Today the betaworks introduced a brand new Web interface for Instapaper. The old Web app worked, but never well. The new one is gorgeous, truly makes Instapaper on the Web feel like a first-class citizen again. To access it, go to http://beta.instapaper.com/ and log into your account.

I don’t know whether I’ll stick with ReadKit¹ on the Mac for reading or not. As I said back in May, ReadKit has become an invaluable tool for maintaining my Instapaper backlog. Lately I’ve been firing it up to read articles in a comfortable setting on my Mac, but the new features available in a browser are appealing enough to keep me from launching it.

The Instapaper Web beta adds Tisa and Adelle Sans to the Web font mix, as well as a cleaner dark reading color scheme. Also, clicking on an article headline takes you to the Instapaper text view of the article, not the source link. Finally.

Their beta servers appear to be getting hit pretty hard right now, so be patient when trying to load up your own account.

Scott Tobias, Editor at The Dissolve, yesterday:

Today, we’re excited to announce that Letterboxd has developed a widget for The Dissolve that will make it that much easier to share your ratings and opinions with fellow readers. Below the information box on every review page, you’ll find a Letterboxd widget for each film that will allow you to add your rating, look at a graph of all ratings site-wide, and see which of your friends have seen it, as well as options to add it to your Watchlist or write a review.

Letterboxd co-founder and site “Director” Matthew Buchanan filled in some blanks as well:

This is the first of what will become multiple types of embedded content from Letterboxd. It’s not available beyond The Dissolve just yet, but if you have a popular site or blog that you’d like to include this sort of content on, please get in touch.

Normally, this wouldn’t be newsworthy to me, but it’s notable because Letterboxd has long been teasing a public API. Clearly they’re getting close to it.

If you don’t know, Letterboxd is a social network for filmgoers.¹ You can rate and review films, follow people with interesting tastes and make (or follow) lists of films around, say, a certain subject, actor or cinematic movement. Here’s my now outdated list of Criterion Collection titles, for example.

Letterboxd took me awhile to get into, but earlier this year I got on board. It’s nice to look at, offers a decent mobile experience² and treats movies the way I think about them. The site allows you to mark a film as seen, rate³ and review it or “like” it. You can also log when you saw a film, if you’ve seen it before and add tags to that particular viewing. The one data point I’d love to see added is theater location a la Foursquare.

What I really like about this integration with The Dissolve is that it points the way for Letterboxd as a decentralized repository of cinematic taste. While the site doesn’t actually play movies, it makes it one-click east to get to Netflix, Amazon and iTunes to view films while browsing. It allows me to rate films according to my own tastes without the consequence of training something like a tailored Netflix queue.

By allowing movie sites to integrate directly with the service, users can fill up their Letterboxd “watchlist,” which is exactly what it sounds like, while reading a review of a film anywhere on the Web. That’s a very cool trick, one that promotes both the viewing of movies and the reading about them. What I like best about that is that it undercuts the quantification of film quality that sites like Rotten Tomatoes foster.

So sure, today it’s just a widget on one site. But Letterboxd has been slow to add new features and was even in private beta for far longer than I realized. They are making patient, deliberate choices. I have a feeling they may be on to something big.

You can follow me on Letterboxd here. Happy watching.

Back in January I decided to read a book. Call it a New Year’s resolution, maybe. I read a lot, all day every day, but chats, tweets, blog posts, articles and the like. It’s like that scene in “The Bizarro Jerry” episode of Seinfeld where Elaine describes her new cohort:

Elaine: …They read.
Jerry: I read.
Elaine: Books, Jerry.
Jerry: Oh… big deal!

Before January the last novel I read was Swann’s Way,¹ the first of seven volumes in Marcel Proust’s massive In Search of Lost Time.² Shortly thereafter I devoured David Bordwell’s excellent Pandora’s Digital Box: Films, Files, and the Future of Movies³ in a matter of days. Those are the only two full-length books I read in 2012, and for months I didn’t read anything at all. So I wanted to kick myself back into gear this year.

