Ghostreader library rates a document's haunting level from 🕯️ to 💀 and quotes the spookiest passages as evidence. Add it to Ghostreader and know what's lurking before you read.

🎬 New video of the week

The best of Stephen King

No one does eery literature quite like Stephen King. Here’s how Gavin would rank King’s work. Spoiler: #1 is one you’ve probably never heard of.

📰 Oct 10 - Oct 16 updates

What's new in Reader and Readwise

🔢 Fixed Clipped List Numbers in EPUBs — In some EPUBs opened in the Reader app, the book’s own styling pulled numbered and bulleted lists flush with the paragraph text, which pushed the numbers out into the page margin where a phone screen cuts them off. Mati restored Reader’s list indent so the numbers stay on the page next to their text.

▶️ Fixed Listen Starting Point — Tapping Listen partway through a document you hadn’t listened to before could jump the Reader app to the top and start reading from the first sentence, then leap back down to your spot a few seconds later. Tristan made Reader wait for the right starting point before it begins playing, so listening starts where you were reading.

🖼️ Fixed Blank Pages for Articles With Clickable Graphics — Saved pages that contain clickable graphics (links drawn as SVG), some blog posts among them, never rendered in the Reader app on iPhone or iPad and the article just sat on a blank screen. Tristan fixed the link check that tripped over those graphics, so these articles open and read normally on mobile.

🔽 Fixed Collapsible Sections on Mobile — Articles with collapsible sections (the HTML details element) expanded fine in Reader on web, but on iPhone and iPad tapping a section’s label did nothing. Thanks to Tristan, tapping the label in the Reader app now expands and collapses the section, without toggling the reader menu or turning the page along the way.

👉 Fixed iPad Toolbar Swiping — Swiping the modern toolbar in the Reader app to move to the next or previous document didn’t register on iPad, where the wider toolbar quietly demanded a much longer drag than on a phone. Tristan matched the swipe threshold to the iPad layout, so a swipe on the toolbar should carry you to the next document again.

👆 Fixed Tapping Away From Highlight Menus — With the toolbars tucked away in the Reader app, tapping blank text to close a highlight menu also counted as a regular reader tap, so the top and bottom bars sprang back into view every time. Artem made that tap do one thing only: the menu closes and the bars stay hidden, so you can keep reading without the chrome popping up.

⏳ Fixed Jumpy Loading in the Lookup Sheet — Opening Define or Lookup on a word in the Reader app showed a “Generating” spinner that visibly hopped upward a moment later, once the sheet’s footer row appeared beneath it. Artem reserved that footer’s space from the first frame, so the sheet now holds still while the definition loads.

📧 Fixed Repeat ChatGPT Emails — After saving your first ChatGPT insights to Readwise, the welcome email celebrating that first save kept arriving again every time another highlight landed in the same conversation. Tristan fixed the check so Readwise sends that email once, when the conversation is first saved, and then leaves your inbox alone.

💳 Fixed Checkout for 3D Secure Cards — Upgrading on readwise.io with a card whose bank requires an extra confirmation step (3D Secure, the “approve this payment in your banking app” check) failed every time with a cryptic Stripe error, no matter which card or browser you tried. Ibai added support for that step, so checkout now shows your bank’s approval screen and finishes the upgrade once you confirm. Cards that don’t need the check work exactly as before.

🐦 Fixed Embedded Tweets in RSS — Twitter list digests and other RSS documents with embedded tweets in Reader lost their card formatting, with the name, handle, and footer of each tweet breaking out of place. Tristan taught Reader’s paragraph cleanup for RSS articles to leave tweet cards alone, so embedded tweets look right again.

📰 Improved Economist Articles — Articles from economist.com saved to Reader arrived with extra clutter at the end, the subtitle under the headline went missing, pullquotes showed up as stray duplicate paragraphs, and some photo essays came through with captions but none of the photos. Krzys rebuilt the parsing rules for the Economist’s current article pages, so articles come through clean with their subtitle and pullquotes in place, and photo essays keep every picture. A save made while logged out of the Economist now shows the “couldn’t fetch full content” banner, so you can tell the rest is behind the paywall rather than missing.

🎧 Fixed Podcast Episode Mix-ups — Some podcast feeds, The Tim Ferriss Show’s blog feed among them, publish a new episode post carrying the previous episode’s audio file and quietly correct it later. Reader kept whatever it saw first, so the episode showed the wrong title and played the wrong show. Krzys taught Reader to pick up the publisher’s correction and move the episode onto the right audio, so these episodes now carry the right title and play the right show.

🇵🇹 Offsite #10 — Most of our team gathered in Portugal this week to meet new faces, hang out, and hack on projects together. We’ll catch up on replies soon!

🛜 Parsing Updates — Krzys improved how Reader handles documents from derstandard.at, community.openai.com, GoodNotes, sspai.com, El Mundo, cen.acs.org, zeit.de, and newsletters from Kill the Newsletter, and Tristan fixed article titles from Colossus.

👍 Three spooky recommendations from our team

👻

Something to read 📖
Tristan recommends There Is No Antimemetics Division for a haunted read. In his words: "it's not Halloween themed, but is the spookiest book i’ve read."

Something to watch 🎥
Careful what you wish for! Angie loved this horror movie and recommended it to the team. Obsession has a very self-explanatory name and really high scores in Rotten Tomatoes.

Something to listen 🎧
If you love a good scary story to chill after a long day's work, try The NoSleep Podcast. Romi guarantees it's a fun way to be terrified!

💬 From the Readwise group chat

Ok.

Ouija boards promise contact with the great beyond, but if you ever manage to summon a dad, this is the entire conversation. You ask who’s there, and one word drags across the board: “ok.” Spirit confirmed. It’s dad, and he designed this airport kiosk.