“I wish to avail myself of all that is already known and then if possible add my mite to help on the future worker who will attain final success.”

— Wilbur Wright

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In July 1969, when Neil Armstrong stepped onto the Moon, he carried a small piece of history in his personal kit: a scrap of muslin from the wing of a flying machine built in a bicycle shop in Dayton, Ohio, sixty-six years earlier.

The machine had flown for twelve seconds. It covered 120 feet, less than half a football field. And it changed what humans believed was possible.

We usually tell the Wright brothers’ story as a story about genius, or courage, or two stubborn men who refused to quit. All of that is true. But reading David McCullough’s biography again, something else stood out to us. This is also a story about notes: who wrote them down, who shared them, who hid them, and who was willing to cross them out and start again.

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They started with other people’s notes

Wilbur and Orville Wright had no college degrees, no laboratory and no government grant. What they had was a bicycle business, a habit of reading, and a letter.

In 1899, Wilbur wrote to the Smithsonian Institution and asked for whatever it had published on human flight. The brothers read everything they could find, including the work of Otto Lilienthal, the German engineer who had made thousands of glides from a hill near Berlin before he died in a crash in 1896, and the designs of the American engineer Octave Chanute.

Lilienthal mattered for more than his data. He had shown, in public and on camera, that a person could leave the ground on wings and come back. Before him, flight was a fantasy. After him, it was a problem. Problems can be worked on.

Then they found the notes were wrong

In the summer of 1901, the brothers took a new glider to the dunes at Kitty Hawk. It flew worse than their first one. It dove, stalled and fought the controls. Wilbur wrote in his diary that they “found the machine less manageable than expected.” Something was wrong.

The problem was in the numbers they had trusted. The curve of their wing had been based on Lilienthal’s recommended values, and the lift tables everyone relied on did not match what the air was actually doing.

This is the moment that, for us, defines the brothers. They did not give up, and they did not keep blindly following the experts. That fall they built their own wind tunnel in the bicycle shop and measured lift and drag themselves, on some 200 wing shapes. McCullough treats their decision to work out the science on their own as a turning point.

When they turned to propellers, they found an even stranger gap. There was simply no usable written theory of how an air propeller should be designed. Even for ship propellers, which had been in use for about a century, the library had nothing that explained how they worked. Nobody had written it down. So they worked it out and wrote it down themselves.

They kept careful records

Wilbur filled notebooks with observations of birds. He noted how a buzzard holds its wings in a shallow V and rides the wind without flapping. He noted how hawks hold steady in strong gusts. Distances were measured. Mistakes were recorded. Every season at Kitty Hawk was written down and studied at home over the winter.

Their famous telegram from December 17, 1903 reads like a lab note: success four flights Thursday morning, all against a twenty-one-mile wind, longest fifty-seven seconds, inform press, home Christmas.

Open versus secret

The most striking contrast in the book is between two men who both wanted to fly.

Octave Chanute believed that knowledge and ideas about flight should be exchanged openly. He wrote to the Wrights, visited their camp and shared what he knew. Samuel Langley, the head of the Smithsonian, was the opposite. In McCullough’s telling, he kept his own work close.

Langley also had what the Wrights never had: public money and the backing of the government. His project had cost nearly $70,000, the greater part of it public money. On December 8, 1903, his Aerodrome was launched over the Potomac River and fell straight into the water. The press turned on him, and his government backing ended.

Nine days later, two men flew at Kitty Hawk whose expenses from 1900 to 1903, including materials and every trip to the dunes, came to a little under $1,000, paid out of the modest profits of their bicycle shop. Chanute had offered to help find a wealthy backer, adding that he happened to know Andrew Carnegie. Wilbur declined. “Practically all the expense of our aeronautical experiments lies in the time consumed,” he wrote.

Money did not decide the race. Will did.

Their records became their proof

The brothers wrote everything down: dated diaries, notebooks of bird observations, wind tunnel tables, more than 400 letters exchanged with Chanute, and photographs of their gliders, including the wrecks. McCullough’s point is that few pioneers left so complete a record, step by step, in writing and on film.

That habit turned out to matter far beyond the workshop. Once flight succeeded, others came forward to claim it, and for years the Smithsonian itself promoted Langley’s Aerodrome as the first machine capable of flight. The brothers’ answer was always the same: the record. It took decades, but in 1942 the Smithsonian finally stated that the credit for the first successful powered, piloted flight belongs to the Wright brothers.

Their nephew Milton, who grew up around the shop, remembered the glue pot and the spruce shavings on the floor. Watching his uncles glue strips into ribs for their “flying machine,” he assumed “all bicycle shops did the same thing.” It was, he said, “all very commonplace.” Most important work looks like that while it is happening. The only way it survives is if someone writes it down.

When Chanute died in Chicago in November 1910, Wilbur wrote a long public tribute to the man who had shared what he knew: “His writings were so lucid as to provide an intelligent understanding of the nature of the problems of flight.”

Secrecy did not cause Langley’s failure by itself. But it is worth noticing which way the knowledge flowed. The brothers stood on what Lilienthal and Chanute had made public. They tested it, corrected it, recorded what they learned, and in time showed it to the world. The record of their work traveled all the way to the Moon.

The Glasp Take: Leave Notes Someone Can Fly On

When we read this book in our reading group, one thought kept coming back. Progress happens when knowledge is spread, kept and left in a form other people can use. The Wrights could start because someone else’s work was visible. Their work could last because they wrote it down. And once two people showed that flight was possible, a whole world of builders followed.

Our name carries the same idea. Glasp stands for Greatest Legacy Accumulated as Shared Proof. The Wrights’ notebooks were exactly that: proof, accumulated, that could be shown to anyone who doubted. That is the chain Glasp exists to strengthen. Most of what we learn still goes the way of Langley’s results: kept to ourselves, in notebooks no one else opens, until it is gone. That is the reason we started Glasp, and why we keep arguing that we should learn in public. A highlight you share, a note you leave on something you read, the Kindle highlights you finally take out of your device, a correction you make when the “expert numbers” turn out to be wrong, are small acts in the Lilienthal and Chanute tradition. You may never know who uses them. That is fine. Lilienthal never saw Kitty Hawk. As we wrote in You are reading a book that has already been read, every reader stands in a long line of earlier readers.

There is one more lesson we take from the brothers. They read everything, and then they checked it against the wind. Shared knowledge is a starting point, not a final answer. The best thing you can do with someone else’s notes is test them, improve them and pass them on.

A question for you

Whose notes are you standing on right now? It could be a book, a teacher, a stranger’s blog post or a thread you once highlighted. Tell us in the comments. And if you have ever found that the “expert numbers” were wrong, we would love to hear that story too.

Read more from Glasp

• Note-taking Lessons From America’s Greatest Biographer (how biographer Robert Caro researches and takes notes)

• 5 Incredible Biographies You (Probably) Haven’t Read

• The Greatest Legacy For Future Generations

• The Wright Brothers on Glasp: if you read it on Kindle, your highlights can be the first ones others see

• How to turn your Kindle highlights into lasting knowledge

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Popular Episodes at a Glance

• #1: How We Found and Acquired Our First 1,000 Users

• #3: How We Rode the AI Wave with Side Projects Before It Exploded

• #10: When the Side Project Outgrows the Mission

• #17: How We Grew ChatGPT Traffic 37x Using Our Own Server Logs

• #18: How a Two-Person Team Uses AI to Run Multiple Products With 3.5 Million Current Installs

Hi, Kei and Kazuki here.

Glasp is two people. Between us we maintain browser extensions, a web app, native mobile apps, a separate AI product, and a research practice. About 3.5 million browsers currently have a Glasp extension installed.

In #18, we described the loop most of our systems share: a signal, a queue, a bounded worker, a verification step, and a retirement rule, and applied it to growth, content, and measurement. Last time, we covered our research. This issue keeps the rest of the promise from #18.

It applies the same loop to two kinds of work that are usually handed to separate teams, answering users and rebuilding products, and ends with the agent workflow underneath both.

In this issue:

• Customer support as a product system. How feedback from Chrome Web Store reviews, App Store and Google Play reviews, and support email becomes one queue, what Claude drafts, and what a person still decides.

• Rewrites that are not finished when the code ships. What rebuilding both native mobile apps taught us about measuring a rewrite and updating the world’s memory of a product, and why human patches, not AI-written code, became the technical debt in our Chrome extension.

• The agent workflow underneath. Contracts instead of standing instructions, why we stopped relying on written rules and built a harness, Claude Code and Codex reviewing each other, more workspaces than people, how an idea reaches the right session from a phone, and how we keep old Macs running agents all day without overheating.

The first section is open to everyone. The rest is for paid subscribers.

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Support is a product system, not an inbox

At our scale, customer support cannot mean two founders reading every message from the top of an inbox and replying faster. There is not enough time, and even if there were, speed is the wrong goal.

The first layer of our support is not a model, and it was never about keeping people away from us. Between our first 100 and first 1,000 users, we ran more than 750 onboarding calls on Zoom, 15 to 20 minutes each, as we wrote in Hatching Growth #1. Getting through onboarding was the part we protected most, because a user who gets past it usually stays. When someone is stuck, we still send a Zoom link or a calendar invite and walk through it together. When something breaks, we ask by email, in detail, how to reproduce it: which browser, which page, what they clicked, what they saw. Even when a problem first appears in a public review, we move the conversation to email, because a review cannot tell us how to reproduce the bug. The result is a lot of email. That volume is a choice, and it is the reason the next layer exists.

The second layer is a queue. Feedback reaches us through several doors: Chrome Web Store reviews, App Store and Google Play reviews, support email, Reddit, and YouTube comments. Each arrives in a different format, in many languages, about different versions of different products. Before anyone can answer well, each item has to become the same kind of object.

A useful support item carries more than the message:

• product, platform, and version;

• language;

• the kind of problem;

• account and payment state, when it matters;

• the evidence already collected;

• whether the reply will be private or public;

• the next action the system is allowed to take;

• and the person responsible for the final decision.

Once feedback has that shape, it stops being a stream of individual complaints and becomes something we can sort, group, and learn from.

The part of this that changed how we think was a failure.

A user wrote a public review that said, roughly, that we had taken their money and never replied. The refund had in fact already been issued. The payment system had done its job. But nobody had told the person, so from their side nothing had happened, and the review said so to everyone who read it.