I decided to start with Stephen King’s The Stand. Having never read a single book by King, it seemed a decent starting point as it’s well regarded as one of his best. I very slowly started working my way through it, but it’s a tome. Months passed and I started to realize that 2013 would be as fallow a reading year as 2012. Worse: I didn’t want to move on to any other book until I conquered all 1,153 pages of The Stand. I was stuck.

So I broke down and renewed my long dormant membership to Audible and downloaded the audiobook. I listened to it sitting on my porch, in the car, walking around the grocery store. In a matter of weeks I came around and finished the book and it sparked something inside of me.

Since finishing The Stand in May I’ve read nine-and-a-half (more on that below) books and I’m still going. I’m writing less, yes,⁴ but I’m enjoying taking in these books while I’m on what feels like a personal streak.

I keep track of my reading on Goodreads, the bookish social network that was recently acquired by Amazon. You can follow my reading exploits there. When I started using Goodreads back in 2009 I considered it a novelty, fully aware that digitally tracking what page I was on in a book was at best foolish, at worst pompous. But now, four years on, I love that I can look back on what I was reading, the pace at which I read it and what I thought of it after the last page.

A quick note on the book links below. Where possible I linked to the edition of the book I read. None of the links point to Kindle books simply because I feel paperback editions make for more reliable Amazon links; Kindle books change cover images sometimes, for example, which makes me wary about which edition is on offer at a given link. In some cases, as in the Proust and Dostevsky books mentioned here, the Kindle editions are extremely unreliable, with some public domain translations being repackaged. My point is simply this: I link only to the editions I think are worth reading.

Without further ado, here’s what I’ve been reading this summer, with a few thoughts on each book.

My Summer Reading List (So Far)

The Stand by Stephen King: Initially I wanted to read King because I was looking for some fiction to fall into. It’s been a long time since I’ve written fiction myself and, at the time, I was looking for an inroad to explore writing it again. King is renowned for being a universe-builder, and I wanted to see how that comes together on the page.

The Stand is a masterpiece. It’s long and it took me half a year to finally get through it all, but at no point was I bored. In fact when it ended I felt as though I needed more. I must read more Stephen King.

The Love of the Last Tycoon by F. Scott Fitzgerald: In the run up to the release of Baz Luhrmann’s The Great Gatsby, I was looking to re-familiarize myself with the source material. Instead, the girlfriend recommended I give Fitzgerald’s posthumous The Love of the Last Tycoon a try. A quick, slim read, it’s a great Hollywood yarn. Romantic and affecting, I couldn’t put it down. It’s full of great little aphorisms that still feel relevant. On Hollywood: “It’s a mining town in lotus land.” Yep.

The Eyre Affair by Jasper Fforde: Another suggestion from the girlfriend, this is Fforde’s first Thursday Next novel, a character he has spun into two separate series. In short: this book is nonsensical by design, but there is also a certain charm to it. For about the first half of the book I railed against the alternate history Fforde has built, but eventually the pieces came together for me. The action scene that takes place in the latter half of the book, which, mind you, occurs along multiple temporal planes and at varying speeds, is unlike anything I’ve ever read. I’ll move on to the rest of the series in due time.

Everything Is Cinema: The Working Life of Jean-Luc Godard by Richard Brody: Another tome I’d been meaning to conquer for years, I finally picked this one up. It’s not a straight biography, hence the mouthful of a title. For the first few chapters I tried to follow along and watch or re-watch the films discussed in each chapter, but I didn’t even make it to the 1970s before I realized this is an untenable (if still enjoyable) way to read a book.⁵ Brody has written a definitive account of Godard’s cinema, yes, but it’s truly much more than that.

Thanks mostly to the fact that Godard is such a central character in both French and cinematic history, this really is a book about the growth of an art form and the convulsions of a nation. Brody gives succinct yet illuminating descriptions of the founding and dismantling of the French New Wave and the events leading up to May 1968. He does this without removing his critic’s hat, which is to say he fairly discusses the work of Godard both on its face and with the benefit of his world-historical perspective.

I am ever the more appreciative of Brody’s The Front Row blog in light of having read his book; each post on Godard (this 2011 entry on Godard’s anti-Semitism comes to mind) now seems like an addendum, though I should hope he will expand the book in later editions.

