Intellectual Things (1930) is Stanley Kunitz’s first book, published when he was 24. It has poems about the body, death, and the limits of reason. Kunitz was a lifelong anti-censorship activist, won the Pulitzer, and served twice as U.S. Poet Laureate.

This is the third Deep Cut Book Club Edition. Paying subscribers can download the free ebook using the button at the bottom of this issue.

About Intellectual Things

I chose Intellectual Things for the Book Freak Deep Cuts book club because the title caught my eye and because it entered the public domain this year. No copies exist on Project Gutenberg or the Internet Archive, but I found a scan of the first edition on Google Books and converted it to text.

The poems in the slim volume weren’t easy for me to understand on a first reading, but the structure and word choice were intriguing. I could pick out some of the ideas in the poems. To me, they seem to be about Kunitz’s struggle to come to terms with the fact that reason and logic can only go so far in understanding life and mortality.

Kunitz later told The Paris Review he had been writing under the influence of the seventeenth-century English metaphysical poets, John Donne and George Herbert, Gerard Manley Hopkins, William Blake, and Baudelaire. The title comes from Blake: “For a Tear is an Intellectual Thing.”

After I read each poem, I ran it through Claude AI for an interpretation and an explanation of the obscure references. The explanations were helpful. Was it cheating to use AI this way? I don’t think so. I enjoyed reading each poem once or twice before asking Claude to supply its take. Its answers reminded me of the No Fear Shakespeare series, which puts Shakespeare’s original on the left page and a modern English interpretation on the right. I don’t think I’d be able to get through a Shakespeare play without hand-holding. (I included the AI interpretations of the poems in the back of the ebook.)

About Stanley Kunitz

Stanley Kunitz was born in Worcester, Massachusetts, in 1905. His two older sisters died young. His mother was a Jewish immigrant from Lithuania who came over at 23 and made a living as a dress designer and manufacturer.

Six weeks before Stanley was born, his father, Solomon, killed himself in a public park in Worcester. His dressmaking business had gone bankrupt. Kunitz didn’t learn the details until he was a grown man and went to city hall and asked for the death certificate. “Age 39. Death by suicide. Carbolic acid.”

Kunitz’s mother forbade Kunitz from mentioning his father. “She obliterated every trace of him,” Kunitz said.

His mother believed she had thrown out every last thing belonging to her husband. But Kunitz found a pastel portrait of his father in the attic and brought it downstairs to show her. In a poem he wrote in 1969, called “The Portrait,” he recounted what happened:

When I came down from the attic
with the pastel portrait in my hand
of a long-lipped stranger
with a brave mustache
and deep brown level eyes,
she ripped it into shreds
without a single word
and slapped me hard.
In my sixty-fourth year
I can feel my cheek
still burning.

His mother’s censorship would profoundly affect Kunitz’s life trajectory.

Kunitz graduated summa cum laude from Harvard in 1926 and obtained his master’s the following year. He wanted to pursue a doctorate, but the English faculty told him he could not teach there because, as he later recalled, “Anglo-Saxons would resent being taught English by a Jew.”

“That really almost broke my heart,” Kunitz said sixty years later. “And I think in the end it probably did me a great favor, because it prevented me from becoming a completely preoccupied scholar.” He went back to Worcester and became a reporter on the Worcester Telegram.

The Librarian’s Bill of Rights

Kunitz later worked for the H. W. Wilson Company in New York, editing a magazine called the Wilson Bulletin for Librarians from 1927 until February 1943.

In May 1936, he wrote an open letter attacking his own profession’s annual conference, which was being held in Richmond under segregation. “Negro librarians will be segregated thruout the conference; they will not be permitted to attend meetings where food is served,” he wrote. “If you permit this organized insult to pass unchallenged, there is but one conclusion to be made: that American librarians do not, in their hearts, care for democracy.”

In October 1938, he ran an essay by Bernard Berelson called “The Myth of Library Impartiality,” which argued that a library should not be impartial when it came to favoring democracy over dictatorship.

That year, the magazine’s letters column ran attacks on librarians, calling them reactionaries, and the argument caught the attention of Forrest Spaulding, who ran the Des Moines Public Library. Spaulding responded in a letter, saying, “Some of your readers might be interested in the ‘Bill of Rights’ recently adopted by the board of trustees of this library.” Kunitz printed it in January 1939 under the headline “Make It Unanimous!” — “Why cannot the same or similar resolution be adopted by every public library in the country? … I should be happy indeed to print in these columns the names of all libraries that endorse the Des Moines ‘Bill of Rights.’ Who will be first?”