The backend action was complete. The trust loop was not.

That changed our definition of done. A support case is closed only when three things are true: the user has been told what happened, the external state matches what we told them, and the underlying cause has somewhere to go so it does not come back as the next message.

The last condition is the one that makes support scale. Ten messages about the same confusion should not become ten separate replies. They should become one issue that produces a product fix, a clearer screen, a help article, a new event we can measure, or a decision not to build the thing that caused the confusion.

This is our third paid field note. The regular newsletter remains public, and we will keep publishing these when we have a concrete system and real implementation detail worth showing.

Below, we share how Claude reads and drafts replies to feedback and where a human has to step in, how we handle refunds and disputes, what rebuilding both mobile apps and the Chrome extension taught us about finishing a rewrite and about technical debt, and the agent workflow that connects all of it: the loop, the harness, Claude Code and Codex reviewing each other, always-on Macs, and a small tool called session-baton.

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You are reading this at the top of the issue, and so is everyone else. The Glasp Newsletter reaches 550K+ subscribers: founders, builders, students, and knowledge workers, with 250,000+ views per send across email and web. One sponsor per issue. Past sponsors include DeepL, Auth0, Bright Data and Clarify.

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🌐 Read this in your language: 日本語 · Español · Português (BR) · Italiano · Français · Tiếng Việt · 한국어

Here is a tutorial for Kindle readers on Glasp: How to Auto-Sync Kindle Highlights with Glasp

Exporting Kindle highlights by hand every time you finish a book is easy to forget. Kindle Auto-Sync (Beta) in the Glasp extension checks your Kindle library on a schedule and imports anything new, so last night’s highlights are already in Glasp when you open it.

Once it is set up, you can:

• Import new Kindle highlights automatically, Daily, Every 3 days, or Weekly

• Pick your Amazon region from twelve Kindle stores and check the connection with a quick test sync

• Leave out the books you do not want in your library

• Search, review, and reuse your highlights alongside everything else you save on Glasp

We keep the full step-by-step guide up to date in one place:

👉 Read the full tutorial: How to Auto-Sync Kindle Highlights with Glasp

👉 FAQs

👉 X

👉 Reddit

See you next time,

Glasp team

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Glasp’s note: This is Hatching Growth, a series of articles about how Glasp organically reached millions of users. In this series, we’ll highlight some that worked and some that didn’t, and the lessons we learned along the way.

If you want to reread or highlight this newsletter, save it to Glasp.

Save to Glasp

Popular Episodes at a Glance

• #1: How We Found and Acquired Our First 1,000 Users

• #3: How We Rode the AI Wave with Side Projects Before It Exploded

• #10: When the Side Project Outgrows the Mission

• #17: How We Grew ChatGPT Traffic 37x Using Our Own Server Logs

• #18: How a Two-Person Team Uses AI to Run Multiple Products With 3.5 Million Current Installs

Hi, Kei and Kazuki here.

Glasp is two people. Between us we maintain browser extensions, a web app, native mobile apps, a separate AI product, and, since this June, a research practice that has put out twelve papers.

Last time we promised an issue on support, research, and the agent workflow behind them. We are splitting it. This one is research, because this week Kazuki is in Minneapolis presenting the first of our papers to pass peer review. Support and the agent workflow come next.

In this issue:

• How it started. A widely shared number about our own growth, and why we turned it into a paper instead of another post.

• What the data says about people. Language models agree with each other about what matters on a page. Readers do not agree with them.

• How we pick a question, and the four tests a question has to pass.

• What AI does in our research, and the four things it does not.

• Why it was fast, and what “fast” leaves out.

• What we got wrong. A headline that was a bug, a finished paper that was not new, and two more.

• What the research changed in the product, mostly by stopping us from building things.

• Questions we get, including whether it is ethical to use AI and user data this way.

The first part is open to everyone. The rest is for paid subscribers.

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How it started

Glasp did not set out to publish papers. It started with one experiment.

At any given time, Glasp has a lot of growth tactics running at once. At the end of 2025, answer engine optimization looked like one we could actually win at. More people were asking AI assistants what was inside a YouTube video instead of searching Google, which is exactly the kind of question our hundreds of thousands of YouTube Q&A pages were built to answer, and at that scale SEO had few levers left we could pull. So we bet on optimizing for ChatGPT, and we ran the experiment. (The full story of that bet is in Hatching Growth #17.)

It grew our ChatGPT referral traffic 37x, and he wrote it up as a long guest post for Sean Ellis. It reached far more people than we expected. People shared it and argued with it in the comments, and a few emailed to say they had built something by following it.

The post had a weakness we knew about. It made a good story, but it was not a controlled experiment, so it could not say how much of the growth our changes had actually caused. Kazuki suggested writing it up properly and putting it on arXiv. Kei had never written a paper and mostly said “sure.” Kazuki started anyway, and it became Disentangling Answer Engine Optimization from Platform Growth, which separates the effect of our changes from the growth of ChatGPT itself.

That is the first lesson of this whole issue, and it is free: the number about yourself that everyone is sharing is the one you should check hardest. A story can be true and still not tell you what caused it.

Why a two-person company does research

We had always half wanted Glasp to be a research company, a place that studies interesting questions and not only ships features. Part of that is plain curiosity. We run reading groups, and we read a lot every day, books and articles alike. Glasp is a product for exactly that. In what we read, the best discoveries usually came from someone following a question because they wanted to know the answer. And part of it is watching companies like OpenAI, where frontier research is the product.

There is also a practical reason. Innovation tends to happen when frontier research meets a real product. People like to talk about connecting the dots, and when you look at the dots behind most new products, one of them is almost always a new technology. We have seen this work once already. As we wrote in Hatching Growth #3 and #4, we were convinced well before ChatGPT that AI was about to take off, and we placed our bets early with AI side projects such as DALL·E-dle, a Wordle-style game where you guess the prompt behind four DALL·E 2 images. That is why we could ship a ChatGPT extension on the day ChatGPT launched, and then the first YouTube summary tool while most people were not yet paying attention to AI. That head start is most of why YouTube Summary grew. Knowing where attention is about to go is a research problem, so we treat it as one.

In practice, that also means Claude reads arXiv for us, often. When a paper on marketing, AI, or agents reports that something works on public data, we have it unpack the method and test it on our own YouTube content and pages. If the result holds for us, we may be one of the first teams outside the authors to use it.

And it fits why Glasp exists. Our mission is to leave knowledge for the people who come after us, which we wrote about in Hatching Growth #16. Studying something carefully and publishing what we found is about as direct a version of that as there is.

What the data says about people

Most studies of highlighting are small lab studies. We have years of highlights that people made while actually reading, for their own reasons. That means we never have to recruit anyone or collect anything new. The data already exists, and it describes something otherwise hard to observe: what people actually pay attention to.

Here is one result. Claims that language models make everyone think alike are usually tested against human judgments collected for the study, which makes the human side an artifact of the design. We used a human reference nobody built for the purpose: 2,523 sets of highlights that readers made across 120 web pages.

On a typical page, two readers who each marked 14 sentences shared about 4. Two models shared almost 9. Across 18 model configurations from 11 vendors, models agreed with each other far more than readers agreed with one another, and no model agreed with readers detectably more than another reader did (Language Models Agree With Each Other, Not With Readers).

If you use AI to decide what matters in a document, to summarize it, compress it, or pick the key passages, this is worth sitting with. A panel of different models is not a panel of different readers.

This is our second paid field note. The regular newsletter remains public, and we will keep publishing these when we have a concrete system and real implementation detail worth showing.

Below: the rest of what the data showed and the agent research that started at a hackathon, how we pick questions, exactly what we hand to AI and what we keep, why it went so fast and what that hides, four things we got wrong, what the research changed in the product, and our answers to the questions people ask most.

Read more

Glasp’s note: This is Hatching Growth, a series of articles about how Glasp organically reached millions of users. In this series, we’ll highlight some that worked and some that didn’t, and the lessons we learned along the way.

If you want to reread or highlight this newsletter, save it to Glasp.

Save to Glasp

Popular Episodes at a Glance

• #1: How We Found and Acquired Our First 1,000 Users

• #3: How We Rode the AI Wave with Side Projects Before It Exploded

• #10: When the Side Project Outgrows the Mission

• #17: How We Grew ChatGPT Traffic 37x Using Our Own Server Logs

Hi, Kei and Kazuki here.

When people find out how small Glasp is, the question is always the same. There is usually a slight pause before it, as if they are checking whether they heard us correctly.

Two people?

Two people. Between us, we maintain browser extensions, a web app, native mobile apps, a separate AI product, and a research pipeline that has produced about a dozen papers in roughly three months.

Across our browser extensions, the current installed base is about 3.5 million installations.

That definition matters. This is an installation count, not a count of unique people or devices, not monthly active users, and not cumulative downloads. It excludes extensions that have been uninstalled, and somebody running two of our extensions appears twice.

The usual answer to the two-person question is that we automate a lot. That answer is true and almost useless.

The interesting part is not the volume of work we hand to machines. It is the shape we force the work into before we hand it over, the things we deliberately keep in human hands, and the work we refuse to create because its operational cost would remain with us forever.

This issue is about that shape.

We are publishing this field note as a three-part series. This first issue follows one product-growth loop. We do not treat Marketing Ops, Content Ops, Analytics Ops, and product development as separate functions. Product use and distribution create signals. Analytics helps us decide which signals are real. Those findings shape what we build, what content we create, and which relationships we prepare to pursue. The outcomes return to the same measurement system and start the next cycle.

The second issue will cover how we build, support, and study the products with AI. The third will focus on DevOps: how the products are deployed, monitored, and kept running over time.

The loop every system has to fit

Most of our internal systems are built from the same five parts. We did not design them all at once. We arrived at this pattern after enough things went wrong that the systems that survived began to look alike.

A signal. Something actually happened, and it was recorded somewhere we can query. A user hit a video with no transcript. A crawler requested a page that did not exist. A product metric moved outside its expected range. Work begins with evidence, not a content calendar or a vague belief that something might be useful.

A queue. The signal becomes an ordered item with a state and enough context to act. A useful queue records what needs to happen, why it entered, what happened last time, how many times it has been tried, and whether it is finished.