The Inimitable Jeeves by P.G. Wodehouse: I think it was a few years ago, after watching Stephen Fry and Hugh Laurie’s A Bit of Fry and Laurie sketch-comedy show⁶ for the first time, that I got the urge to read Wodehouse. The duo went on to play the eponymous roles in the Jeeves and Wooster series, based on Wodehouse’s two most famous characters. And so I read a few short stories which proved illuminating.

It’s not simple to pin down a canonical order in which to read Wodehouse’s Jeeves and Wooster stories. Some were published in magazines, some in anthologies and still others in novel form. The novels are often re-workings of old shorts to boot. Suffice it to say, The Inimitable Jeeves is a fine place to start, regarded as the first complete novel. It’s simply brilliant. No one turns a phrase like Wodehouse. I really should have a slim Wodehouse volume ready to go between all other books I read.

One more thing: another bit that pushed me to rekindle reading Wodehouse was this quote from John Ratzenberger in the October 2012 GQ oral history of Cheers:

It was the last generation of writers that had grown up reading books instead of watching TV. So you weren’t getting anything that was derivative of I Love Lucy or Happy Days. You were getting real characters [like those] they read in P.G. Wodehouse or Dickens or somewhere along the line, because they had all grown up with a love of literature.

I’ve been re-watching Cheers since reading that as well; he’s spot on. And, well, maybe that has more than a little something with my wanting to read more Wodehouse.

Vulgar Modernism: Writing On Movies And Other Media by J. Hoberman: This is that half book I mentioned above. If we’re going to split hairs here I actually read two-thirds of it. This is a collection of Hoberman’s writings from the 1980s. I put it onto my to-read list as online conversation about Vulgar Auteurism reached a fever pitch. Hoberman’s moniker has nothing to do with VA, but since the word vulgar was in the title it piqued my interest nonetheless.

This is an excellent collection, a recommended read for any aspiring (or duly employed, for that matter) critic. A common refrain against younger, greener critics is that they only know movies (see also:Ratzenberger, above). Hoberman is a sponge for all media, and he spouts that knowledge in everything he writes. It’s not the only way to be critical, but if you can’t imagine what it’s like to write with a working knowledge of arts and media theories, read some Hoberman.⁷

The Golden Age by Michal Ajvaz: Credit where it’s due: this book first caught my attention when one of the booksellers at McNally Jackson recommended it on one of the in-store displays. Ajvaz’s novel is a reverie, a fever dream reminiscent of Italo Calvino, specifically If on a winter’s night a traveler. Ajvaz twists and turns through interlocking narratives about a mysterious unmarked island and other far flung places. One of the best set-pieces involves a chase along a large fluorescent sign that anyone with even a passing interest in type design will enjoy. This was a fun one to get lost in.

Ready Player One by Ernest Cline: I didn’t particularly enjoy Cline’s novel. It’s simple and painted in broad strokes, which is to say it’s really for a younger set than myself. That said, I do actually like the world he’s built in The OASIS, a futuristic gaming platform that has become more than an escape from reality, but a reality unto itself.

It’s easy to see how we’re heading on a path toward more fully realized digital selves at the expense of our grip on reality. Cline’s future is dystopic, but he seems to think it’s the technology that will ultimately save us from ourselves, which seems unlikely given the problems The OASIS has ultimately wrought by the time the novel picks up.

Notes from the Underground by Fyodor Dostoevsky: I read Crime and Punishment in high school. I remember about enough to know the context of the name Raskolnikov should it come up in conversation. I’d been meaning to revisit Dostoevsky, specifically to give the Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky translations a spin. I went with the slimmest volume and yet another recommendation from the girlfriend (she knows her stuff), Notes from the Underground. I found it to be a brilliant bit of comic work that, in fact, goes hand in hand with the Wodehouse I’d just read.

Dostoevsky’s unnamed underground narrator reminds me of the schlemiels from Yiddish literature, only full of ten times as much bile. Plus, he has this to offer, which comes at a good time for me as I try to write more:

I’m bored, and I constantly do nothing. And writing things down really seems like work. They say work makes a man good and honest. Well, here’s a chance, at least.

