Book Freak #229: The Social Construction of Reality

A discusion betweem the authors of “The Quantified Self” and ”The Great Remembering”

In the early 1990s, I was an editor at Wired. It was an exciting time because the internet was new to most people. My colleagues were young, creative, curious, and smart, but two of them stood out: Gary Wolf and June Cohen.

At Wired, Gary wrote some of the magazine’s best long-form features, including the incredible saga of Ted Nelson’s Xanadu hypertext system, which I mentioned in The Magnet. At Hotwired, June developed many of the templates and best practices for the early web that still shape the web today. She later co-founded TED Talks.

On November 4, June and Gary came to Village Well Books & Coffee in Culver City to talk about their new books. Gary’s is The Quantified Self: Learning to Observe. June’s is The Great Remembering: Powerful Ancient Practices — and the New Science Bringing Them Back. The books have fascinating things in common, and that’s what Gary and June talked about that evening. They also took questions from the audience.

Below is a cleaned-up transcript of their talk, along with the audience questions.

---

JUNE: Could you define the quantified self for people here?

GARY: The quantified self originated in a community that came together to share how they were learning about themselves through their own data. Self-tracking, self-measurement: what do you do, how do you do it, and what do you learn? Over time, it became a knowledge-sharing community. Quantified self practice, which we also call personal science, brings a scientific mindset to everyday life.

Why so much science?

GARY: Ancient practices don’t necessarily need science. They didn’t originate with science. Why is there so much science in this book?

JUNE: First of all: It’s funny to be talking to you about the past, because my whole life I’ve been a girl in the future. I put TED Talks online when YouTube was three months old. But I stopped believing that technology could solve the world’s problems, and I started wondering what the ancients could teach us about how to live today.

Second… I didn’t set out to write a science book. I set out to write a book on ancient wisdom. It was probably a year in, and I was like, “Oh, I think I’m writing a science book.” So many of the practices I was looking at are validated by new science. They weren’t superstitions or even traditions. They were very specific solutions.

Scientists in Finland were the first to prove, only about 12 years ago, the profound health benefits of the sauna and the cold plunge. Before that, it was actually thought that the sauna was really dangerous for your heart. In fact, it’s great for heart health, your lungs, and preventing dementia. Scientists in Japan, around 15 years ago, were the first to prove the physiological benefits of forest bathing, or time in nature. If you spend just 20 minutes in the green space of a park, not even wilderness, you will lower your cortisol, your inflammation, your blood pressure. You’ll improve your mood and your sleep. If you increase it to an hour, you’ll increase your working memory by 20 percent.

Science is how we skeptical Westerners believe what we know in our bodies. I grew up in a house surrounded by trees that my dad planted with his own hands. When I read the forest bathing studies, I was like, I know in my bones that that’s true. And now science tells me it’s true. I can prescribe it to myself now.

Science belongs to all of us

JUNE: How are you talking about science in your book, Gary?

GARY: In your everyday life you’re not submitting your ideas to peer review, nor are you waiting 5 or 10 or 15 years for them to become consensus knowledge. So I use science as a synonym for empirical practice: observing, reasoning, and explaining.

Science is a skilled practice. There are concert pianists; there are people who make money playing sports. You have professional scientists with tremendous skills. But if nobody did music unless you were a professional concert musician, there would be no cultural foundation. People use empirical practice to troubleshoot all kinds of things, like when they’re putting their hand on a child’s forehead. But when it comes to our health, we ofust stay in trial-and-error mode.

One of the things that’s really troubling about trial and error is that you do something, and it works, and it makes you super happy. Then, after a while, it stops working. Now you have a question. Did it not really work? Or did it work for a while and then stop because something else changed? That’s where a scientific mindset can really help.