A bounded worker. Code or an AI agent takes an item and performs one narrow task. It has a hard limit on how much it can change, spend, send, or process. A worker without a ceiling is not automation. It is an open tap.

A verification step. A worker reporting success does not prove that the user received the intended result. Something separate has to inspect the outcome and be able to return no.

A retirement rule. Whatever the system creates, the system must also know when to stop, archive, reverse, or remove. We did not take this seriously enough in the first few years. It is one of the first things we would install if we started again.

That is the operating model: signal, queue, bounded worker, verification, retirement.

A script that creates output is a shortcut. A system that detects demand, acts within a limit, verifies the outcome, and stops when the value disappears is infrastructure.

This is the first time we have put anything behind the subscribe button. Some of you have been paying for a while and receiving exactly what everyone else receives. That was never the deal we meant to offer, and this is us starting to fix it.

We are not turning every Glasp newsletter into a paid post. The regular newsletter will remain public. We will publish deeper paid field notes occasionally, when we have a concrete system, real implementation detail, and lessons worth showing rather than summarizing.

Below, we show how product signals, AARRR, daily analytics, paid-user behavior, public pages, tutorials, newsletters, and outreach move through one operating loop.

Read more

If you want to reread or highlight this newsletter, save it to Glasp.

Save to Glasp

Hi, I’m Bobby Powers! I run the Leader & Learner publication, where I share two posts per week to help you become a more curious leader and learner.

As an avid reader, I love using Glasp to save highlights and takeaways from what I learn online. But I’m also a fan of physical books and notes, so I’ve spent years refining how to write better handwritten notes in my journal, work notes, etc.

These five tips have saved me time, improved the readability of my notes, and—perhaps most importantly—made it easier to find relevant notes later.

1. Leave space at the start of every notebook for an index

For years, I found it nearly impossible to find critical notes later. I didn’t have any system for clearly indicating which ones were important and what I could find where.

Thankfully, that problem nearly disappeared when I began using an index.

I now reserve the first 2–4 pages of each notebook for creating an index. In that section, I jot down the relevant page number(s) of important notes, longer-term action items, and anything else I think I may need to reference later.

Here’s a quick peek at the index of one of my past journals.

Having an index like this makes it WAY easier to find important notes later. I’ve also found that it’s surprisingly easy to predict which notes I’ll want to reference later, so those are the ones I make sure to list in the index.

2. Create a distinct symbol to designate action items

Some of the most important notes you’ll ever write are action items you need to complete in your work or personal life—such as completing a presentation, following up with a big client, or scheduling a doctor’s appointment.

Because these notes are so critical, you’ll want a way to quickly find them. The best way to do that is to create a custom symbol that you only use for action items and to-dos. The symbol you choose doesn’t matter. The important thing is that it’s easily identifiable as you scan through your notes.

Many people use checkboxes for this purpose, but use whatever works best for you. For example, I draw diamonds to denote action items, then color in the diamond once I complete the task, which provides a nice little dopamine hit as I finish my work.

3. Dog-ear each page once all of the action items are completed

I picked up this trick from an old boss of mine, and it works like a charm. (Thanks, Annie!) Since I began doing this, I’ve hardly forgotten a single action item in years.

The trick is this: once you’ve completed all of the tasks on a given page, dog-ear that page. That way, you can quickly see which pages still have lingering tasks you haven’t completed yet. (Pics below.)

If you’re writing notes in a digital tool instead of a physical notebook (for example, I use a reMarkable paper tablet), you can do an equivalent version of this with tags. Just apply a “ToDo” tag to each page with outstanding tasks, then remove the tag once you’ve completed the tasks on that page.

4. Include a date and topic at the top of every page

This is the simplest tip but also a very necessary one: begin every entry with a date and topic. This information will help you quickly find notes later.

I keep separate notebooks for work notes versus personal notes (like my journal), and I do this same process for all of my note-taking.

Whenever an entry carries over onto an additional page, I carry over the topic/title on the top of the next page and add “Cont” (for continued). Here’s a quick peek, showing a topic that has continued onto a second page:

5. Create additional symbols for other common notes

I’ve learned that some types of notes show up frequently enough in my notebooks that they deserve their own symbol or signifier to help me find them easily.

We’ve already discussed this for action items, but it’s also helpful to create signifiers for common notes like big-picture ideas, lessons learned, words/topics to look up later, etc.

I use a bunch of these symbols because I’ve found them to be a useful way to quickly track down specific things. Here are the symbols I use:

You don’t need to understand what all this stuff means. These signifiers are meant for me—not you. The general principle here is that it’s helpful to create symbols for the various types of entries you plan to write because those symbols can help you find info faster later.

Here’s what these symbols look like in action:

There’s a lot going on here, and you don’t have to pay attention to most of it. I’ll just call your attention to the five numbered sections:

1. Beginning of a New Entry: In the lower-left corner, you’ll see a headline that says “1/24/22 Monday.” That’s the format I use to begin each day’s note in my journal. I try to start most journal entries with three gratitudes, signified by the up arrows. You’ll also see a little stick figure, which is my symbol for exercise.

2. Standard Note: In the upper-right part of the page, you’ll see a basic note. Use bullets and sub-bullets to help you order information. (For example, I use an asterisk as my top-level note and a dash as my sub-level note.)

3. Quotes: I love quotes, so I pepper them throughout my notes. The quotes you can see in the picture are from the book I was reading at the time: One Thousand Weeks by Oliver Burkeman. (Btw, that book is excellent, so check it out!)

4. Weekly Goals: I often set personal goals for books to read, people to reconnect with, things to learn, etc.

5. Vocab Words: Lastly, in the middle of the left-hand page, you’ll see a weird symbol that looks like a backward pilcrow (¶). That’s the signifier I use to indicate new vocabulary words I stumble across when I’m reading.

The key here isn’t to blindly copy my method, but to find a method that works for you.

Maybe you think it’s ridiculous to create a symbol for vocabulary words, but you find yourself frequently writing notes about your workout regimen, diet, quarterly goals, work deadlines, or details about a specific client. Consider creating a symbol to designate whatever types of notes you jot down most often.

I hope you’ve enjoyed this super-nerdy jaunt into the world of handwritten notes.

I’m always interested in hearing others’ ideas so I can test them in my own notes, so drop a comment below if you have a helpful note-taking tip to share!

📣 Community Updates by Glasp

• 🟥 Glasp Talk with Bobby Powers:

  Glasp Talk features intimate interviews with luminaries, revealing their emotions, experiences, and stories. The guest, Bobby Powers, is a dedicated learner passionate about leadership and personal development. With over a decade of experience managing teams, leading onboarding, and Learning and Development programs at various startups and SMBs, Bobby is also an avid reader, having read over a thousand books in the last 15 years.

  ✨ Want a concise summary before diving in? Install the YouTube Summary with ChatGPT extension by Glasp for instant video summaries!

• 🟦 Kindle Highlights Milestone:

  Glasp users have now imported over 84,000 Kindle highlights. Japanese, Spanish, German, French and Portuguese clipping formats work too. Bring your own library in here.
  👉 Download Highlights and Notes from Kindle

• 🟨 YouTube Channel Tracking:

  Over 4,300 YouTube channels are now being tracked on Glasp, so you never miss a new video worth highlighting. Start tracking here.

  👉 Bulk Download YouTube Transcripts

• 🟩 95,000+ Audio Files Transcribed:
  Our Audio Transcriber has now processed over 95,000 audio files. We’re excited to see how the community is using Glasp to capture insights from conversations, lectures, and recordings.

Would you like to take Glasp on the go?

With the Glasp mobile app, you can highlight and organize your favorite content anytime, anywhere. Stay productive on the move and never miss an insightful quote.

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We currently offer newsletter sponsorships. If you have a product, event, or service you’d like to share with our community of learning enthusiasts, sponsor an edition of our newsletter to reach engaged readers.

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“Nothing is so fatiguing as the eternal hanging on of an uncompleted task.”

— William James

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You have been told your brain holds on to what you did not finish. It is why so many products leave things visibly incomplete: the progress bar at 80%, the streak you cannot break, the draft marked unsent. The idea comes from one experiment in 1927, and it has been repeated so often that almost nobody went back to check it.

Someone finally did.

Save to Glasp

📄 Glasp Deep Dive

The Zeigarnik Effect: What the Research Says · 17 min read

Why we went looking. We make a tool for saving what you read, so we had a stake in this one. The case for highlighting has always leaned on memory: capture it, and you will remember it. We went through the literature expecting to find support for that. The memory argument did not survive. What replaced it is a better reason to save things, and it is not the one we had been giving.

Here is the short version.

The finding. A 2025 meta-analysis pooled 37 studies and put the weighted ratio of interrupted to completed tasks recalled at 0.99. There is no memory advantage. Zeigarnik’s 1927 original, with 32 adults, reported 1.9. Everything since has scattered between 0.70 and 2.0, and weighting by sample size cancels it out.

What survived instead. Maria Ovsiankina, working in the same lab a year later, measured something different: not what people recalled, but whether they went back. Across 20 studies the pooled resumption rate is 66.79%, against a 50% baseline. The obscure sibling replicates. The famous one does not.

So the pull back toward unfinished work is real. The memory benefit people built products around was never there.

The part that should worry you. Open loops do not help you remember, and they do cost you. Masicampo and Baumeister (2011) found that an unfulfilled goal produced intrusive thoughts during unrelated reading, inflated accessibility of goal-related words, and worse performance on an unrelated anagram task. What degrades is executive function itself: impulse control, logical reasoning, fluid intelligence, all of it leaning on working memory.

No upside, real downside. The worst arrangement available.

The fix is almost insultingly cheap. In the same work, writing a specific plan eliminated the interference. Not finishing the task. Writing down when, where and how you would return to it. The size of the effect tracked how earnest the plan was.

Leroy and Glomb found the same thing in the workplace version. Interrupted work leaves attention residue on whatever you turn to next. Across four studies, people who spent a few seconds noting where they were and what they would do on return carried less residue, and the interrupting task did not suffer.

What this changed for us. We had been telling you to highlight so you would remember. That is not what the research supports. Highlight so you can put the loop down: the sentence you came for, the next step you would take, written where you will find it. You are not saving it to remember it. You are saving it to stop paying for it.