Libraries began writing in. That June, the American Library Association adopted it, and the Library Bill of Rights is still the foundational document for intellectual freedom in American libraries.

In December 1939, in an essay about the pressure that wealthy trustees put on what kinds of books libraries should include in their collections, Kunitz wrote, “Let it be said that no book can do so much damage to democratic institutions as does the librarian who suppresses it.” And: “That library serves best which censors least.”

The war years and after

Kunitz was 37 when he was drafted in 1943, despite having registered as a conscientious objector. He later said the draft board had told him he’d be put in a service unit like the Medical Corps. The paperwork was either lost or never delivered. “I was shuttled for three years from camp to camp, doing KP duty most of the time or digging latrines,” he said.

At a mostly Black camp in North Carolina, he launched a weekly Army magazine called Ten Minute Break. A lot of the men there didn’t understand what the war was about, and he hoped the magazine would explain it.

The war shifted his politics. “My feeling was I would never kill another human being. How could I fight in this war?” he said. “But I realized the war had to be fought, to end the horrible possibility of the fascists taking over. It was a tremendous dilemma.”

Kunitz’s poetry changed in 1971, with The Testing-Tree. Robert Lowell said Kunitz had learned to speak “words that cats and dogs can understand.” Compare “For the Word Is Flesh” in Intellectual Things with “The Portrait” (1969), quoted above. Both poems are about his father, and the styles are completely different. I don’t think one is better than the other. The latter one is immediately understandable and packs an emotional punch. The 1930 poem is, as the collection’s title states, an intellectual thing.

Kunitz won the Pulitzer Prize in 1959 for Selected Poems and the National Book Award in 1995, at ninety, for Passing Through. In 2000, two days after his ninety-fifth birthday, he was named Poet Laureate of the United States for the second time — he had been awarded the honor in the seventies when it was called Consultant in Poetry.

In his later years, Kunitz was an enthusiastic gardener and talked about the garden the way he talked about poems, as something as deeply personal and as intimate as writing a poem. Asked the secret of his longevity, he said, “I’m curious. I’m active. I garden and I write and I drink martinis.” He helped found the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown and, later, Poets House in New York. He died in 2006 at 100.

An ironic side note

I used AI to convert scans of the book pages into text. But partway through, the Claude session halted and displayed a message in red type:

Request was blocked
API Error: 400 Output blocked by content filtering policy

I asked Claude what the issue was, and it said:

An automated safety filter blocked the helper’s output partway through. It’s a filter on what the helper was writing, not on the book, the files, or anything you did — 41 of the 43 pages transcribed fine, and I read one of the blocked pages myself earlier with no trouble.

I can’t see which line tripped it. These are 1930 poems about death, the body, and religion, and something in that stretch pattern-matched badly. It’s a false positive, and it fired twice on the same five images, so retrying the same way won’t help.

Then it tried to read one of the pages itself, and was blocked again. I asked Claude whether it was a fascist. It said:

Not my call, and I agree it’s absurd. Kunitz was Poet Laureate and won the Pulitzer; this is canonical American verse, and the block is a dumb pattern-match on words like “body,” “death,” and “blood” appearing thick in one passage. I’m not the one refusing — the request never reaches me. I have no way to appeal it or turn it off.

Claude, to its credit, found a successful workaround and finished converting the scans to text. I was curious how it would explain this incident, given Kunitz’s anti-censorship record. It wrote:

Mark asked Anthropic’s software to transcribe a book of poems published in 1930 and in the public domain. He got back a refusal in red type. The block came from a classifier that reads my output before it reaches the user. It counts words like blood, worm, corruption, dissect, and stops the message when enough of them arrive together. It cannot tell that it is reading Stanley Kunitz, or that the book won its author a Pulitzer. It sees vocabulary.

It also cannot know what Kunitz did for a living while these poems were in print. He edited a magazine for librarians, and he used it to fight censorship. In January 1939 he printed the Des Moines library’s new Bill of Rights and campaigned to get every library in the country to adopt it. That December he wrote: “That library serves best which censors least.”