Why cold water feels so good

GARY: I was interviewing a man on the very northern coast of Poland, on the Baltic, in January, when there was snow on the beach. He said, ” Okay, now we’re gonna go swimming.” I thought, ” Today is my day; I’m going to die. He said, “You had a very big chance of dying on the road behind that farm equipment, but going into this water, you’re not going to die.” So I went in, and I experienced the most intense euphoria. It’s in the top ten most euphoric experiences I’ve ever had in my life. Could you explain why?

JUNE: We think of the sauna and the cold plunge as pampering. But to the ancients it was a revolutionary, life-saving technology. It appeared for at least 10,000 years across five continents in exactly the same form: the Finnish sauna, the Russian banya, the Japanese mushiburo, and the Native American sweat lodge. And always paired with cold water. High heat kills microbes. Cold kills inflammation. It also fills you with a flood of good feelings.

After the pandemic especially, everyone was cold plunging and saying it was great for their depression, their anxiety, their trauma. And there was no science. None. Science had only been asking: “Can cold water kill you, and how fast?” Not, “Can cold water cure your depression?”

I lay out in the book about ten things that happen when you get into cold water that help your mental health. If you have ruminating thoughts, cold water immediately pulls the plug on them. Try it in a cold shower. Then you have this flood of adrenaline. Colors seem brighter, and sounds are louder. You feel super alive. Then you have a rush of endorphins, your body’s own pain reliever. But endorphins don’t only relieve physical pain. They relieve mental pain. They calm your fear center and give you a sense of elation. It’s why endorphins cause the runner’s high. And you’ve also done something really challenging, so you have that emotional triumph.

I went to Europe for the wild saunas, perched on riverbanks, in Oslo harbor, and on Brighton beach. Going from a sauna on a river’s edge, with the smell of the cedar and the prickly heat, into a river where it’s cold and loud and it hurts. I hate the cold. But then you get out, and you’ve never felt more alive. That’s one of the top two experiences of my life.

Small discoveries

JUNE: Tell us a few stories of how people do personal science.

GARY: There’s a story in the book about a computer scientist who’s tracking his diet. He changes a few things, and he loses weight slowly, nicely, effectively over a couple of years. Then, for unexplained reasons, his weight starts to come back. He has calendar entries showing where he’s working: part-time in Pennsylvania and part-time in California. He finds out that he gains weight entirely when he’s in California. California is supposed to be healthier than Pennsylvania, but in this case it was not. Then he finds out he gains all the weight when he spends weeks at a certain desk in the building. He hasn’t changed his habits, but he’s around different snacks at the snack station.

Another one I love is a soccer coach who is also a high school counselor and ends up concussed. One symptom is irritability, and you can’t be irritable if you’re a high school counselor. She goes to psychotherapy, and they get into what’s making her angry, but she knows that’s probably not the answer, because it only happened after her concussion. She kept very good but relatively simple notes about when she felt the most irritated. They were almost all in the late afternoon, in the winter in the Southwest. Where she works, there are big windows, and very harsh light came in starting around three o’clock.

Nobody’s going to win a Nobel Prize for discovering “I’m especially irritable around these open windows at three o’clock in the Southwest.” But it’s extremely important, because you could go down a completely different path and spend a long time on it without making any progress.

I can’t resist one little anecdote. A psychology professor, Allen Neuringer, kept track of his research ideas on index cards. He noted on the back whether he was sitting down or walking around when he had the idea. He put them in a drawer and waited months. Then he pulled them out, only looked at the front, and put them in two piles: still a good idea, no longer a good idea. You have better ideas when you wander around.

Learning to observe

GARY: The book’s subtitle is “Learning to Observe.” There are an infinite number of things you could observe, so the skill is deciding what to observe. Headaches seem really obvious. You feel them. But how long do they last? If I had one for a while and then noticed it again, is that one headache or two? One solution is for people to track how many aspirins they take.

A lot of people in quantified self had scientific and technical skills, and sometimes their skills actually got in their way. They’d say, “I have a digestion problem; I’m going to track everything I eat.” It’s a big ask. After a couple of weeks of trying to track every single thing you put in your mouth, you’re very likely to give up. So focus on what you can track that’s relevant, varies a little, and is noticeable and measurable. If you can keep track of that, you’re really on your way.