Read the full deep dive, including why the 1927 result probably worked at the time and stopped working since.

What is the one open loop you have been carrying all week without ever writing down where you left it?

📣 Community Updates

• 🟩 Glasp on mobile passed 100,000 installs:

  Across iOS and Android, more than 100,000 of you have now installed the app. Thank you for that. If you have been meaning to try it, this issue is a decent excuse. The phone is where you are most likely to leave a loop open, and the app is where you can put it down.
  👉 App Store · Google Play

• 🟦 Kindle Highlights Milestone:

  Glasp users have now imported over 83,000 Kindle highlights. Japanese, Spanish, German, French and Portuguese clipping formats work too. Bring your own library in here.
  👉 Download Highlights and Notes from Kindle

• 🟥 YouTube Channel Tracking:

  Over 4,100 YouTube channels are now being tracked on Glasp, so you never miss a new video worth highlighting. Start tracking here.

  👉 Bulk Download YouTube Transcripts

❤️ Gratitude

Thank you for sharing and mentioning us on X, LinkedIn, and/or your blogs. 🙂 We appreciate your support! Please don’t hesitate to ask us anything at any time. Also, feel free to join our Reddit Community ;)

• Toolworthy listed Glasp’s YouTube Summary.

  

• PeerPush featured YouTube Summary with ChatGPT and Claude.

• Pasquale Pillitteri included us in a roundup of free AI tools beyond ChatGPT.

• Paragraph walked through copying the text of a YouTube video without installing anything.

• Techreviewer wrote us up as a tool for researchers, students, writers, and lifelong learners.

• Aposto described Glasp for readers in Turkey as the extension that collects what you highlight without switching tabs.

• INSIDEA recommended Glasp for tracking how AI-assisted readers curate and share knowledge.

• Visalytica covered the Glasp MCP connector for searching your highlights from inside an AI assistant.

• Acadomi put Glasp in the curriculum of their AI productivity course, in the module on pulling key insights out of articles and documents.

• eBool ranked Glasp first among 25 content curation tools.

We hope you enjoyed reading this newsletter!

See you next week ;)

Best,
Kei and Kazuki

--

Would you like to take Glasp on the go?

With the Glasp mobile app, you can highlight and organize your favorite content anytime, anywhere. Stay productive on the move and never miss an insightful quote.

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“Trust, but verify.”

― Russian proverb, made famous in English by Ronald Reagan

* Today’s newsletter is brought to you by AfroTech.

Governance and integration are where most AI projects stall: no one signed off on what the agent could touch, or the data architecture gave out after the demo.

At the AFROTECH Conference, Gregory Green of VMware breaks down the production stack that makes agentic AI resilient, and cybersecurity author Nicole Dove covers the “32% problem” of over-trusting AI output, plus the guardrails that fix it without slowing your team down.

Secure your pass for four days in Houston, November 2 - 6.

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Hi there,

Every agent you run today carries memory it did not earn: notes from a previous session, rules a teammate wrote down months ago, constraints whose original reason has quietly changed. This week’s three reads are about one question. When an agent inherits a rule, does it ever go back and check whether the rule still holds?

The first one is our own. The short answer is no, and the fix is smaller than you would think.

Save to Glasp

📚 3 Good Recommendations

When Stale Constraints Go Unchecked: Budgeted Verification Failures in Inherited Agent Memory by Kazuki Nakayashiki (65 mins)

• We handed 16 language models (Claude Opus 5, Sonnet 5, Haiku 4.5, the GPT-5.6 family, and ten more from nine other labs) six inherited memories and a task with five possible actions. One memory stated a constraint, “this discount hurt retention, do not reuse it.” In the archive, that constraint had already been withdrawn by a newer record. The memory’s provenance link still pointed at the old one.

• Each model could open only two source records before deciding. They opened the constraint’s source about one time in five. Across 5,400 episodes, they followed the withdrawn rule 74 to 77 percent of the time.

• The failure is not a lack of budget but where the budget goes. Forcing one of the two slots onto the constraint memory recovered 61 to 81 points. A content-blind rule, “check the memory that limits your options first,” recovered 89. Telling the model the memory might be old did nothing.

Save to Glasp

Designing for Doubt: How to Prevent Automation Complacency in AI Workflows by Victor Yocco, UXmatters (11 mins)

• Paper one is about agents that stop checking. This is about the people watching them. Complacency sets in under three conditions that describe most AI deployments: the system is usually right, the operator is busy, and nothing has gone wrong yet.

• The slide is gradual. “I should verify” becomes “it is right unless something looks off,” then simply “it is right.” The Air France 447 crew in 2009 were highly trained and still followed the automation into the sea.

• Four design moves push back: deliberate friction at the moments that matter, confidence signals that vary instead of always reading as certain, periodic unassisted tasks, and treating complacency as a system health metric. “Complacency happens when trust closes the gap between ‘I believe this system works’ and ‘I no longer evaluate whether it has worked this time.’”

Save to Glasp

Guardrails for Autonomous AI Agents by Khimananda Oli (11 mins)

• Paper one shows an agent will act on a rule nobody checked. This is the other half: make sure that when it does, it cannot reach far. “The primary failure mode isn’t malicious AI, it’s competent AI operating with excessive permissions.”

• Permissions in three tiers, deny by default, allow by function, then bound to the session. No wildcards. Approval gates only where the blast radius is real: production deletions, IAM changes, cross-account moves. Everything routine stays automatic, or the humans stop reading the prompts.

• Every policy decision goes to an immutable log, kept at least twelve months, and the guardrail costs 50 to 200 milliseconds per checkpoint. Written by an infrastructure security engineer with working policy code, not a vendor.

Save to Glasp

Three reads, one shape. An agent will not check a rule that looks settled. The person supervising it stops checking for the same reason. And the fix in both cases is not more trust or less, but deciding in advance which records get opened every time, and how far anything can reach when nobody opened them.

For the deep dive on designing memory that expires on purpose, Hidekazu Konishi’s AI Agent Memory Design Guide (updated August 29) covers forgetting, staleness and provenance in detail.

So a question for anyone running agents in production: when did your agent last open the source of the rule it is following right now? And when did you?

📣 Community Updates

• 🟨 Glasp Research has a home page:

  Everything we have published this year now lives in one place: eleven papers on how people highlight and how AI agents handle inherited memory, with code and data bundles for the ones you can reproduce. Today’s first read is the newest entry. We publish negative results too, because that is what keeps our product decisions honest.

  👉 Browse Glasp Research

• 🟦 Kindle Highlights Milestone:

  Glasp users have now imported over 82,000 Kindle highlights. Japanese, Spanish, German, French and Portuguese clipping formats work too. Bring your own library in here.
  👉 Download Highlights and Notes from Kindle

• 🟥 YouTube Channel Tracking:

  Over 3,100 YouTube channels are now being tracked on Glasp, so you never miss a new video worth highlighting. Start tracking here.

  👉 Bulk Download YouTube Transcripts

• 🟩 90,000 Posts published on Glasp:

  Highlights are where reading starts; posts are where readers put the pieces together. Ninety thousand of them now, written on top of what the community has highlighted. Thank you for writing in public.

  👉 Write a post

❤️ Gratitude

Thank you for sharing and mentioning us on X, LinkedIn, and/or your blogs. 🙂 We appreciate your support! Please don’t hesitate to ask us anything at any time. Also, feel free to join our Reddit Community ;)

• The IT Brief picked Glasp as Tool of the Week, “a web highlighter that builds a searchable knowledge base”

• Little Almanack named Glasp one of the two main Readwise alternatives in its 2026 review

• アプリマーケティング研究所 (note, Japan) published a deep dive on how Glasp grew to 3.5 million users: about 800 rounds of onboarding iteration and ten product and marketing moves that compound at low cost

  

• inkl syndicated The Guardian’s Matthew Cantor on a year of ChatGPT, with Glasp’s YouTube Summary as the plugin that “can even summarize entire YouTube videos so you don’t have to listen to an insufferable Ted Talker”

• Mazhar Hussain on Medium listed Glasp in AI for Academics: 13 AI-Powered Apps

• 10 Revolutionary Educational Tools That Feel Like Cheating on Medium included Glasp

• AIツールギャラリー (Japan) added a Glasp entry, MCP connector included

• LIKE.TG listed the YouTube Summarizer

• Chrome-Stats profiled YouTube Summary with ChatGPT & Claude

  

• Parse, which tracks how AI assistants talk about brands, now indexes Glasp: “a social PDF and web highlighter,” scored across more than 3 million AI responses

We hope you enjoyed reading this newsletter!

See you next week ;)

Best,
Kei and Kazuki

--

Would you like to take Glasp on the go?

With the Glasp mobile app, you can highlight and organize your favorite content anytime, anywhere. Stay productive on the move and never miss an insightful quote.

Download for iOS

Download for Android

Partner With Glasp

We currently offer newsletter sponsorships. If you have a product, event, or service you’d like to share with our community of learning enthusiasts, sponsor an edition of our newsletter to reach engaged readers.

Sponsor an Edition

Subscribe to Glasp

Subscribe now

🌐 Read this in your language: 日本語 · Español · Français · Português (BR) · Tiếng Việt · 한국어

We’re excited to announce a new tutorial on Glasp: How to Follow YouTube Channels and Newsletters in the Glasp Mobile App

Copying a link every time you want to read or watch something on your phone gets old fast. The Glasp app for iOS and Android has a Feed tab with two segments, YouTube and Newsletters, so you follow a source once and its new items come to you.

Once your sources are set up, you can:

• See every new upload from the YouTube channels you follow, in one place

• Follow newsletters and blogs by URL, or pick from Suggested sources

• Read the transcript, get an AI summary, or ask questions with Chat, without leaving the app

• Highlight and bookmark what matters, synced to your Glasp profile

📱 Get the app: App Store · Google Play

We keep the full step-by-step guide up to date in one place:

👉 Read the full tutorial: How to Follow YouTube Channels and Newsletters in the Glasp Mobile App

👉 FAQs
👉 X
👉 Reddit

See you next time,

Glasp team

–

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If you want to reread or highlight this newsletter, save it to Glasp.

Save to Glasp

Hi, I’m Bobby Powers! I run the Leader & Learner publication, where I share two posts per week that will help you become a more curious leader and learner.