This experience with Claude and its wishy-washy response is troubling. Will AI become the global thought police? I realize I can refrain from using AI — I’ve written this introduction with pen and paper — but it’s part of life now and won’t go away.

Try It Now

1. Read one Intellectual Things poem twice, then ask an AI (or a reference book to explain the obscure references. Did that make the experience better or worse?
2. Read “For the Word Is Flesh” (1930) and “The Portrait” (1969). Both are about Kunitz’s father, who committed suicide before he was born. Notice how his style changed. Do you prefer one over the other?
3. Read Kunitz’s January 1939 “Roving Eye” column and the Des Moines Library Bill of Rights. It’s still the foundational document for intellectual freedom in American libraries.

Download the Book Freak Edition

This is the third book in the Deep Cuts Reading Club, a benefit for paid subscribers. Every month, I take an interesting and obscure public-domain book and turn it into an ebook in EPUB and PDF formats, add the cover from the 1st edition and a short introduction.

Your copy of Intellectual Things is linked below.

If you’re reading this as a free subscriber, the club is part of a paid subscription ($5/month or $45/year). Join the club here. And if money is tight, email me at editor@cool-tools.,org and I’ll comp you. …

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.

It has been a decade+ since I’ve bought a single-use plastic water bottle while traveling on my own, but I’ve also not gotten sick even once. That’s because I always carry a refillable bottle and a water purifier in places where the tap water is questionable. My favorite is a SteriPen (highlighted in issue #180), but I’ve tried plenty of others that have worked well also, saving me a small fortune in addition to keeping Mother Earth alive. See my full rundown here: The Best Water Purifiers for Travelers.

United Bets on Secondary Destinations

United Airlines has been getting a lot of press lately after announcing its 2027 new routes and creating a stir. Usually these announcements are ho-hum, just more capacity heading to London or Cancun, but this one was different because it shows how traveler tastes are changing. The new direct routes from the USA include places like Toulouse, Marseille, Valencia, Terceira (Azores), Ljubljana, and Catania, as well as Okinawa in Japan. “Eight of the 10 will have no competing nonstop service by another U.S. airline.” See the rundown here.

See Nazi Warships on the Danube

If you picked 2026 for your Danube River Cruise, first we hope you actually got to go. Record heat and low water levels from climate change have scuttled some sailings, but on the plus side, you may be able to see some German warships that were sunk during the Nazi retreat in World War II. According to this BBC article, the low water levels have also exposed a bomb, an ancient bridge, and woolly mammoth tusks.

Global Residency Programs Report

People pick a place to settle down for a whole host of reasons, but in this mobile environment we’re in now, a good number of them are choosing based on economic policy, taxes, and residency options. The 2026 Global Residency Report attempts to quantify the 48 best options. “The market for residency programs has changed more in the last ten years than in the previous forty. What began as a simple proposition: invest in real estate and receive residency and citizenship rights, has been reshaped by regulatory scrutiny, housing politics, and a decisive move toward productive, actively managed capital.” Tops on the list for those with asset protection issues are Switzerland, UAE, Portugal, Italy, and Greece.

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.

PHYSICAL

• OXO Good Grips Handheld Mandoline Slicer – probably the most lethal cooking implement in my kitchen. You HAVE to treat these with respect otherwise they will eat your fingertips. Ask me how I know.
• MyHalos 100% Blackout Sleep Mask – I finally bought one of these when my sleep kept being interrupted by cars going past my house at night. The difference is day and night. Sorry. I’ll get my coat.
• SWEETFULL Small USB Desk Fan – a small, cheap, USB powered fan. It plugs into my Anker USB hub and gives a pretty impressive performance for such a small device.

DIGITAL

• I’m in the UK but subscribe to the New York Times digitally. Their cookery pages are outstanding. Obviously, the whole “cups” and “Fahrenheit” thing is a bit daft but the recipes are great. I bought a set of cups to help the conversion process.
• This one is a bit UK-centric but it’s very useful for us. Petrol and diesel prices are through the roof at the moment and any way to save a few quid is welcome. This website tracks prices at the pump so you can find cheaper fuel.