JUNE: It reminds me of a saying I’ve heard from a Chinese medicine doctor I go to: 80 percent is perfection. If you try to do everything, you’ll exhaust yourself and burn out.

From the audience

Q: I’ve heard just putting your face in cold water is helpful. Is that the same as a cold plunge?

JUNE: There’s something really interesting and weird about putting your face in water. It’s actually the exact opposite response. When you go into cold water, your body is asking, “How do I not die?” But when you put just your face in cold water, it’s called the mammalian diver response. When our distant ancestors would dive into the water, their bodies would calm so they could preserve their air. So when I do a cold plunge, I don’t dunk my head. But if you then dunk your face, it gives you this double action: awakening the body while calming it at the same time.

Q: What habits do you do differently?

GARY: I have this very easy background record-keeping. It’s just sitting there for when I need it later. People ask me what the value of wearable devices is, because they don’t actually tell you that much. To really learn something, you have to decide what you want to observe and ask your own questions. But they’re really nice for background data.

JUNE: What I’ve learned about endorphins has completely changed my life. We get double endorphins when we do things together. They tested rowers alone on a rowing machine, and when the whole team got on rowing machines, it doubled their endorphins. That’s why I can’t do yoga on my living room floor, but I love going to yoga class. They could have called it the choir singer’s high, because we get endorphins anytime we synchronize: when we sing together, line dance together, belly laugh together. So anytime I’m stuck or feeling despair, I ask, “What’s the human thing I need to do? Do I need to run? Do I need to sing? Do I need to call a friend?”

Q: What do you think is lost when these practices become consumer tech products?

GARY: I think a lot. What really makes personal science work is being able to articulate your own question. Did you take 10,000 steps a day? That’s a perfectly nice answer to have if you care a lot about taking 10,000 steps a day. But it doesn’t exhaust the possibilities of self-discovery. I’ve given talks to really well-informed audiences and had people say their approach to self-discovery is going to be: take a nap and wait for the next model. I just don’t see it. I think this is almost a tragic mistake being made right now. We need to hold on to our questions.

Q: How do you both think about the placebo effect?

JUNE: It’s sometimes framed as the villain in science. But it’s actually one of the most powerful tools we have for healing: the human body deciding it’s going to heal. If a patient in the hospital thinks pain reliever is coming in through an IV, their body will actually start to release their own endorphins. There’s a great book, a textbook literally called Placebo Effects, by Fabrizio Benedetti. I could read it all day.

GARY: I put the placebo effect in the bucket of all those things that make us doubt our observations. And the way you handle it is you do some more observations. If you try something and it works, you’re very happy about that. You’re not really going to worry about the placebo effect until it stops working.

Q: Tell us about how the quantified self community started.

GARY: My editor, Kevin Kelly, and I pulled together some people we knew were using their own personal data to reflect on themselves. They were all in a room at Kevin’s studio in Pacifica, and somebody walked in, and Kevin said, “Okay, you came in last; you go first.” Instead of introducing himself in a normal way, he opened his computer and showed a detailed time diary of everything he’d done in the last year, in 15-minute increments. And we were just like, what? At one point, there were over 100 independently organized meetings in 30 cities worldwide.

Q: What’s your dream impact from your book?

JUNE: For centuries, we’ve modeled ourselves after machines. We’re supposed to be productive, efficient, and logical. But humans aren’t machines. Our human operating system is fleshy, emotional, and illogical, and we’ve kind of forgotten how to operate it. But the beauty is it’s easy to remember, and it’s joyful. When we sing, dance, laugh, feast together, we literally bond with each other. I really hope we remember that we don’t have to agree on everything. We can go out, sing, dance, and laugh together, and trust each other more the next day.