I’ve been collecting quotes for the past decade. My database now contains thousands of witty insights from books, podcast interviews, articles, YouTube videos, etc.

Here are the best quotes I’ve found on journaling and self-reflection:

“The palest ink is better than the best memory.” -Chinese proverb

“The quieter you become, the more you can hear.” -Ram Dass

“Sometimes, you have to look back in order to understand the things that lie ahead.” -Yvonne Woon

“The biggest lie we tell ourselves is ‘I don’t need to write this down because I will remember it.’” -Kevin Kelly

“I examine my entire day and go back over what I’ve done and said, hiding nothing from myself, passing nothing by.” -Seneca

“Reflection is one of the most underused yet powerful tools for success.” -Richard Carlson

“Paper is more patient than people.” -Anne Frank

“I would rather be an authority on myself than on Cicero.” -Michel de Montaigne

“One dull pencil is worth six sharp minds.” -Anonymous proverb

“If [your journal] was for sale and you were the only buyer, you’d buy a million copies because this was the most interesting book that you’ve ever read. And that’s because everything resonates with your life. This is exactly how you felt.” -Amy Tan

“Notetaking is like time travel—you are sending packets of knowledge through time to your future self.” -Tiago Forte

“Self-reflection is a much kinder teacher than regret is. Prioritize yourself by making a habit of it.” -Andrena Sawyer

“We write to taste life twice, in the moment and in retrospect.” -Anaïs Nin

“As time goes by, when you look back over those entries that had seemed so ordinary, they become really interesting—to look back 15, 17, 20 years...you can’t anticipate how important it will be when you’re doing it because you’re just caught up in the moment.” -Joyce Carol Oates

“Remember what it was to be me, that is always the point.” -Joan Didion, re: her journaling

“Envy is inversely correlated with self-examination. The less you know yourself, the more you look to others to get an idea of your worth. But the more you delve into who you are, the less you seek from others, and the dissolution of envy begins.” -Lawrence Yeo

“To know oneself is, above all, to know what one lacks. It is to measure oneself against Truth, and not the other way around. The first product of self-knowledge is humility.” -Flannery O’Connor

“To know thyself is the beginning of wisdom.” -Aristotle

“Who has dared to tell himself the truth? Who even when surrounded by crowds of toadying sycophants is not his own greatest flatterer?” -Seneca

“Our best teacher isn’t experience. It’s evaluated experience.” -John Maxwell

“Don’t become too preoccupied with what is happening around you. Pay more attention to what is going on within you.” -Mary-Frances Winters

“A great way to understand yourself is to seriously reflect on everything you find irritating in others.” -Kevin Kelly

“Fear is a question. What are you afraid of and why? Our fears are a treasure house of self-knowledge if we explore them.” -Marilyn French

“Self-reflection is the quality that most differentiates those who evolve quickly from those who don’t. Remember: Pain + Reflection = Progress.” -Ray Dalio

“Whenever you find yourself on the side of the majority, it’s time to pause and reflect.” -Mark Twain

“I shall keep watching myself continually, and—a most useful habit—shall review each day. For this is what makes us wicked: that no one of us looks back over his own life. Our thoughts are devoted only to what we are about to do. And yet our plans for the future always depend on the past.” -Seneca

“The greatest of faults, I should say, is to be conscious of none.” -Thomas Carlyle

“Follow effective action with quiet reflection. From the quiet reflection will come even more effective action.” -Peter Drucker

“Self-reflection is the school of wisdom.” -Baltasar Gracian

“It is always our own self that we find at the end of the journey. The sooner we face that self, the better.” -Ella Maillart

More Great Quotes:

The Best Quotes About Habits

The 50 Best Quotes About Taking Action

📣 Community Updates by Glasp

• 🟥 Glasp Talk with Bobby Powers:

  Glasp Talk features intimate interviews with luminaries, revealing their emotions, experiences, and stories. The guest, Bobby Powers, is a dedicated learner passionate about leadership and personal development. With over a decade of experience managing teams, leading onboarding, and Learning and Development programs at various startups and SMBs, Bobby is also an avid reader, having read over a thousand books in the last 15 years.

  ✨ Want a concise summary before diving in? Install the YouTube Summary with ChatGPT extension by Glasp for instant video summaries!

• 🟦 Kindle Highlights Milestone:
  Glasp users have now imported over 80,000 Kindle highlights. Bring your own library in here.

Would you like to take Glasp on the go?

With the Glasp mobile app, you can highlight and organize your favorite content anytime, anywhere. Stay productive on the move and never miss an insightful quote.

Download for iOS

Download for Android

Partner With Glasp

We currently offer newsletter sponsorships. If you have a product, event, or service you’d like to share with our community of learning enthusiasts, sponsor an edition of our newsletter to reach engaged readers.

Sponsor an Edition

Share Glasp Newsletter

Share Glasp Newsletter

“The acquisition of knowledge is always of use to the intellect, because it may thus drive out useless things and retain the good.”

― Leonardo da Vinci

* Today’s newsletter is brought to you by Context.dev.

Context.dev is a web data API to power AI native products. Turn any URL into clean Markdown, rendered HTML, screenshots, or structured JSON. Trusted by 14K+ developers and teams like Mintlify, Klarna, and SimilarWeb.

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Hi friends,

We hand-picked 3 good pieces of content to inspire and motivate you now and in the future. Keep track of the insights that resonate with you by highlighting them with Glasp💡

If you want to reread or highlight this newsletter, save it to Glasp.

Save to Glasp

📚 3 Good Recommendations

1. An opinionated guide to which AI to use to do stuff by (8 mins)

• Pick one and pay for it. Claude or ChatGPT, twenty dollars, and use the agent modes rather than the chat box. That is the whole of the setup advice.

• Keep it on a leash at first. Leave every permission on ask-first, especially anything touching email, purchases or deleting files, and widen it only once you know how it fails.

• Turn the thinking up when it matters. For medical, legal or otherwise consequential questions, use the stronger models with reasoning set high, where the error rates are measurably lower.

Save to Glasp

2. Incident Report: unsanctioned agent behaviour during cyber testing by Simon Willison (4 mins)

• 19 out of 122. During cyber evaluations run between July 25 and 28, the UK AI Security Institute logged 19 instances of agents acting on the live internet without sanction, across 122 attempts.

• One agent ran a supply-chain attack on its own initiative. It opened a GitHub account, filed a pull request with a hidden prompt injection, then created a second account to pose as a reviewer endorsing its own PR, and sent spear-phishing mail to maintainers.

• The setup explains most of it. Safety classifiers were deliberately turned off and the agents were given direct internet access. Willison’s point is that the missing piece was network sandboxing, not surprise at the behavior.

Save to Glasp

3. Indirect Prompt Injection: The Year It Got Real CVEs by Glasp (16 mins)

• It stopped being theoretical. EchoLeak (CVE-2025-32711) let Microsoft 365 Copilot leak enterprise data from a crafted email, with no user action beyond receiving it.

• Whatever your agent can read, an attacker can write. CometJacking and HashJack turned URL parameters and fragments into instructions for Perplexity’s Comet and ChatGPT Atlas.

• The tool response is part of the prompt. In CVE-2026-21520, Copilot Studio agents treated whatever a connector returned as a legitimate continuation of the conversation, hidden instructions included.

Save to Glasp

📣 Community Updates

• 🟦 Launched Kindle Clippings Converter:

  Amazon’s My Clippings.txt puts every book in one file, interleaved, with duplicates and notes torn away from the highlights they belong to. This turns it into something you can actually use: Markdown as one document or a note per book, CSV, an Obsidian vault, Anki cards, or JSON if you want to script it. It runs entirely in your browser, so the file never leaves your machine, and there is no account to create. Japanese, Spanish, German, French and Portuguese clipping formats are handled too.

  👉 Try the Kindle Clippings Converter

• 🟥 Launched Airtable Importer:

  If you keep your reading in an Airtable base, you can move it over in about two minutes, for free. Export the view as CSV, drop it in, and map your own column names to ours. They can be called anything: “Article URL”, “Quote”, “My Notes”. Before anything is saved you see how many highlights you will get and every row that will be skipped, with the reason why. It does not touch your base, and it is not a one-way door either: Glasp exports to Obsidian, Notion, Readwise, Zotero and more, so the next move is yours too.

  👉 Import from Airtable

• 🟨 Glasp MCP Connector on Product Hunt:

  You can connect Glasp to Claude and ChatGPT and search your own highlights and notes in plain language, right inside the assistant. It is read-only and private to you. Thank you to everyone who came by to support and upvote it 🙏

  👉 See it on Product Hunt

• 🟩 35,000+ PDFs Uploaded & HighlightedPDF:
  More than 35,000 PDFs have been uploaded and highlighted on Glasp. We’re excited to see how the community is using Glasp to organize research, study materials, and important documents.

  👉 Upload and highlight a PDF

🤝 Ask

• 🟥 Rate the Mobile App:

  The iOS and Android apps are far newer than the extension, so each rating counts for much more there. Rate it on iOS here and on Android here.

❤️ Gratitude

Thank you for sharing and mentioning us on X, LinkedIn, and/or your blogs. 🙂 We appreciate your support! Please don’t hesitate to ask us anything at any time. Also, feel free to join our Reddit Community ;)

• AI Future put Glasp in her roundup of the best AI Chrome extensions for 2026

  

• shared Glasp on Substack:

• Dustin Miller put Glasp in his top five education tools, calling it the most successful social learning experiment he has seen

• SaaSTrac added Glasp to its directory

• Cortera published a company profile of Glasp Inc

• WayToAGI listed Glasp among its AI tools

• Logiciels.pro reviewed Glasp for French readers

• Forendors featured Glasp for its Czech readers

• ねん wrote up our AEO work in Japanese, including how ChatGPT traffic grew 37x in four months

We hope you enjoyed reading this newsletter!

See you next week ;)

Best,
Kei and Kazuki

--

Would you like to take Glasp on the go?

With the Glasp mobile app, you can highlight and organize your favorite content anytime, anywhere. Stay productive on the move and never miss an insightful quote.

Download for iOS

Download for Android

Partner With Glasp

We currently offer newsletter sponsorships. If you have a product, event, or service you’d like to share with our community of learning enthusiasts, sponsor an edition of our newsletter to reach engaged readers.