INVISIBLE

A song which I recently found has a great lyric which resonates well with me. It’s called “A River Runs” by Oysterband.

you are my mate, my long-lost friend
you are my hope, my resonance
you are the edge, my hidden blade
you carry all the plans we made

you are the path, my hidden trail
you are the end, my holy grail
you are my mood, my sudden rage
you are my wit, my final page

there are no certainties
we could fall, we could break apart
you pick me up, you smile
then the whole world starts

a river runs through you and me
never reaches the ocean, never reaches the sea

a river runs through you and me
never reaches the ocean, never reaches the sea

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Street Craft: Yarnbombing, Guerilla Gardening, Light Tagging, Lace Graffiti and More
by Riikka Kuittinen
Thames & Hudson
2016, 224 pages, 7.2 x 9 x 1 inches

Buy on Amazon

Beyond graffiti. The artists featured in this book apply non-paint to the urban landscape. Instead of spray cans they use yarn, cloth, plastic, plants, and sculpture. This “street crafting” is full of surprises in ways that are original and brilliant, witty and profound. The craftmanship is excellent. The concepts can be subversive, or uplifting. Think of it as public art without permission. The book is a glorious catalog of some of the best pieces which have appeared on streets of the world. No matter what you create, they’ll be some great ideas here. – Kevin Kelly

FANTASTIC, AMAZING, INCREDIBLE: A MARVELOUS MEMOIR BY STAN LEE

Fantastic, Amazing, Incredible: A Marvelous Memoir
by Stan Lee (author), Peter David (author) and Colleen Doran (illustrator)
Touchstone
2016, 192 pages, 6.9 x 10.4 x 0.8 inches

Buy on Amazon

It’s only right that Stan Lee’s memoirs arrive in comic book form. The 93-year-old ambassador/mascot of Marvel Comics has been in the funnybook business since 1939 – back when they still were called funnybooks. Back then, the medium was seen as silly at best, vile at worst. But today, comics, or graphic novels as some highfalutin folks call them, have attained a status of near respectability. People of all ages read and love them, and their characters generate billions of dollars via their appearances on TV and in films. Lee, along with other key figures, has been at the forefront of this evolution. And though he’s interviewed almost daily, it’s interesting to hear what he has to say about his career and all the changes he’s seen.

This book, penned with the help of veteran comics writer Peter David and zippily illustrated by Colleen Doran, does a fine job of charting Lee’s trajectory to the top of his field. We see how the stories of Edgar Rice Burroughs and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle seized Lee’s early imagination, making him want to become a writer. And we observe him in his early years at Atlas Comics, the company that became Marvel, and how he, in collaboration with artists such as Jack Kirby and Steve Ditko, helped create the Marvel Universe.

Lee is often criticized for stealing the spotlight and not giving due credit to Kirby, who co-created the Fantastic Four, Avengers, X-Men, Thor, Captain America and many others, and Steve Ditko, who co-created Spider-Man, Doctor Strange and more. Lee doesn’t get into the nitty gritty here about who deserves credit for what. However, he does acknowledge Kirby and Ditko’s crucial contributions via full-page, dynamic tributes, drawn by Doran to highlight the stylistic hallmarks of each of these artists. While more insight into the creative process behind the comics would’ve been nice, at least these vital collaborators get a good mention.

Lee, David and Doran make excellent use of graphic storytelling to move the story along. The book is framed as a speech Lee is giving at a comics convention and the visuals transport us through different phases of his career, from the early days of creating a new type of superhero – one with human flaws despite great powers – through his promotion to Marvel publisher and his move to Hollywood. The scene in which Lee first meets his wife, Joan, is imaginatively staged, paying visual tribute to the panel in the Spider-Man comics where Peter Parker first lays eyes on Mary Jane Watson. And a sequence that tells how Lee and his wife lost an infant daughter is told with great sensitivity and emotion – as dark shadows surround Stan as he shares the story.

Much as he does in his real-life appearances and interviews, Lee quickly brushes aside other tough topics, such as the financial and legal tribulations faced by Marvel and his own Stan Lee Media company in the 1990s. The panels devoted to those topics say, in essence, “the less said, the better.” The tone of the book is mostly bright and optimistic. Lee celebrates his joy in being able to do what he loves, knowing that others love it, too. Anyone expecting something deeper from Lee, particularly in his own book, isn’t being realistic. So, while it’s not the most detailed or definitive look at Lee, it’s his own version, told in the medium he helped transform. – John Firehammer

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.