The Futurological Congress: From the Memoirs of Ijon Tichy by Stanisław Lem: I’m quite excited for The Congress, Ari Folman’s first film since his Oscar-nominated animated documentary, Waltz with Bashir. Starring Robin Wright and Harvey Keitel, the film played at Cannes where it seems to have landed with a thud. It has no American release date announced. Anyway, the film is based on Stanisław Lem’s The Futurological Congress, though the trailer makes it appear as though the film has very little to do with the book, a fact which I might bristle at for any other book I enjoyed reading. Not so for this one.

In a word, Lem’s novel is nuts. I don’t envy Michael Kandel, who translated the book from the Polish. Almost every other word is a pun or a fictitious pharmaceutical or a futuristic machine with a wacky name and purpose. I have no clue how this sort of wordplay translates over, but I’m so, so glad it does. In Lem’s future there’s a drug for everything, even how we perceive reality (and a pill to cut through that as well). Read it. Go read it now.

Onward

Now that I’m in a reading groove, I’ve decided to try reading David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest. I’m 8% of the way into it (I’m reading an ebook) and I sort of don’t know what the hell is going on. A more accurate way to put it would be that I don’t know how to describe what’s going on, but I am rather enveloped in this wild, unpredictable universe. Whenever I get lost or frustrated there’s always the Infinite Summer message boards to get me back on track.

I’ve been adding books to my Goodreads “to-read” shelf and picking from them at random. Their recommendation engine is quite good, but I’ve got enough that I already know I want to read that I should be set for a long while. If you’d like to suggest a read, I’d love to hear it in the comments, or drop me a line here or on Twitter.

Well, now that that’s out of my system back to writing about movies and technology. Maybe.

Undertexter.se, a Swedish site that posts fan-produced subtitle files, was raided on Monday. In messages posted to the stripped down site (Google Cached), the owners claim they have “never received complaints from businesses who have pointed out that some of the texts are taken from their DVD.”¹

Subtitling is a tricky part of international distribution, and as such many films simply aren’t translated for most markets out there. Fan sites have long played an integral role in bringing subtitled movies abroad for free. You can use fan-created subtitles with legally purchased films; on its face there doesn’t appear to be anything illegal about distributing the texts.

Studios should embrace fan subtitlers. They’re creating a massive collection of localized data and don’t ask for anything in return. With fan subtitles you could enhance a service like AnyClip by making movie scenes searchable by dialogue in any language. There are even tools like Mute Profanity or Hulu Filter that automate the process of muting offensive words based entirely on subtitles; not something I’d promote but a neat trick nonetheless.

All may not be lost, though. The first message posted to Undertexter after the site went down ends on this note:

We will never give up, we live in a free country and Swedish people have every right to publish your own interpretation of a movie/series.

Yep. Here’s hoping subtitles aren’t the MPAA’s next crusade.

(via The Daily Dot.)

Last week, hours before its funding window closed, comedian Casey Malone discovered that a fully funded Kickstarter project, “Above the Game,” purporting to be a manual on meeting women actually contained offensive, abusive material; a blank check to go out an sexually assault any woman you meet. In a follow-up, Kickstarter told him that, under their current guidelines, the project would have to be funded. I discussed this at length on The CrowdCrowd podcast Thursday evening, but by the time our episode posted Kickstarter had already issued an apology for their handling of the matter.

Under the headline “We were wrong,” the team lays bare why they didn’t pull the funding and how they intend to prevent similar projects getting funding in the future. I am content with this response.

Ben Brooks, someone I would say was a onetime influential booster of Kickstarter, is not so happy. He calls out the company for being “chicken shits” and draws his line in the sand (again: 1,2):

…I won’t ever fund a project, or promote one, on KickStarter again.

I respect Ben’s opinion, and I agree with him to a point. As I said on The CrowdCrowd, I really don’t care about the headache this caused for any employee at Kickstarter. If I worry about anything at all, it’s the community of striving artists and creators, not the maintainers of the service who take a cut on the work of others (including “Above the Game”). But Ben’s not telling the whole story:

They were chicken shits and allowed the funding to go through, while knowing it was wrong. Then the story got too big and they coughed up $25k to a great charity, but still allowed a manual on sexual assault to be funded.