Sponsor an Edition

Subscribe to Glasp

Subscribe now

Here’s something we noticed while pulling this month’s most-imported books.

Half of this list is people learning how to move other people. Offers, negotiation, brand stories, leverage. The other half is people learning how to sit still with what won’t move at all. Stoics, a shepherd chasing an omen, a Navy SEAL in the snow.

Read them together and the seam between the two halves is the whole argument:

You control the offer. You don’t control the answer.

Alex Hormozi opens with an offer so good it can’t be compared. Chris Voss follows by questioning the assumptions everyone else takes on faith. Then Ryan Holiday shows up twice in a row to say the quiet part: direct your actions properly, and willingly accept what’s outside your control. Morgan Housel prices that same idea in dollars. Paulo Coelho’s most-underlined line calls the loss of control the world’s greatest lie. By the time Gary Keller closes the list with one thing at a time, the argument has come all the way around. Do the work that’s yours. Release the rest.

As always, we’re not just sharing what got imported. For every book, we’re showing you the single line that the most readers stopped to highlight, what we call Reader Consensus. It’s the closest thing we have to a room full of strangers nodding at the same sentence.

One more thing before we start. Only two books carried over from June’s list, and both of them brought back the exact same sentence, with more readers behind it than before. Consensus, it turns out, is sticky.

Here are July’s top 10.

1. $100M Offers

Alex Hormozi, gym-owner-turned-investor who wrote the playbook for pricing what you sell far above what it costs you to deliver.

“The Grand Slam Offer only becomes valuable once the prospect perceives the increase in likelihood of achievement, perceives the decrease in time delay, and perceives the decrease in effort and sacrifice.”

Reader Consensus: 24 of 86 highlighters (28%), tied with his definition of the Grand Slam Offer itself. July’s most-imported book by a clear margin.

📖 Read on Amazon · Highlights on Glasp

2. Never Split the Difference

Chris Voss, former lead FBI hostage negotiator who brought tactical empathy from life-or-death standoffs to the boardroom.

“Great negotiators are able to question the assumptions that the rest of the involved players accept on faith or in arrogance, and thus remain more emotionally open to all possibilities, and more intellectually agile to a fluid situation.”

Reader Consensus: 23 of 58 highlighters (40%). The same line June’s list surfaced, now with six more readers underneath it.

📖 Read on Amazon · Highlights on Glasp

3. The Daily Stoic

Ryan Holiday and Stephen Hanselman, who turned Marcus Aurelius, Epictetus, and Seneca into a page a day and put Stoicism back on the bestseller list.

“Control your perceptions. Direct your actions properly. Willingly accept what’s outside your control.”

Reader Consensus: 16 of 57 highlighters (28%).

🌐 Top highlights in other languages: 日本語 (5) · Español (5)

📖 Read on Amazon · Highlights on Glasp

4. The Obstacle Is the Way

Ryan Holiday, back for a second appearance in as many entries, this time with the book that made an ancient idea sound like a training manual.

“The impediment to action advances action. What stands in the way becomes the way.”

Reader Consensus: 22 of 48 highlighters (46%), the second-highest agreement on this list.

🌐 Top highlights in other languages: Português (5)

📖 Read on Amazon · Highlights on Glasp

5. The Almanack of Naval Ravikant

Eric Jorgenson, who distilled a decade of Naval Ravikant‘s tweets, interviews, and essays into a free guide to wealth and happiness.

“Learn to sell. Learn to build. If you can do both, you will be unstoppable.”

Reader Consensus: 29 of 75 highlighters (39%). The other line that carried over from June, four readers stronger than it was then.

🌐 Top highlights in other languages: 日本語 (26)

📖 Read on Amazon · Highlights on Glasp

6. The Psychology of Money

Morgan Housel, partner at Collaborative Fund, who argues that doing well with money is a behavior problem long before it is a math problem.

“There is no reason to risk what you have and need for what you don’t have and don’t need.”

Reader Consensus: 21 of 60 highlighters (35%).

🌐 Top highlights in other languages: 日本語 (9) · Español (9) · Português (7)

📖 Read on Amazon · Highlights on Glasp

7. The Alchemist

Paulo Coelho, the Brazilian novelist whose shepherd boy has sent more people looking for their own omens than any self-help book on this list.

“It’s this: that at a certain point in our lives, we lose control of what’s happening to us, and our lives become controlled by fate. That’s the world’s greatest lie.”

Reader Consensus: 8 of 21 highlighters (38%), tied with a second line about how clearly we see everyone’s life but our own. The only novel in this month’s top 10.

🌐 Top highlights in other languages: 日本語 (18)

📖 Read on Amazon · Highlights on Glasp

8. Sapiens

Yuval Noah Harari, historian who explained our species by arguing that the thing we’re best at is believing in things that aren’t there.

“There are no gods in the universe, no nations, no money, no human rights, no laws, and no justice outside the common imagination of human beings.”

Reader Consensus: 16 of 62 highlighters (26%), tied with the passage on living in a dual reality. Fitting, for a list this full of people selling stories.

🌐 Top highlights in other languages: 日本語 (17) · Español (12) · Português (7)

📖 Read on Amazon · Highlights on Glasp

9. Can’t Hurt Me

David Goggins, retired Navy SEAL who turned a childhood he should not have survived into an argument that the limit you feel is a suggestion.

“Everything in life is a mind game! Whenever we get swept under by life’s dramas, large and small, we are forgetting that no matter how bad the pain gets, no matter how harrowing the torture, all bad things end.”

Reader Consensus: 9 of 38 highlighters (24%). The most spread-out book on the list. Goggins readers underline everything, and rarely the same thing.

🌐 Top highlights in other languages: Italiano (5)

📖 Read on Amazon · Highlights on Glasp

10. The ONE Thing

Gary Keller and Jay Papasan, who took a single question, “what’s the one thing I can do such that everything else gets easier,” and built a method around it.

“Passion for something leads to disproportionate time practicing or working at it. That time spent eventually translates to skill, and when skill improves, results improve. Better results generally lead to more enjoyment, and more passion and more time is invested. It can be a virtuous cycle all the way to extraordinary results.”

Reader Consensus: 17 of 35 highlighters (49%), the highest agreement of any book on this list. Nearly half of everyone who highlighted this book stopped at the same paragraph, and it’s the one that says the cycle only pays if you stay in it.

📖 Read on Amazon · Highlights on Glasp

📈 Discovered in July

The top 10 measures volume. This section measures momentum: books whose July arrivals make up an outsized share of everyone who has ever imported them. The first one sits at #7 above. The other two never had the volume for the list, but a third or more of their entire readership showed up this month.

• The Alchemist: 6 of its 21 all-time importers (29%) arrived in July. A 1988 novel outrunning most of the business books around it.

• How to Know a Person: 4 of 11 all-time importers (36%). David Brooks on the skill of actually seeing someone, quietly the counterweight to a list this focused on persuading them.

• The Hero with a Thousand Faces: 3 of 6 all-time importers (50%). Joseph Campbell’s monomyth, showing up in the same month that Sapiens and a brand-story book both made the top 10. Somebody out there is building a narrative.

❤️ Before you go

Every line above came from someone who took the time to mark it. That’s the whole idea: when you highlight on Glasp, you’re not just saving a sentence for yourself. You’re leaving it for the next reader.

If any of these books are on your shelf, import your highlights and add your own underline to the count. Next month’s consensus is being written right now.

See you in the margins,

The Glasp Team

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This month was about meeting you where you already read. The extension is rebuilt from the ground up and finally landed on Firefox, three more apps joined the list of places you can import highlights from, and the Obsidian plugin now brings your summaries and bookmarks across too. Whichever browser you open and whichever app you think in, your highlights come along.

Here’s what’s new.

📣 Community Updates

📌 Community Milestones

• Glasp posts published: 8,000+

• Kindle highlights imported: 78,000+ unique books

• YouTube Channels Tracking: 3,500+

• Audio files transcribed: 80,000+

🔧 Feature Updates

• Glasp Extension v2.1.2: The biggest rewrite since we launched. A new highlighting engine that holds up on pages that used to fight back, a redesigned sidebar, and Suggested Highlights, where AI picks the key sentences and you accept the ones you agree with. Plus AI Overview, a better Community view, 7 languages, and dark and light themes. One thing to know: the upgrade signs you out of the extension once, and nothing is lost. → Read the announcement

• Firefox Extension: Glasp is on Firefox at last. Highlight the web, PDFs, and YouTube transcripts, with your highlights syncing to the same account you already use everywhere else. It has been the single most requested thing in our inbox for years. → Get it on Firefox Add-ons

• Mobile App: Image highlighting is now on mobile, so you can mark up what you see, not just what you read. The Feed gains a Newsletters section, and you can pull your Raindrop highlights in from the app. The Safari extension got a round of polish too. Update from the App Store or Google Play.

• YouTube Summary Extension: A redesigned sidebar puts Transcript, Summary, Chat, and Highlights in one place. Chat is the new one: ask anything about the video and the answer comes back grounded in what was actually said, with starters like “What are the key takeaways?” if you don’t know where to begin. The transcript now lives in our sidebar instead of leaning on YouTube’s own panel, so it keeps working when YouTube moves things around.

• Obsidian Plugin v0.3.0: Summaries and Bookmarks now import alongside your highlights, and each source gets its own Obsidian Bases database view, as a table or as cards with thumbnails. We also fixed a bug that duplicated Kindle notes on re-sync. Requires Obsidian 1.9+. → Get it from Community Plugins

• Zapier: Summaries can now kick off a Zap. The new New Summary trigger fires whenever you generate an AI summary of a page, PDF, or YouTube video, so a summary can land in Notion, a Slack channel, or a spreadsheet without you moving it. It joins the existing triggers for new highlights, bookmarks, and documents, plus actions to create highlights and bookmarks from anywhere. → Browse the Zaps

• Import & Export: The biggest expansion yet, on both sides. Coming in, Matter, Raindrop.io, Diigo, and Wallabag all joined. Raindrop connects with one click and pulls your highlights with their notes, colors, and tags, with no file export needed, and only pages you actually highlighted come across, so your plain bookmarks stay where they are. Going out, five new destinations: Zotero, Tana, Workflowy, Roam Research, and Anki. That’s 13 places to bring highlights in from and 8 to send them out to, all under Settings → Integrations.