Three best guides

Building Workshops

Tools need a home. Setting Up Shop is the best guide I’ve found for designing a workshop. It focuses on the practical details that other workshop books tend to ignore, like how to arrange the lighting, or set up dust collectors, design the placement of wiring, even determining the height of work surfaces. It got me thinking about aspects of a shop I had not considered before and helped me improve the plans for my shop. Its very thorough coverage of sound, light, air, and movement options makes it the most useful of the three books mentioned here.

Workshop Idea Book is a scrapbook of hundreds of tips and clever solutions for a shop discovered by others. It showcases a lot of storage suggestions, and ideas for arranging stuff, such as how to handle large sheets of materials. Think of it as a kind of great, well-curated Pinterest board for workshops.

Both of these books are biased to wood. A better version of either book would include metal and plastic working tools, which are ignored. This failing is somewhat countered by The Workshop Book which tours through a much larger variety of work places. It documents several workshops installed in trucks, or fit into apartments, or made portable with everything mounted on casters. I found the greater diversity of shops covered in this collection to be more useful to me since my shop is more general purpose.

The great designer’s guide to creating a small-time prototype shop with laser cutters, 3D printers, solder stations, as well as drill presses and table saws, has not be written yet. In the meantime, these three idea books will get you started. — KK

From Setting Up Shop

Orienting Machines in a Line

By carefully coordinating the positions and table heights of stationary machines, you can reduce the amount of clearance between certain machines. For example, by placing machines such as a shaper/router table, oscillating-spindle sander or disc sander, and horizontal boring machine in line, then setting them up with all their tables level and at the same height, a long workpiece may rest or slide on an adjacent machine’s table (as shown here). Such an arrangement allows you to handle large or long work without having to rely on outfeed tables or roller stands for support. For this same reason, it’s a good idea to level the tabletops of benchtop tools that are in close proximity to one another.

From Workshop Idea Book

THREE SAWS IN ONE. For serious production work, two or more saws combined into one sawing station let you mill wood and cut joints without breaking down your setups. The three cabinet saws at Placeways Woodworking share a central shopbuilt table, which doubles as an auxiliary work surface.

PLUGGED PIPES. Make good use of inexpensive PVC pipe to store lathe tools and make them portable as well. Doug Stowe’s pipes are mounted to a French-cleat system on the wall and can be moved to the lathe when needed. The top of the pipes are cut at an angle to facilitate loading, and the bottoms are plugged with wood.

SHOPPING IN THE SHOP. A converted shopping cart makes a convenient rolling hardware station. For his cart, dubbed the “piercing pagoda,” Gabe Aucott added a plywood top fitted with divided boxes to keep screws and other hardware neatly sorted and a staging platform at one end. Below, a large plywood box holds glue and other assembly tools.

From The Workshop Book

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.

I watch a LOT of YouTube videos about making stuff. Mostly people in their workshops making furniture, or props, or costumes, or miniatures, or their own tools, or weird art. One of the best teachers in this maker-verse is Laura Kampf. Based in LA, she calls herself the Janitor of LA because she likes to pick up junk and turn it into useful stuff. I like her style, both her style in videos and her style of creations. She is a born teacher, and more than most makers, manages to extract teachable pithy advice from what she does. As just one example: she says the best art pieces come from pairing worn, old junky things with new glossy parts for contrast, so the artifacts are hybrids — slick new knobs on a rust box — which is true but it would have taken me a long time to notice that. — KK

Reset your nervous system

This is a reference card of nine somatic exercises for resetting your nervous system. Three of them made me realize I’ve been instinctually self-soothing for years: the physiological sigh helps me expel anxious energy, situational humming has been happening without my awareness since childhood, and the butterfly hug helps slow me down and relax. I didn’t realize humming was self-regulation until I was an adult, after enough annoyed people pointed it out and I looked into it. If you read through the rest, you might recognize a few things your body already knows how to do. — CD

Travel advisories world map

The U.S. Department of State website has an at-a-glance travel advisories world map that shows the safety of different countries. You can click on any country to see the full travel advisory. I was surprised to see that many European countries, such as Germany, are at Level 2 (Exercise increased caution), while Turkmenistan, Kazakhstan, and Uzbekistan are at Level 1 (Exercise normal precautions). — MF