It sounds like the sort of papering over of scandals we’ve grown accustomed to from politicians and conglomorates. That would be a chicken shit move if that’s all Kickstarter did. But it’s not.

…we are prohibiting “seduction guides,” or anything similar, effective immediately. This material encourages misogynistic behavior and is inconsistent with our mission of funding creative works. These things do not belong on Kickstarter.

This is not the stuff of a non-apology. This is actual change; a real preventative measure.

We live on the Web now. New ideas, new communities will continue to endure terrible growing pains. Craigslist has facilitated murder. Reddit propogates a culture of misogyny, racism and violence on a scale never before conceived. And yet both sites have much to offer the world. There is ugliness everywhere; it’s how we handle it that matters.

Kickstarter fucked up, but they did so in the name of their benefit-of-the-doubt ethos that creatives know best how to make great work that enriches the world. We’re all learning how to do this together. I’m pleased they’re making an effort to do better in the future.

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At first I thought Vertigo was my favorite, but then I saw the Dial M for Murder title.

Very cool stuff from Jean-Baptiste Lefournier. Also: I couldn’t believe this was shot on a hacked Panasonic GH2.

(via Philip Bump.)

Linda Holmes over at NPR’s Monkey See:

I want to stress this again: In many, many parts of the country right now, if you want to go to see a movie in the theater and see a current movie about a woman — any story about any woman that isn’t a documentary or a cartoon — you can’t. You cannot. There are not any.

This afternoon, writer Ken Lowery took to Twitter to vent a bit about movie criticism and the reliance on box office as a conversation point. It’s an insightful read.

I’ve compiled his tweets over at Storify and organized them below (with permission). The sentences are linked to corresponding tweets. Taken together, they tell the story of the perversion of criticism and fandom into formidable marketing tools. It makes for a great read.

For God’s Sake Burn Down Rotten Tomatoes

I think you guys know I love movie criticism. I really do. I take it seriously and value arts criticism in general as absolutely necessary. But Rotten Tomatoes is the fucking pits. Find critics you like and/or trust (for variable definitions of “trust”); read them; be content.

It’s not a game. It’s not a race. Do not let studios make you foot soldiers in their dick-measuring wars. Box office does not matter. Aggregate percentages and star ratings – and no critic worth their salt likes those things – do not matter. What did it do to you? That is what matters.

I will hate Harry Knowles forever because he was INSTRUMENTAL in getting sentimental nerds turned into street teams for movie PR machines. Why the FUCK should we care about opening weekend B.O.? And yet we do. We act like we’re shareholders and not just another fucking mark. You didn’t get brought onto the team when you figured out per-screen averages, folks. You got BOUGHT. And usually all it took was some cool little geegaws with a fucking logo on ’em.

I get it – getting into the guts of why something moved you how it did is hard work, and arguments about quantities are so much easier. We can theorize and bullshit about same-day foreign premieres or whatever-the-balls because it’s something like hard data. (It isn’t, really, but it FEELS like hard data, which makes it easier to compare A to B.) I swear to you: NONE OF THAT MATTERS.

My personal metric for caring about box office is “do people I like get to keep doing what they want to do?” And that is it. To toot my own horn, I think that’s a pretty damn good metric.

OK, lots of eloquent messages rolling in but I just got called into a meeting. Brb. Just remember: This is part of the overall plan to make you care more about PRODUCT than about the PEOPLE MAKING IT. This is not an accident

(h/t Rafi.)

At exactly 10pm CDT this past Monday, the review embargo for Man of Steel was lifted, allowing any site to publish articles about the film a full 73 hours before the public at large would be able to see it. This feels a bit early to me, ¹ though certainly not the earliest of late.²

Most of the people I follow on Twitter (or on any network) are critics. I love reading their snap reactions to films, following the links to interesting things they share and generally basking in the wash of cinematic writings available to us at this unique moment in the history of information. But by 10:05pm on Monday I’d had enough. The moment the embargo lifted a number of people I follow unleashed their reviews and the conversation amongst those who had seen the film began. At 10:17pm I switched Twitter clients to Tweetbot (from my preferred Twitterrific) so I could set up search filters to excise Man of Steel tweets from my timeline.