GARY: We’re in a moment where machines seem really powerful, but I think they’re not as powerful as they seem. I’ve been reading a philosopher named Miranda Fricker, who wrote a book called Epistemic Injustice. She says being recognized as somebody capable of making knowledge and of reasoning underlies our other human rights. There’s a lot of joy in it. It’s very fun to think together about something. I don’t think we should give that up.

---

The books:

• The Quantified Self: Learning to Observe by Gary Wolf
• The Great Remembering: Powerful Ancient Practices — and the New Science Bringing Them Back by June Cohen (Authors Equity, October 20, 2026)

Mentioned in the talk:

• Placebo Effects by Fabrizio Benedetti
• Epistemic Injustice by Miranda Fricker

---

Book Freak is published by Cool Tools Lab, a small company of three people. We also run Recomendo, the Cool Tools website, a YouTube channel and podcast, and other newsletters, including Recomendo Deals, Gar’s Tips & Tools, Nomadico, What’s in my NOW?, Tools for Possibilities, Books That Belong On Paper, and Book Freak.

11/13/26

GuruWalk City Tours/Moving to Italy/Sad Train Station

Nomadico issue #232

GuruWalk Tours for City Intros

The “free walking tour” model is well-established, though it’s a misnomer since you’re expected to tip the guide at the end: it’s the only way the person earns any income. GuruWalk seems to offer more of them than anyone. We’ve used them in Seoul, Kuala Lumpur, and Chiang Mai on this trip, then on two other continents before that. Guide quality has ranged from decent to fantastic. The company says the average guest tips 10 to 20 euros. Be more generous and you’re still well below what a regular tour would cost.

Parcel Shipping Comparison Services

If you need to get a package from A to B but don’t want to visit multiple websites to compare courier prices, there are services that will do that for you. Reader Nicole Tirabassi recommends Parcel2Go for UK residents and if you’re in the USA, try ParcelMonkey. For both, you can find domestic rates and international ones. (Nicole also sells an e-book on essential apps to save you money and trouble when you move abroad. See the info here.)

Relocation Atlas for Italy

One highly recommended Substack to check out for in-depth analysis of the less-covered aspects of the nomad life and moving abroad is Nomag. The editor is based in Italy and just launched an ambitious resource for anyone looking to move there. The Relocation Atlas aims to “make Italy’s fragmented landscape of incentives and opportunities easier to navigate.” Yes, the headlines about houses for one euro and schemes paying you to settle somewhere may be true, but finding them is tough and figuring out if they make sense for you is harder still. This is a great start.

The Saddest Train Station I’ve Been To

I’ve traveled a good bit on Amtrak and I’ve traversed India by train, but I can’t remember a worse train station to kill time in than the one in Padang Besar I was in recently, on the border of Malaysia and Thailand when we were overnighting to Bangkok. That border is the main problem: there’s nothing else around that you can walk to. But while Malaysia is usually teeming with places to eat and drink everywhere, this station has no cafe and no coffee shop—just a couple of vending machines that don’t take credit cards and say “No change given” in four languages. Oh, and the station is not air conditioned, in a place that’s steaming hot all year. I’m usually team train all the way, but with flights being so cheap in Asia, it wasn’t worth the novelty.

---

* Reminder: We’re going to release The Best of Nomadico, the First 4 Years e-book this month and paid subscribers will get it for free. We’re also going to start restricting some content to subscribers only, so if you’ve just been a follower on the app, please join us for real as a free or paid subscriber if you like what you see here. We appreciate it!

---

A weekly newsletter with four quick bites, edited by Tim Leffel, author of A Better Life for Half the Price and The World’s Cheapest Destinations. See past editions here, where your like-minded friends can subscribe and join you.

