The Best Articles in Books
The most useful articles and videos in Books from around the web, curated by thought leaders and our community.
Refind focuses on timeless pieces and updates the list whenever new, must-read articles or videos are discovered.
Top 5 Books Articles
At a glance: these are the articles that have been most read, shared, and saved in Books by Refind users in 2024 so far.
Videos
Watch a video to get a quick overview.
I learned a system for remembering everything
Go to https://squarespace.com/mattdavella to save 10% off your first purchase of a website or domain using code MATTDAVELLA. Thanks to Squarespace for sponso...
A few short lessons from Stoicism for dealing with life
✉️ Want Stoic wisdom delivered to your inbox daily? Sign up for the FREE Daily Stoic email at https://dailystoic.com/dailyemail🏛 Get Stoic inspired books, m...
The Expectation Effect
A 1-Minute book summary of The Expectation Effect by David Robson.Check out my book summary video of 33 books on my channel.#markmanson #davidrobson #theexpe...
What Really Happened When Agatha Christie Went Missing
Agatha Christie is the most translated writer of all time - her books have been enjoyed in over 100 languages. She’s also been featured in the Guinness World...
Discovering Isaiah Berlin (Short version)
Isaiah Berlin was born in Riga, Latvia, in 1909, then part of Tsarist Russia. When he was six, his family moved to Petrograd. There in 1917 he witnessed both Revolutions…
What is ...?
New to Books? These articles make an excellent introduction.
15 of the Best Philosophy Books for Beginners
From classic texts to modern philosophy books for beginners, these are the best philosophy books to fill your shelves with.
How to ...?
How to make more time to read
Many of us would like to have more time to read, but life can get in the way of picking up a book. What are strategies that actually work?
«However, speed reading limits your comprehension of the novel, reducing the accuracy of what you read and hindering how much you retain of the story»
How to Choose Your Next Book
Get the simple two-step filter that I use to help me select what to read to improve my total return on invested reading time. Basically, I combine two ideas that both work together.
«“The more basic knowledge you have … the less new knowledge you have to get.”— Charlie Munger»
How To Remember More Of What You Read
Do you draw a blank trying to remember books you've read? Try these techniques to retain more of what you read.
«Spend less time worrying about meeting your Goodreads reading challenge, and more about picking out books you’re really excited to read.»
How to read more books
Modern life can feel too frantic for books. Use these habit-building strategies to carve out time for the joy of reading
How To Read A Self-Help Book In 90 Minutes
Do you have a lot of self-help books on your reading list? This simple system helps you to read a self-help book in 90 minutes.
Trending
These links are currently making the rounds in Books on Refind.
Busting Genre, in Style: Geoff Dyer on the Joy of Writing “Unpublishable” Books
George Makari, director of the DeWitt Wallace Institute of Psychiatry: History, Policy and the Arts at Weill Cornell, and author of Of Fear and Strangers: A History of Xenophobia hosts an ongoing s…
How Deep Does Life Go?
Geologist James Powell chronicles the evolution of our understanding of life in the deep-sea biosphere.
Amazon is filled with garbage ebooks. Here’s how they get made.
It’s partly AI, partly a get-rich-quick scheme, and entirely bad for confused consumers.
The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows: Uncommonly Lovely Invented Words for What We Feel but Cannot Name
“Despite what dictionaries would have us believe, this world is still mostly undefined.”
Maggie Nelson on the Conversations She Wants to Be Having
The author of “The Argonauts” and the new collection “Like Love” discusses the performative aspect of writing, reading her old work, and becoming “lightly interested” in genre for the first time.
Short Articles
Short on time? Check out these useful short articles in Books—all under 10 minutes.
My Simple Habit for Smarter Book Reading
The best habit to improve your reading is to ask after every impassioned argument, “What’s the rebuttal?”
«ChatGPT and LLMs can be useful here. Asking an LLM, “What are the most frequently cited objections to opinion X?” doesn’t guarantee an accurate summary of the literature. But it can give you a starting point by introducing you to some jargon you can search for later.»
Ness Labs Best Books of February 2024
What should you read this month? This is your February 2024 guide to discovering the most insightful, inspiring, and transformative books on mindful productivity, creative growth, holistic ambition,…
The Middle Passage: A Jungian Field Guide to Finding Meaning and Transformation in Midlife
“Our task at midlife is to be strong enough to relinquish the ego-urgencies of the first half and open ourselves to a greater wonder.”
«“In the middle of the journey of our life I found myself within a dark woods where the straight way was lost,” Dante wrote in the Inferno.»
A Technology Leader’s Non-Technical Reading List
My personal favorite reading materials that have helped me think about leadership, management, and technology.
Why Novelists Should Embrace Artificial Intelligence
Let’s imagine, for the purpose of this essay, that the following statement is true: An AI writes a novel. Actually, forget about the imagining. This is already happening. Today’s AIs—large language…
Long Articles
These are some of the most-read long-form articles in Books.
33 Powerful Books That Might Change Your Life
I’ve read over 1,000 nonfiction books, and these 33 truly changed my life. Maybe they'll change yours too.
If You Only Read A Few Books In 2024, Read These
One of my favorite quotes—enough that I have it inscribed on the wall across the back of my bookstore—comes from the novelist Walter Mosley. “I’m not saying that you have to be a reader to save your…
The Ghost Did What?! Translation Exposing Providentialist Thinking
Stories of extensive evil, in which the threat is not a single villain, nor even a man-made pollution monster, but systemic structures of harm in which we are all complicit, offer tools to think th…
What does a happily ever after look like?
We looked at over 1,400 romance novel covers featured in Publishers Weekly from 2011 to 2023 and evaluated each cover based on its raunchiness (or level of undress), art style, and representation of…
How to Make a Monster
Ideas about monstrosity were fundamental to ancient and medieval debates about the nature of humanity, and the rhetoric of monstrosity was widely used to dehumanize certain groups in medieval Europe.
Thought Leaders
We monitor hundreds of thought leaders, influencers, and newsletters in Books, including:
What is Refind?
Every day Refind picks the most relevant links from around the web for you. Picking only a handful of links means focusing on what’s relevant and useful.
How does Refind curate?
It’s a mix of human and algorithmic curation, following a number of steps:
- We monitor 10k+ sources and 1k+ thought leaders on hundreds of topics—publications, blogs, news sites, newsletters, Substack, Medium, Twitter, etc.
- In addition, our users save links from around the web using our Save buttons and our extensions.
- Our algorithm processes 100k+ new links every day and uses external signals to find the most relevant ones, focusing on timeless pieces.
- Our community of active users gets the most relevant links every day, tailored to their interests. They provide feedback via implicit and explicit signals: open, read, listen, share, mark as read, read later, «More/less like this», etc.
- Our algorithm uses these internal signals to refine the selection.
- In addition, we have expert curators who manually curate niche topics.
The result: lists of the best and most useful articles on hundreds of topics.
How does Refind detect «timeless» pieces?
We focus on pieces with long shelf-lives—not news. We determine «timelessness» via a number of metrics, for example, the consumption pattern of links over time.
How many sources does Refind monitor?
We monitor 10k+ content sources on hundreds of topics—publications, blogs, news sites, newsletters, Substack, Medium, Twitter, etc.
Who are the thought leaders in Books?
We follow dozens of thought leaders in Books, including Guardian Books, London Review of Books, Los Angeles Review of Books, Strand Book Store, Powell's Books.
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Keep Learning
Learn something new, guided by experts. Deep Dives are carefully hand-curated series of time-tested articles and videos from around the web.
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