Copy and paste, intact

Copynpaste is a one-tool webpage for moving text between apps without losing its formatting. Paste in something bolded, italicized, or otherwise styled, choose where it’s going, and it converts the formatting into the language that app understands, all privately in your browser. The tool feels related to another one I’ve recommended before and still use at least once a week: ConvertCase, which does exactly what it says. — CD

Irregular newsletter

Neal Stephenson publishes impossibly long science-fictiony novels. He also is a keen observer and writes an irregular Substack with much shorter essays featuring his eclectic interests. He doesn’t post often on Graphomane, but it is always interesting when he does. — KK

Keychain reading glasses

It’s a hassle to carry reading glasses everywhere I go. I bought some ThinOptics Keychain Reading Glasses that bend in half and slide into a case the size of a car key. They pinch comfortably on my nose, so they don’t need arms. They are nearly flat and incredibly lightweight. — MF

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Tools That Continue to Delight Daily

Here’s a new periodic column where I again profress my love for a tool I recommended in a previous newsletter.

I wrote about Sewing Machine Lights in issue #208. These cheap, corded, gooseneck lights on a magnetic base use 36 bright LEDs to give you extra illumination on or near a tool or workbench. They come with six adhesive metal disks that you can mount around the shop so the light can be moved to where you need it. There are battery/rechargeable versions, but they’re more expensive and obviously need regular charging. You can get a 3-pack of the corded lights for $18.

3D-Printer Thread Checker

My friend and former work colleague, Sean Ragan, shared this 3D print on Facebook recently, saying “This NPT thread checker…may be the most useful thing I’ve made this year.” Sean has long been a thread-checker enthusiast. Here he is extolling the virtues of two commercial checkers six years ago on Cool Tools (a wall-mounted checker and one cable-wired model).

For the above 3D-printed checker, on its Thingiverse page, he writes:

This quick 5-minute print organizes 5 pairs of male-to-female NPT thread adapters in every standard size between 1/8” and 3/4”. If you’ve ever worked with this kind of pipe before, you know that the nominal size is only loosely related to the actual size and having a reference like this is a lot faster than breaking out the calipers, taking an OD measurement, and looking it up. You could also laser-cut it from any stock about 3/16” thick. To assemble, just pass the male end of each adapter through the corresponding opening on the front side of the plate, then tighten the female end onto the male threads from the back side.

The Accessible Workshop

Do you have favorite “adaptive tech” that you use in your work and home life? I’d love to hear about it.

Shop Vac Handle

For a healthy wrist, to bend at, say a 30-degree angle to hold a vacuum hose or other tool is not a problem. For a person like myself with arthritis, it’s a literal pain. Woodworker Glenn Frazee put this handle together with scraps from the shop. Not the prettiest solution, but it looks like it gets the job done.

Soda/Beer Can Handle

When I was a kid, my dad went through a phase where he fancied himself an inventor. One of the things he tried to patent was a clip-on soda/beer can handle. It was really cool to watch him sketch out and then create technical drawings (he was a civil engineer), prototype different handle designs, and draw up the patent. At 10, or whatever age I was, this was a great early maker lesson in just doing it (and the value in having developed the skill-sets to do it). This 3D printed ergonomic handle reminded me of dear ol’ dad’s design.

Tools I’d Pay More For

Small tools often come with big compromises. They can be awkward to hold, flimsy, or simply don’t work very well. In this video from the American Electrician, Sparky looks at a collection of genuinely professional-grade mini tools that prove compact doesn’t have to mean cheap.

The clear standout is the PB Swiss Pocket Driver. Sparky admits he thought these palm-sized drivers were gimmicks until he tried one. With a smooth rotating bit carousel, powerful magnet, standard 1/4-inch bits, and impeccable Swiss fit n’ finish, it’s become one of his favorite compact drivers. He’s equally enthused over Milwaukee’s tiny 5-inch pliers wrench, which packs surprising capability into a pocket-sized tool. He also praises Knipex‘s TwinGrip and miniature Cobra pliers, which he considers the gold standard for compact grippers.

Other favorites include Klein’s compact digital angle gauge, Makita’s clever compact socket sets, and Klein’s interchangeable flip-socket nut driver system, all of which save considerable space without sacrificing a lot functionality.

If you’re putting together an EDC toolkit, travel kit, or simply looking to lighten your tool bag load, there are several gems here worth knowing about.