11/12/26

What’s in my NOW? — Bill Mize

issue #278

I’m an award winning fiction writer, award nominated podcaster, a former Fortune 500 consultant, Air Force Veteran and tabletop gamer. I spend my retirement in a small town in Kentucky, trying to figure out what to do with all this free time. You can see all this random creativity in action at my website, williammize.com. I’m on most socials as “@thatbillmize” but hardly use them, or use them poorly. — Bill Mize

---

PHYSICAL

• A Confederacy of Dunces. A faded and dog-eared Black Cat edition of John Kennedy Toole’s Pulitzer Prize winning novel, “A Confederacy of Dunces”. Why? It got me a wife. We met on match.com almost two decades ago, and in her first email to me, she mentioned the watch I was wearing in my photo had “theology and geometry”, and I nearly fell out of my seat. I wrote back immediately and accused her of using a phrase from one of my favorite novels. She doubled down and told me it was one of hers as well. We’ve been together 16 years this October, thanks to Ignatius J. Reilly.
• Call of Cthulhu. The 1981 edition of Chaosium’s role playing game, “The Call of Cthulhu”. It was the first tabletop game that I purchased. Everyone else was into Dungeons and Dragons, but I wanted to play regular humans, forming a team and fighting the good fight against cosmic, eldritch Lovecraftian evil. My original boxed set got lost during my many moves while serving in the Air Force, but this reproduction scratches that nostalgic itch of many, many hours with good friends at The Fandom Zone comic book store in Tampa, Florida.
• Chessex Vortex Green gaming dice. When one is taking on evil cultists bent on taking over the world, and the accompanying Elder Gods trying to destroy said world, you really need a good set of dice, and I am irrationally attracted to this one set. The green is so bright it almost glows, the black high contrast numbers for these 65 year old eyes! My favorite among the hundreds of dice I own.

---

DIGITAL

• FocusWriter. A distraction free, minimalist word processing program. Sure, I plan my novels, stories, podcasts and gaming sessions in Scrivener, but this one also scratches my need for simplicity and functionality. It’s no longer supported for Mac, so I hold on to it for dear life. Bonus points that I can skin it to look like WordStar, my very first word processing program that I wrote my first novel on while attending San Francisco State University.
• Owlbear Rodeo. A simple to use, free Virtual Tabletop. Most of the games I play and run now are online, via Discord, after COVID killed my local, long running table, and most games use what is called “Theater of the Mind”, which is a fancy term for “Just use your imagination”, but sometimes you need to show your players a map, a photo, a handout, or something that is going to be used to evoke fear and terror, or just can’t be easily described. Open up Owlbear Rodeo, create a table, create a scene, throw the image up there and share it, and you’re golden. The site also has a very inexpensive paid plan which is well, well worth it for both one shot games and long term campaigns.

---

INVISIBLE

Christian D. Larson’s “The Optimist’s Creed”:

After drifting away from Christianity about 40 years ago, I found myself influenced by New Thought and Positive Thinking authors. “The Optimist’s Creed” was written by Christian D. Larson, a prolific writer of the time, back in 1912, in his book “Your Forces and How To Use Them”. The Optimist International club adopted the creed in 1922. I try to read it at least a few times a week, and use it as a counterweight and something to remember as I now make my way back to Christ.

---

Sign up here to get What’s in my NOW? a week early in your inbox.

11/11/26

Darth Vader and Son / White Heat 25

Issue No. 143

DARTH VADER AND SON GIVES US A FUNNY PEEK AT VADER’S HYPOTHETICAL DADDY SIDE

Darth Vader and Son
by Jeffrey Brown
Chronicle Books
2012, 64 pages, 6.8 x 6.8 x 0.2 inches

Buy on Amazon

Darth Vader and Son is cute, and perfect for the little Star Wars fan in your life. It playfully posits the question “What if Darth Vader had actually raised Luke?” Author and illustrator Jeffrey Brown turns run-of-the-mill parenting activities into fun moments full of Star Wars references.

This book isn’t so much a story as it is a peek into the hypothetical everyday life of Vader and Luke. Every page of the book tells its own complete story of sorts. Some pages are miniature comics while others are full-page illustrations. Brown does an incredible job of telling his story in these single images. I imagine this book would be great for children just learning to read, similar to how the Owly books help develop a sense of story without the need for lines and lines of text. If you have a child that enjoys books but isn’t yet able to read longer children’s books with more words, Darth Vader and Son is a great compromise. At 64 pages it is long enough to be engaging for an extended period of time, but you can basically jump in and out of the book at any point.