I feel confident saying that today, in the US at least, there are more self-identifying (and duly credentialed) film critics and journalists than at any point in the history of the movies. Criticism isn’t dying by any stretch, in fact it’s flourishing. Yet it feels like, as a community, we are insulating ourselves from the rest of the world. A lot of the criticism I see feels as though it is aimed at the same crowd that produces it. Critics writing for critics; the rest of the world can watch if they like.

When the Man of Steel embargo lifted, suddenly hundreds (thousands?) of people privy to advance screenings were all in the same place (Twitter) at the same time, ready to discuss it. Personally, I’m not worried about spotting a spoiler. I just don’t like being on the outside of a conversation of a film I won’t be seeing the film until it opens. I could barely make it 5 minutes on Twitter without getting burned out of hearing about it. And I’m part of this community. I can only imagine what it’s like for someone else, on the outside looking in.

Is it any wonder that film critics have less sway on audiences than ever before, that binary watchdogs like Rotten Tomatoes have become the barometers of quality for the masses? The more critics write for themselves the more they cut themselves off from the rest of the world. But the community is so big now, who cares? Who needs non-critics in a world where your closest friends have already seen the movie you want to talk about 73 hours before the plebes even can?

A word on embargoes. Press screenings come with a caveat: journalists can’t write about the film they’ve seen until a set date a time. Publicists and marketers set when the embargo will lift. The consequence for publishing early is burning the bridge with the studio and/or publicist that set the embargo. In general they’re a mostly reasonable thing that allows all outlets to operate on an even playing field, but make no mistake: embargoes are a marketing tool devised to ensure maximum press saturation.

Back in 2011, when New Yorker critic David Denby broke an embargo by publishing his The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo review two weeks early, producer Scott Rudin told him in an email he “very badly damaged” the film. What he meant was that Denby upended Sony’s carefully timed marketing campaign. An embargo is set so that no one is talking about your film before the studio wants them to, but there is nothing that says you have to publish the moment the embargo lifts.

Which brings us to 10pm CDT, Monday June 10, 2013, when my feed was firebombed with Man of Steel reviews.³ As of this writing (61 hours after the embargo lifted), the New York Times, which in my opinion retains one of the steadiest hands in the business of film criticism, is yet to publish a review of the film. I doubt it’s because one of their critics hasn’t written one. They publish reviews the night before a film’s New York or nationwide release; a studio’s preference doesn’t change the schedule.

Of course, the Times doesn’t need to elbow for page-views; the readers actually come for the criticism. Perhaps there’s a lesson there.

Yesterday I bought ReadKit, an app that’s only been around since January but nonetheless made the jump to 2.0 this week. Fundamentally, ReadKit is a Mac client for Instapaper, Pocket, Readability, Delicious and Pinboard. Or rather it was.

This update turns ReadKit into an RSS client, including sync capabilities for Fever and NewsBlur. As a Fever user myself, this was the main feature that got me to plunk down $5. Currently I have a Fluid app for Fever, which works well, though I’d rather have a native app for reading RSS. ReadKit seemed like a bargain as a catch-all app.

Unfortunately, right now ReadKit is unusable as a Mac Fever RSS client for me. I’ve got 251 feeds; trying to get one sync to complete took an inordinate amount of time. I don’t know where the bottleneck occurs. It could be my server, Fever’s API or ReadKit itself. This isn’t the first Fever client I’ve had issues getting sync to work with though, so I imagine it’s a combination of all three.

That said, ReadKit is a brilliant Instapaper client. Overnight it has changed the way I use the service. I can’t recommend it highly enough on this front.

I first got Instapaper Free way back in January 2009. I used the service constantly to queue up morning reads on the subway. When the iPad came out (and I bought one) I finally made the upgrade to Instapaper Pro, and it is without question the best $5 (!) I’ve ever spent. I’ve tried the competition, but Marco Arment, Instapaper’s creator, always did an amazing job at heading off the other apps and making a simply great app for reading articles on a digital device.