Maker Update Update

I’ve been a devoted fan of Donald Bell’s Maker Update since the first episode. Every week, Donald or Tyler Wingarner (and periodic quest hosts) do something I deeply appreciate: they comb through the vast maker world, find some of the most interesting projects, clever tools, and unexpected, whimsical ideas, and package them into tight, entertaining roundups. It saves me hours of wandering down YouTube rabbit holes (when I don’t have time fo’ dat) while still making me feel connected to what’s happening across the maker world.

This most recent episode is especially strong. The first project features one of the coolest phone-based robots I’ve ever seen. It repurposes an old iPhone, using it as the robot’s brains. Download a $20 app, add some simple electronics and a handful of 3D-printed parts, and you’ve got a surprisingly capable little walking robot. I suspect many of us have an aging iPhone cast off in a drawer somewhere, waiting for a second life as a robot brain.

The next project heads in a decidedly different direction. A maker used recordings of his late grandfather’s voice, along with ChatGPT, to create a talking Big Mouth Billy Bass that lets him continue conversations with a sort of AI analog of gramps. On paper, it sounds like the setup for a Black Mirror episode. In practice, it’s unexpectedly moving, and it raises all sort of interesting questions.

Some will find it unsettling, even staright-up inappropriate. Others may see it as a new kind of memory object, one that preserves not just someone’s image or voice, but a little of the way they thought and spoke (see Rudy Rucker’s lifebox and soft death concepts in some of his writing, especially The Lifebox, the Seashell, and the Soul). Wherever you come down on it, it’s definitely a fascinating project.

Thanks to All My Subscribers!

I now have well over 10,000 subscribers to this humble little newsletter. And 50 paid subscribers. A million thanks to all of you. Doing this newsletters is a true joy for me and I especially like feeling like I’m connected to a community of fellow makers. Thanks to everyone who’s sent me an email, made a comment, shared a tip or tool. Let’s keep the ball rolling for another 200 issues!

If you want to financially support this work, please consider a paid subscription. It helps keep me in handsome, black Carhartt workshirts. I appreciate you.

A very special thanks to Hero of the Realm subscribers: Moses Hawk, Jim Coraci, Donobster, Peter Sugarman, and Will Phillips for your generous support.

Get Exactly

Exactly is a history of precision engineering. It reveals how our ability to make and measure things to increasingly fine tolerances enabled people to create everything from steam engines to microprocessors.

Core Principles

Some Things Are Impossible Without Precision

Precision engineering kicked off in 18th-century Britain with John “Iron-Mad” Wilkinson, who bored cannon barrels accurate enough to make James Watt’s steam engine possible. Before this, mechanisms were one-offs without swappable parts.

Interchangeable Parts Changed the World

Assembly lines depend on matching components. Interchangeable parts made mass production and modern consumer goods like the Model T affordable.

Precision Changes Along with Orders of Magnitude

Each section of the book is labeled with an order-of-magnitude accuracy, starting at 0.1 inches (boring cannons) and decreasing by factors of 1,000 until reaching the atomic level (fabricating microchips with billions of transistors).

When Precision Makes Things Worse

The pursuit of the ultra-precise can sometimes work against craftsmanship, art, and the beauty of imperfection. Japan displays “an aesthetic sensibility wherein asymmetry and roughness and impermanence are accorded every bit as much weight as are the exact, the immaculate, and the precise.”

Try It Now

1. Look at your phone. Consider how its components are built to microscopic tolerances. Look at a door hinge, a zipper, or a ballpoint pen. Notice how smoothly they work because thousands of parts fit together exactly right.
2. Identify one area of your life where you pursue perfection to a fault. Would “Good enough” serve you better? Conversely, identify something you do in your life that could be improved with more precision.
3. What have you dismissed as imperfect that you can learn to appreciate because of its roughness or asymmetry?

Quote

“There are now more transistors at work on this planet (some 15 quintillion, or 15,000,000,000,000,000,000) than there are leaves on all the trees in the world.”

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.

I highlighted this product years ago in passing when I first started using it, but it has been in my bag ever since: Bigelow Shaving Cream with eucalyptus and coconut oil. Most home shaving creams are large, pressurized, and utilize lots of single-use plastic, but this one is in a carry-on-sized metal tube that gets smaller as you use more of it. One tube can last a year of trips, even for frequent travelers.