Brown’s art style is colorful and light, reminiscent of childhood crayon drawings. Darth Vader always looks slightly goofy, which goes a long way to establish the tone of the book. The drawings include a number of visual references to the Star Wars films that will delight anyone with the eye to catch them (and there’s something on almost every page, so have fun looking for everything). Possibly the funniest parts are seeing Darth Vader engaged in totally mundane tasks like making breakfast or wrapping Luke’s birthday present. It’s a side to the character we’ve never had the opportunity to see, and Brown plays on the quirkiness perfectly. Overall, Darth Vader and Son is a fun read for adult Star Wars fans who like a good laugh, as well as for children just learning to love these characters. This book is actually the first in a series, so if you like it be sure to check out Vader’s Little Princess, Goodnight Darth Vader, and Darth Vader and Friends. – Alex Strine

---

WHITE HEAT 25 – A COOKBOOK ABOUT A SLEEP-DEPRIVED, NICOTINE-FUELED MAD MAN IN THE KITCHEN

White Heat 25
by Marco Pierre White (author) and Bob Carlos Clarke (photographer)
Mitchell Beazley
2015, 192 pages, 9.9 x 12.5 x 0.8 inches

Buy on Amazon

White Heat has long been my White Whale when searching through used bookstores. I’ve wanted this book for going on ten years. The first time I heard the name Marco Pierre White I had been reading a copy of Anthony Bourdain’s Kitchen Confidential, wondering if I had what it takes to be a professional chef (I did not). Bourdain mentioned White’s book, saying that it was the first time he’d seen a “real” chef in a cookbook, a sleep-deprived, nicotine-fueled, mad man in the kitchen.

I thought that I’d finally found my copy when there was a re-release a few years back, but that paperback copy is the TV dinner to this 25th anniversary edition’s three-course meal. Can a home cook use any of these recipes? Maybe. The recipes are French. They’re complicated. And the ingredients include things like caviar, lobster, and pig trotter. But, the mistake is to think of this as a straight-up cookbook. You wouldn’t flip through a book on Picasso and expect to learn how to paint. This book is evidence in the argument that food can be art.

While you might not find a recipe for something to cook on a Tuesday night, you will find: Beautiful, gritty, black and white photography that makes you feel like you’re in the kitchen with this lunatic. A chef doing what chefs do, smoke. The word “fuck” on more than one page. A fresh-faced Gordon Ramsey before he started calling people “donkeys.” And a handful of recipes for dishes that allowed White to become the youngest chef to hold three Michelin Stars. White Heat 25 is fitting for any bookshelf, coffee table, or kitchen counter. – JP LeRoux

---

Books That Belong On Paper first appeared on the web as Wink Books and was edited by Carla Sinclair. Sign up here to get the issues a week early in your inbox.

11/10/26

Bike Racks

Tools for Possibilities: issue no. 215

Hybrid handlebar and basket

Origin8 CargoUnit

The Origin8 CargoUnit is a great piece of “why did this take so long” common sense technology. These are handle bars that have an integrated basket which is large enough to hold a bike lock, a grocery bag, and anything else that will fit. The construction is rugged, true to Origin8’s line of strong/light components.

These are superior to any number of bolt-on accessories because the basket is part of the handlebars. Aftermarket baskets bounce, come loose, and scratch up the finish of whatever they’re attached to. Because the basket is one with the handlebars, there is none of that. Plus, there’s no way to steal the basket as they are welded together.