In the four years since I started using Instapaper, I never thought to clean it up. I would save articles to it, and maybe I would read them, maybe not. Usually not. For the past many months (years?) I’ve become overwhelmed with the unending stream of unread articles in the app. I would open it up on my iPad and want to read everything but not know where to start, so I’d close it and go do something else. When I fly, I ritualistically load it up with long reads to keep me occupied en route, instead of, you know, reading the months’ worth of great articles already there. And so it has gotten bloated.

ReadKit to the rescue.

I basically decided to declare Instapaper bankruptcy and admit that I probably won’t read the thousands of unread articles in my account. Making sure I wasn’t going to do any irreparable damage, I exported my bookmarks (limited to the most recent 2000 articles) out of Instapaper and imported them into Pinboard.

Because why not? Pinboard is the safe deposit box of my Internet wanderings, my cold storage, if you will. I don’t mind loading it up with superfluous (and probably redundant) bookmarks. Instapaper, in contrast, should be the place I go to read interesting things, the sort of beaten path along which I travel. But it had become the cold storage over time. Now, back to how I changed that.

Once I knew my bookmarks were mostly backed up to Pinboard, I used one of ReadKit’s new power features: Smart Folders. Just like the smart folders in Mail, ReadKit allows you to create extremely powerful folders based on granular searches of the content you have loaded into the app. I’ve barely scratched the surface of their potential, but they pack a punch. Smart Folders can search across accounts, so you could have quick access to any article that had, say, “movies” in the headline or body in all of your accounts. They can even trigger notifications, which could be useful if you’re waiting for specific news via RSS.

The Smart Folder that I created to clean up Instapaper was very simple: collect any unread article in Instapaper that hasn’t been added in the last month. Here’s what it looks like:

The Unread folder under ReadKit’s Instapaper header is limited to 500 articles at a time (by Instapaper). So at any given time this smart folder had some 470 articles in it. At first I started filing away articles I know I want to revisit soon into folders (which I also reorganized, but you don’t want to hear about that) and spent some time deleting obviously superfluous articles. I even read a few of them as I went through this process. Anything I didn’t know what to do with got archived, which is as simple as selecting and typing A in ReadKit.

Once that was done for the first set of articles, I’d simply reload and do it again for the next set of 500, going all the way back to 2009. Reload, select all, archive, repeat. I did this until my Unread folder was down to only the articles added in the past month. From there it was just a matter of going through the past month’s worth of articles, filing and archiving those I had read and deleting what didn’t belong. Now I’m down to a svelte 17 articles I actually want to read. And I will.

Yesterday I read more long pieces from the Internet than I have in too long a time. It was nice to open Instapaper and be able to quickly pick a worthy piece to read. As a result I’m also more careful about what I put into Instapaper and why. Things I want to read should go to Instapaper; things I need to save go to Pinboard. It sounds simple but for the longest time I used the services interchangeably. Without ReadKit I may not have been able to find a way to clean up Instapaper and rediscover it.

A few more words on ReadKit itself. Visually it’s a simple, stunning app. I like all of the themes for reading text, and I’m glad that I’m able to pick which typeface my articles appear in. It’s just customizable enough, but not to the point of being overwhelming. I loaded up my Pinboard account, but personally I prefer the Pinboard site to any native tools. However, I may find better uses for it in the near future. One other nice touch in ReadKit is its ability to “save and restore” your reading position. This sort of works with Instapaper’s own progress syncing, though mostly it’s useful for retaining your place while navigating away from an article. It’s an optional feature but a pleasant one.

One request would be to add some form of word count to the app. I was hoping there would be a way to set a word count threshold for Smart Folders so I could sift out the really long reads from the short ones. When I sit down to pick which article I read, article length is the first metric I check, cleverly made visible in Instapaper’s iOS app by a series of dots below the headline. Perhaps in time this will be added, but of course it would be a luxury.

ReadKit 2 is $4.99 on the Mac App Store.¹ Go get it. You won’t be sorry.