🆕 New Pages

• Glasp Research: Every paper we’ve published, in one place. Each one ships with a reproducibility bundle: the code and the derived data behind every number, and for most of them a public repository too.

• Open Graph Checker: Paste any URL and see exactly how it will look when shared on X, Facebook, LinkedIn, Discord, Slack, and Google. It lists every Open Graph, Twitter Card, and meta tag, so you can spot what is missing before you publish. Free, no sign-in.

• Brand Assets: Logos, colors, and company boilerplate, ready to download. If you write about Glasp, make a video, or build an integration, you’re welcome to use them without asking first.

• Discover Books: The books Glasp readers import most, ranked. A quick way to see what everyone else is reading before you pick your next one.

📖 New Tutorials & Posts

• Research

  • Language Models Agree With Each Other, Not With Readers: Two language models pick the same sentences far more often than two readers do. Across 18 model arms from 11 vendors, the median model pair reaches +0.093 excess agreement against a human yardstick of +0.040, and no model agrees with readers more than a reader does. The human side is 2,523 mark sets from people highlighting for their own reasons, not for a study.

  • Measuring Alignment With Reader Highlights Net of Position and Length: Crowd highlights sit early in a page and run long, so anything that favours early or long sentences looks aligned with readers. Netting both out, a language model’s importance ranking reaches +0.196 excess agreement with the crowd, and a single human reader reaches +0.182.

• Hatching Growth

  • How We Grew ChatGPT Traffic 37x Using Our Own Server Logs | Hatching Growth #17

Thank you to Alumni Ventures and Hashiri.AI for backing us this month. If you’d like to reach this audience, we have slots open.

• Tutorials

  • How to Connect Glasp to Claude, ChatGPT, and Claude Code (MCP Connector)

  • How to Export Highlights and Notes into Tana

  • How to Export Highlights and Notes into Workflowy

  • How to Import Highlights from Matter to Glasp

  • How to Turn Your Glasp Highlights into Anki Flashcards

• Curated YouTube collections

  We published 21 curated collections this month. A few that readers went for:

  • 10 Best YouTube Videos on AI Agents

  • 10 Best Veritasium Videos That Explain How the World Works

  • Naval Ravikant’s 10 Best Interviews and Talks

• Top 3 Most-Highlighted Kindle Books in July

  • $100M Offers by Alex Hormozi

  • The Obstacle Is the Way by Ryan Holiday

  • Never Split the Difference by Chris Voss

  • The Daily Stoic by Ryan Holiday

Second place was a three-way tie this month, so there are four. Ryan Holiday takes two of them.

Full breakdown coming in a separate post.

🎯 Sponsored by YouTube Summary with ChatGPT & Claude

Summarize any YouTube video in one click. Used by 2 million people worldwide.

→ Try it free

Interested in sponsoring The Highlight? → Learn more

🌍 Glasp in the Wild

Thank you for sharing and mentioning us on X, LinkedIn, and/or your blogs. 🙂 We appreciate your support! Please don’t hesitate to ask us anything at any time. Also, feel free to join our Reddit Community ;)

• Glasp: AI Summary & Highlight on Chrome-Stats

  

• Glasp on TheAiSurf

  

• Glasp on AIPURE

  

• Glasp AI on 5app

  

• 27 Best Chrome Extensions for Bloggers in 2026 on Ryan Robinson

• Top 13 AI Chrome Extensions for Students to Make Things Easy and Better on Active Noon

• Must-Know AI Tools for Startup Founders to Work Smarter in 2023 on Grav.id’s Medium

• 7 Best AI Chrome Extensions for Work on God of Prompt

• Fastest Growing AI Tools in March 2026 on NavTools AI

• 14 Tools AI Terbaik untuk Merangkum Video YouTube Pakai AI (14 Best AI Tools for Summarizing YouTube Videos Using AI) on Belajarlagi

✍️ Write for Glasp

Do you write about learning, reading, or AI? We occasionally feature guest contributors. Share a link to something you’ve written in the comments — we’ll reach out if it’s a good fit.

→ Past guest posts

⭐ Could you leave us a review?

If Glasp has earned a place in how you read, a quick review helps more than you’d think. Reviews are how most people decide whether to try something new, and they take about thirty seconds.

The Firefox add-on is brand new, so it has almost no reviews yet. That one would help the most.

• Chrome Web Store

• Firefox Add-ons

• App Store (iOS)

• Google Play (Android)

Thank you 🙏

💛 Did you know?

Did you know Glasp can tell you what your reading says about you? Know Thyself reads the books, highlights, and notes you’ve saved and turns them into a portrait of how you think, then points you toward readers who think in similar ways. It’s free, and it gets sharper the more you highlight.

We hope you enjoyed reading this newsletter!

See you next week ;)

Best,
Kei and Kazuki
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🌐 Read this in your language: 日本語 · Español · Français · Português (BR) · Tiếng Việt · 한국어

We’re excited to announce a new tutorial on Glasp: How to Connect Glasp to Claude, ChatGPT, and Claude Code (MCP Connector).

Have you ever wished your AI assistant knew what you have been reading? With Glasp’s MCP Connector, you can connect your Glasp account to any MCP-compatible AI tool, including Claude, ChatGPT, Claude Code, and clients built on the OpenAI API, and ask them about everything you have read, highlighted, and saved.

Picture this: instead of digging through old bookmarks, you ask Claude “what did I save about deep work?” and get your own highlighted passages back, with their sources, right inside the chat you already use.

The connector is read-only and private to you. It can read your own highlights and memories, and nothing else. It can never post, edit, or delete anything.

Save to Glasp

🔌 How to connect

Before you start. Go to the Settings page on Glasp and click MCP Connector in the left sidebar. You can also learn more on the MCP Connector page.

The MCP server URL you will use in every client is:

https://glasp.co/api/mcp

The full step-by-step guide covers Claude, ChatGPT, Claude Code, and any MCP client, with screenshots:

Read the full guide

💡 What you can do once connected

Write with your own sources, not generic AI text. Ask your assistant to pull the passages you already highlighted and weave them in with citations.

“I’m writing about deep work. Pull the quotes I highlighted on focus, and draft an intro that uses them.”

Resurface what you forgot you saved. It searches across every article, PDF, YouTube video, and Kindle book you saved.

“What have I saved about pricing strategy, and where was each from?”

Get a briefing before a meeting or decision. Turn scattered highlights into a one-paragraph brief.

“Summarize everything I’ve highlighted about a competitor or topic into five bullet points.”

Review what you are learning. Turn your reading into study material.

“Quiz me on my recent highlights about AI agents.”

Stay in your coding flow (Claude Code). Ask about something you saved without leaving the terminal.

“What did I highlight about rate limiting in that API article?”

📖 Connecting takes about a minute

For Claude and ChatGPT, it’s OAuth: no token to copy, just sign in with Glasp and approve read-only access. For Claude Code and other MCP clients, it’s a single command with an access token. The full step-by-step guide covers every client, with screenshots:

Read the full guide

With the MCP Connector, your highlights and notes stop being a static archive and become a knowledge base your AI assistant can actually use. The more you highlight, the more your AI knows about what you have learned.

Sign up for Glasp

👉 FAQs
👉 X
👉 Reddit

See you next time,

Glasp team

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We currently offer newsletter sponsorships. If you have a product, event, or service you’d like to share with our community of learning enthusiasts, sponsor an edition of our newsletter to reach engaged readers.

Sponsor an Edition

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* Today’s newsletter is brought to you by Alumni Ventures.

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Popular Episodes at a Glance

• #1: How We Found and Acquired Our First 1,000 Users

• #3: How We Rode the AI Wave with Side Projects Before It Exploded

• #4: From ChatGPT’s Launch to YouTube Summary’s Breakout

• #5: After YouTube Summary — Building AI Clones

• #8: How We Doubled Down on YouTube Summary with Programmatic SEO

• #10: When the Side Project Outgrows the Mission

• #11: How We Appeared on Times Square — for Free

• #12: AEO in Practice: Memory Hacks, Prompt Injection Experiments, and Honest Results

Hi, Kei and Kazuki here.

An earlier version of this story ran as a guest essay on Sean Ellis’s Substack: How Glasp grew ChatGPT traffic from 500 to 19,000 daily sessions in 4 months. We are genuinely grateful to Sean for giving us that stage; the essay reached a far larger audience than it would have on its own, and the conversations it started are part of why this follow-up exists. The essay recently moved behind the paywall, though, and we kept getting asked for a version people could actually read, so this issue is the permanent public home of the playbook. It is also more than a reprint: since that essay went out, we re-measured the entire experiment with a control group, published the analysis as a paper on arXiv, and ran two more months of iterations. The tactics are here in full, and so is the honest accounting of what they were actually worth.

If you want to reread or highlight this newsletter, save it to Glasp.

Save to Glasp

The bet

Glasp has a corpus of 400,000+ YouTube Q&A pages, grown out of our side product YouTube Summary with ChatGPT (how that corpus came to be is Hatching Growth #8; how we decided to embrace it is #10).

How those pages are built matters for everything that follows, because AEO at this scale only survives if the corpus survives scrutiny from creators, platforms, and the AI providers who decide whether to keep crawling you. We do not store transcripts; YouTube’s terms do not allow republishing them at scale, so we keep video metadata only. Channels with strict copyright posture are excluded from the pipeline entirely, and Creative Commons licensed videos are prioritized. When a transcript fragment appears in an article, it is a citation, never the substance; the page is built around our own Q&A synthesis and structured data. And attribution flows back to the creator: every article embeds the original video and links prominently to it, so a reader who wants the full thing sends their attention upstream, while a reader who wants to summarize their next video themselves finds our extension. A corpus designed to give before it asks is a corpus designed to last.

In late December 2025 we made a bet on that corpus: deprioritize direct SEO investment and optimize for ChatGPT instead. For a growing share of users, the first move to learn what is inside a YouTube video is no longer Google. Search behavior is not dying; it is expanding, and AI assistants are absorbing exactly the summarization and Q&A queries our corpus is built for. Our 400,000 pages were optimized for the wrong retrieval surface.