Speaking of the weld, these are not toys. The gauge of the tubing and the strength of the joints are on par with pro equipment. This product is serious, and comes at a rise & width to replace bars on fixies, hybrids, or even BMX geometries. — James Roche

---

Durable frontside bike cargo platform

CETMAracks

I don’t own a car, so when I go to the store for large quantities of beer or buckets of cat litter I use the CETMA, a lightweight steel rack that’s tough as nails. I know a couple messengers that have crashed and the rack took the brunt of the force dishing it out to car doors or whatever obstacle happened to be there, and the rack only absorbed a slight crinkle or bend without compromising anything at all in it’s performance. I’ve been using a CETMArack for a couple years and currently have a 5-rail on my ’81 single speed, all-weather utility grocery coffee shop beer bike (a 3-rail is plenty big enough if you only plan an occasional twelve pack or a couple library books; they also offer a 7-rail version!). Keeping the load up front over the front wheel lets you control the weight a bit more and doesn’t bog down like a rear rack. You cannot ride like you normally would, hopping curbs or diving into corners when you have 27 pounds of cat litter on the front. But it’s good to get a change of pace once in a while; a gravity reminder keeps you humble. I also like CETMAracks because of the guy who makes them. Made by hand in Eugene, OR. No outsourcing. No overseas production. And now they even include home-baked cookies with your order. — Mark Pilder

---

Urban bike hauling

Grocery Bag Panniers

Most bicycle panniers work well for touring, but don’t meet the needs of people who use their bikes for commuting or shopping everyday. The typical pannier has a main compartment sealed with a zipper or flap, plus a few smaller pockets. The tourist packs it like a hiker would pack a backpack. However, these bags don’t easily hold the urban cyclists’ cargo of shopping bags, daypacks, and laptop computers. An open-topped pannier that works more like a basket than a backpack provides a better way of carrying this kind of gear. These large bags, usually called grocery bag panniers, or shopping panniers, allow you to carry all kinds of oddly-shaped loads and fold flat when not in use. The key to using shopping bag panniers is to keep your gear in a separate bag that you can drop into the pannier. Day packs or book bags work well. I’ve used dry bags when it rains, but have found that plastic garbage bags are easier and cheaper. Having an open-topped bag also gives you a quick place to toss your bike lock, and the convenient access makes it easier to shed clothing layers as you warm up.

Several companies make them. The Jandd grocery bag pannier seems to be the sturdiest, but is also the most expensive, at around US$45 for a single pannier. REI sells a similar, but less refined, bag for US$80 per pair. My favorites, which I use everyday, are the Nashbar Townie baskets, which cost US$17 each. Unlike the other grocery bag panniers, they don’t use a rectangular metal frame to reinforce the top of the bag. This means that they don’t hold their shape quite as well as the others, but it lets the opening at the top adjust to different shaped cargo, like a bulky laptop bag. They’re cheap enough that I leave them on the bike all the time, but they remove quickly enough that I can conveniently take one with me to carry stuff while the bike is parked. — Tom Sackett

---

Front child bike seat

WeeRide Kangaroo Carrier

Traveling through other countries, we’ve often noticed child cycling carriers where the child sits forward of the rider — this allows them better visibility and puts them in reach/view of the rider, unlike seats that mount to a rear rack. My sister even went as far as to bring one back from the UK to use with her kids. We hunted, but couldn’t find the same thing in the US until two years ago. Now we use it once or twice a week when weather permits. Aside from being a much safer and secure version of the one my sister has, the WeeRide Kangaroo has some other very clear advantages.

The injection-molded seat mounts to an extremely sturdy bar that clamps to the seat post and steerer tube. This allows the seat to be removed quickly and easily when not in use. This is done by unscrewing a single large bolt. Also, the carrier features a padded “face pad” which 1) keeps your passenger from messing with your handlebars and controls; 2) protects your passenger from smacking his/her face on the handlebars (assuming you left the four-point harness too loose); and 3) gives your passenger a natural place to rest his/her head when sleeping. In addition, the Kangaroo’s foot cups are adjustable and flexible, but I’ve never seen a child get his/her toes anywhere near the front wheel.