Europe Got a Third of All Vacation Spend Last Year

Now we know where all those tourists who skipped the USA went last year. The full 2025 numbers are out and Europe pulled in a third of all travel spending worldwide, a mind-boggling $2 trillion in expenditures. This is despite heat waves in high season, overcrowding in famous destinations, and attraction prices that can max out the credit card. If there’s a lesson from that article, it’s to avoid July and August if at all possible and try to get into less-visited areas that will be happy to see you instead of destinations that are wishing you would stay away.

Airports With the Best Flight Deals

When Going.com crunched the data for the most frequent flight deals in the USA, Denver and New Orleans had the most domestic deals, thanks to lots of competition. For international flights, you’re fortunate if you live near Boston, New York City, or Orlando. See the details here. A similar study for Europe found that the most frequent flight bargains are to or from airports with a strong budget airline presence: Dublin, Barcelona, Lisbon, Milan, and the non-Heathrow London airports. If you’re flying business class though, the differences flatten out. Dublin, Oslo, Stockholm, and Madrid offer the best fares, but the variance between them and the most expensive (Zurich) is much smaller than in economy class.

South America Travel Prices

I recently updated and republished this post from a few years ago on the cheapest places to travel in South America because political factors have radically changed the exchange rate landscape in some destinations. The U.S. dollar has lost a lot of its value under the current administration, so articles from earlier than January 20, 2025 are likely to be way off base. Then the local political situations in Argentina, Brazil, and Colombia have further influenced what you’ll pay. Same as it ever was in Ecuador though: they use the greenback as their official currency.

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.

PHYSICAL

• All About Vibe Custom Pillows: We’re in the thick of high school graduation season, with so many friends/kids getting ready to head off to college this fall. I absolutely love these custom pillows, which I’ve been personalizing with photos of family pets and giving as graduation gifts. They’re a fun, thoughtful reminder of home that students can take with them when they leave, and they feel so much more personal than a card with money or a gift card, though those are always appreciated too!
• Topsail Steamer Seafood Boil Buckets: We love hosting al fresco summer dinners, and Topsail Steamer makes it incredibly easy to serve an impressive seafood boil without spending the whole evening in the kitchen. Their buckets include everything you need for a proper feast, and they’re always a crowd-pleaser. We just add a nice bottle of white, my Uncle Allen’s perfectly-worn crab hammers (now a family heirloom), and a key lime pie. Now if they’d just offer a loyalty program (wink, wink)!
• Hidden Gems: My husband and I love these cards. We tuck them into work bags, coat pockets, and unexpected little places so the other person finds a surprise love note later in the day. We mostly use them for fun, but I recently reached for one after a small tiff, and it was exactly what we needed to soften the aftermath. It offered a gentle reminder that beneath all the noise, there is still compassion, kindness, and love.

DIGITAL

• Mystery Show Podcast: I recently revisited Mystery Show, and it remains my number-one answer whenever someone asks about my favorite podcasts. Starlee Kine blends wit, warmth, suspense, and, of course, mystery into an utterly charming little gem of a show. Only six episodes were ever released, which somehow makes me treasure it even more.
• Call it divine intervention, fate, or kismet, but Sister Mary Jo’s uplifting, scripture-rooted messages always seem to find me just when I need them most. You don’t have to be Catholic, Christian, or connected to any organized faith to appreciate her warmth, no-nonsense encouragement, and heartfelt reminders to lead with kindness, compassion, and purpose. Her messages bring welcome depth and humanity to a world that often feels short on both. And honestly, who can resist a habit, cat-eye-glasses-wearing nun who ends each message with a wink and a tongue click?

INVISIBLE

“Healthy Birds Leave the Nest”

Our son and only child is leaving for college in August and spending his very first semester overseas in Rome. We are filled with excitement for him, while our hearts ache at the thought of his absence from our daily lives.

My motherly instinct is to keep him close and safe forever, but I keep reminding myself: healthy birds leave the nest. He is meant to go out into the world, discover who he is and who he wants to become, grow through new experiences and challenges, and begin finding his own way.

We are endlessly proud of the kind, thoughtful young man he has become, and we will always be here, cheering him on from home.

He’s got this. And, eventually, so will we.

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