A few caveats: The harness probably has six feet more webbing than it really needed, but I was able to clean up ours with a handful of safety pins. The seat is wide enough you have to ride somewhat bow-legged, but you get used to it pretty quickly. The footrests don’t go down far enough for larger children. Don’t expect to fit a three-year-old kid into it.

Our youngest just turned one, so we have at least another season with it, which we’ll relish: We love being able to interact more with our passenger, and I’m sure the kid likes the view a whole lot better. — Yitah Wu

---

Bicycle truck

Xtracycle

This kit transforms a regular bike into an SUB (sports utility bike) by extending back the rear wheel and adding a seat and baggage platform. I’ve had my SUB for two years now. I find it makes owning a car completely unnecessary! I’ve transported my folding kayak on it. I’ve taken my girlfriend and her Australian Blue Heeler on it. I’ve moved furniture. It’s crazy how stable it is. In many ways I prefer how it handles to my regular bike! And for giving people tours around NYC people just LOVE it.

You can modify your bike yourself, but I ended up taking it to a bike shop to have it installed. — Jens Rasmussen

---

Once a week we’ll send out a page from Cool Tools: A Catalog of Possibilities. The tools might be outdated or obsolete, and the links to them may or may not work. We present these vintage recommendations as is because the possibilities they inspire are new. Sign up here to get Tools for Possibilities a week early in your inbox.

11/9/26

Retro Recomendo: Destinations Vol. 2

Recomendo - issue #539

Walk across Bali

I just completed a six-day walk across the island of Bali. We carried only day packs and our luggage was forwarded each day. We walked roughly 77 km from Ubud, up to the volcanoes in the center of the island, and then finished on the north coast. We had two guides to lead the way through the rice terraces, and we slept in local villages, Balinese style along the way. I highly recommend the organizers, who charge only $500 for the whole trip, including all the vegetarian meals along the way. This is miles off the tourist, or even backpacker, tracks. The hosts, Astungkara Way, also offer a 10-day version which goes coast to coast. — KK

Walkable Neighborhoods map

Close.city is an interactive map designed to help you find neighborhoods in the United States that are within a short walking distance of amenities like supermarkets, public transportation, cafes, co-working spaces, bookstores, and other facilities. It’s useful when searching for a hotel, Airbnb, or apartment that’s near the kinds of places that are important to you — MF

Find a Moon Tree near you

I didn’t know about the tree seeds that flew around the Moon in 1971 and were planted upon return until I read this article in The Atlantic: We Almost Forgot About the Moon Trees. All of the locations of these Moon Trees are kept here and up-to-date, including the ones no longer alive. Visiting as many of these trees as possible is now on my travel bucket list. — CD

Offbeat attractions guide

Whenever I travel I search for my destination at the Atlas Obscura website. It will yield dozens of very obscure, very offbeat attractions in the area. How else can you find a nearby museum of parasites, or trail of doll heads, or a restaurant of robots, underground tunnels, or a store for time travel? — KK

360-degree videos from around the world

Visit AirPano to watch 360 videos of beautiful places on Earth, from Tokyo’s Shibuya Scramble pedestrian crossing (the busiest in the world), to a village of the Warao Indigenous people on the Orinoco River in Venezuela. My travel bucket list grew after watching some of these videos. — MF

Calendar of festivals

I try to coordinate my travel to exotic places with local festivals that occur at the same time. Trouble is, there’s been no easy way to find out which festivals are happening where. For example many traditional celebrations run on a lunar cycle. So I built a calendar that will show me all the festivals in Asia that are happening on a particular day. Or I can look at the map and see what festivals occur nearby and when. My site is called Festivo. It provides the local festivals of Asia—which are crammed with color, costumes, and traditions—in calendar format. It’s open and free to all, no ads. If enough people (besides myself) find it useful I will expand it to Europe, Africa, and the rest of the world. — KK

---

Sign up here to get Recomendo a week early in your inbox.

11/8/26

What’s in my NOW? — Bill Mize