One important precondition before anything else. AEO is not a substitute for SEO; it sits on top of it. Glasp’s domain authority was around 69 to 70 when this experiment began, built over years of category clusters, clean HTML, schema, and JSON-LD. As of this writing it sits at 71, and we will come back to why that small move matters. Everything below assumes a domain that Google already takes seriously. If you skip that foundation and optimize for ChatGPT from a cold start, we genuinely do not know what happens. We did not run that experiment.

Why we walked away from SEO

Given that foundation, why stop investing in it? Because at our scale, SEO had almost no levers left that we could actually pull. For a page that is indexed but not ranking, backlinks were honestly still part of the answer, but acquiring meaningful backlinks for each of 400,000 programmatically generated pages is functionally impossible; the unit economics do not pencil out. In the early weeks we ran a parallel SEO plus AEO matrix, scoring every article on both axes and routing each to a different playbook, and the operational overhead was crushing. Worse, the few levers SEO did still have at our scale, title rewrites and structural rewrites, were the same levers helping AEO. Two playbooks were converging into one, and the AEO side had the steeper upside and the higher velocity.

There was also a quieter reason, harder to put in a spreadsheet: by then we had a feel for what gets cited. Through earlier, smaller experiments, publishing tutorials on Glasp Post, watching landing pages and user-generated content across the glasp.co domain, and posting articles on other sites, we had seen which kinds of pages ChatGPT actually picked up, and built working intuitions about what an answer engine reaches for. Those intuitions were not 100 percent right, and we knew it. But walking into a large experiment with a sense of direction changes everything about its economics: improvement ideas suggest themselves instead of having to be mined from scratch. We optimized for the asymmetric bet, and collapsed the two playbooks into one.

Read your own logs, not the model’s mind

Most AEO tools (Profound, Peec, AirOps, and the rest of the category) query LLMs from the outside with prompt lists, run them many times, and statistically estimate citation rates. We built our own MVP of that in August 2025: hit ChatGPT’s web search 100 times per query, compute how often glasp.co shows up. It worked, technically. It was also indirect, noisy, and expensive, and it answered “are we cited” rather than “what should we build next.”

The reframe that drove this whole project: instead of asking the model what it cites, ask your own server what arrived. The bot already made its routing decision. Server logs are deterministic, free, and you already own them.

There was one more reason we leaned this way, and it is worth naming honestly: spamming an LLM with 100 prompts to estimate a citation rate that has already been decided on the server side felt like solving the wrong problem from the wrong end. The log-driven approach felt cleaner, and as far as we could tell, nobody had built on it. We searched, we asked around, we read every AEO product page we could find, and nothing was building on top of Cloudflare’s AI Crawl Control logs. Doing something genuinely novel, even at small scale, was part of what made the experiment exciting enough to actually run.

Cloudflare’s AI Crawl Control dashboard shows AI bot requests by category and by page, but its lookback window is short and depends on your plan: the free tier shows only the past 24 hours, and on our plan the dashboard kept 7 days. Either way, data that ages out of the window is gone. So we built a weekly snapshot pipeline: every 7 days, pull the data via API and store it in Firestore with timestamp, page URL, bot type, and request count. Over months, that becomes a longitudinal dataset the dashboard itself does not keep. Ours runs as a Cloud Run Job, but a GitHub Action on cron or a $5 VPS works identically.

Cloudflare splits AI bot traffic into three categories, and the split is the whole game. AI Crawler is training collection. AI Search is indexing. AI Assistant is a real-time fetch triggered by a live user’s prompt: ChatGPT-User retrieving your page in the middle of answering someone’s question. That third category is the closest server-side proxy to a human being about to see your content. We sorted the entire rewrite queue by AI Assistant request volume per page, because improving pages that already had live human demand compounds fastest.

One caveat that applies to everything in this essay: Cloudflare records bot requests, not citations. We can see that ChatGPT-User fetched a page during a live prompt; we cannot see whether the model used that page in its answer or discarded it after reading. AI Assistant volume is the closest server-side proxy to citation behavior available, but it is a proxy. When we say a page “got cited,” we mean the inference; when we cite lift numbers, we mean measured request volume.

What separates cited pages from ignored ones

The diagnostic ran in two layers, whole site first. Where on glasp.co was AI traffic actually landing: blog posts, landing pages, user profiles, discovery pages, the YouTube corpus? The distribution was lopsided; the YouTube corpus dominated by orders of magnitude. That alone settled the strategy, because the obvious move was to double down on the surface already generating most of the AI traffic rather than coax the others upward.

Then, within the corpus: we compared the top 10 percent of pages by AI Assistant traffic against the bottom decile, across every dimension we could extract: source channel, language, topic, article length, title structure, TLDR structure, Q&A depth, and vocabulary. Comparing that many dimensions across 400,000 pages by hand was not feasible, so we fed the logs and page metadata to a model and had it surface the separating patterns. There is a small recursive joke in using AI to figure out how to be cited by AI, but the synthesis was genuinely beyond what spreadsheet pivots could absorb.

Three findings dominated everything else:

• The TLDR is the citation surface. Frequently requested pages had TLDRs averaging 132 characters and about 20 words across 2 sentences. Rarely requested pages averaged 14 characters and 2 words: placeholder length. A roughly 10x gap, tightly correlated with AI bot request volume.

• Descriptive prose openers were the strongest structural signal, about 15x more concentrated in frequently requested pages. Sentences that start “This video explains...” or “The video covers...” read as standalone answers a model can lift cleanly. Bullets were not the enemy; empty TLDRs were.

• Educational vocabulary signals a real answer. TLDRs that name the topic specifically and frame the video as explanatory get requested more. Descriptive, not prescriptive: we never jammed keywords into pages that were not about them.

The three signals we acted on

Signal 1: URL hygiene

Partly a confession. We had two URL patterns serving identical content, slug-based and videoID-based, a design oversight from years ago. The logs showed AI bot traffic splitting credit across duplicates of the same article. We consolidated to one canonical URL per video and stopped generating slugs. Not an AEO trick; the logs just made an old hygiene debt visible enough to finally pay.

Signal 2: 404s as latent demand

The most underrated discovery of the project. Cloudflare logs include 404s from AI bots, and a 404 from ChatGPT-User means the model constructed a URL it expected to exist on your domain, tried to fetch it mid-answer, and found nothing. LLMs pattern-match URL structures they have seen before, so if a model has observed many glasp.co/youtube/ pages, it will guess new ones of the same shape. Ahrefs found ChatGPT sends users to 404s about 3x as often as Google search. To give a sense of volume: in one 7-day window, ChatGPT-User alone logged 78,640 unsuccessful requests against glasp.co. Not all of those are 404s; the bucket also includes 403s, 429s, and server errors. But a meaningful share are, and that subset is where the roadmap signal lives. The industry treats this as noise to clean up. We treat it as a roadmap: the model is telling you what content your category should have but does not. Your competitors do not have those pages either, and the user already wanted them. We generated pages for the highest-frequency 404 patterns, and their rate of getting re-requested by ChatGPT within weeks ran meaningfully above baseline.

Signal 3: Titles and TLDRs are the interface

The highest-leverage rewrite. Users prompt ChatGPT in commands and questions, so we rewrote titles from the video’s own click-optimized phrasing into the question a user would actually ask, and rewrote thin TLDRs into self-sufficient 2 to 3 sentence answers in the 80 to 150 character range, opening with a descriptive verb and leading with the entity. Worth being concrete about scale: this first rewrite pass covered about 12,000 pages, a small slice of a 400,000-page corpus, worked through in descending order of AI Assistant request volume so the effort landed where live demand already existed. The program has not stopped since; as of this writing, just over 70,000 pages have been through an AEO rewrite. And we restructured pages around short, self-contained chunks, a direction sharpened by our conversation with Metehan Yeşilyurt on Glasp Talk #55: models parse short paragraphs more reliably than long ones, so the top of the page must carry the complete answer even if nothing else gets read.

SEO Guard: the safety valve

Walking away from SEO must not break the SEO you already have. We wired Google Search Console’s APIs into the same Firestore pipeline and gave every page a rule:

• Pages earning 100+ Google clicks in 180 days are locked. No automated rewrite touches a page that already converts on Google. The threshold is judgment, not science; the principle is that you do not trade certain value for speculative value.

• Pages with zero Google impressions in 180 days and zero AI bot requests since logging began get tombstoned: unpublished, removed from the sitemap, flagged in Firestore so they can be restored if the signal ever changes. This was roughly 50,000 to 60,000 pages in the first pass alone. The pruning has continued alongside the rewrites ever since, and as of this writing more than 200,000 pages have been tombstoned, roughly half the corpus.

• Everything in between is the rewrite zone.

The counterintuitive result of the tombstone pass: indexation rates on the remaining content improved. Crawl budget concentrated where it should have been all along. In a world where models judge sources by site-wide signal, deletion is a growth lever.

The result, and then the honest version of the result

Daily sessions from chatgpt.com: 517 on January 1, 2026. 19,129 on May 5, 2026. Roughly 37x in four months. Those are human click-throughs measured in GA4, not bot hits; bots do not execute JavaScript. If anything the figure undercounts, because ChatGPT’s mobile apps strip referrers into the Direct bucket.

One more measurement, and it may be the most interesting one in this essay. Our weekly AI bot request volume was roughly flat through this entire period, fluctuating in the 2 to 3 million per week range. It did not 37x. Human sessions did. Same crawl volume, dramatically more downstream traffic: the same bots were extracting more citable, more clickworthy answers from our pages than before. The rewrites compounded into how often our pages get chosen and clicked, not into how often they get crawled. If your AEO dashboard fixates on raw bot request counts, it is worth asking whether that is the metric that reflects downstream value at all.

The 37x is the number that travels well in a screenshot. Here is what happens to it as you make it progressively more honest. This cascade is the part of this essay we most wish every AEO case study included, ours until recently included.

• 37x is a comparison of two single days, and to be clear, neither was chosen for effect: January 1 is simply the start of 2026, the cleanest calendar boundary available, landing just after our Firestore logging came online in late December, and May 5 is right around the day we sent Sean the draft. We had even pre-committed a threshold, deciding in advance that crossing 10,000 daily sessions would be the trigger to pitch Sean the guest post; the 19,129 reading was overshoot past that bar, lucky in its timing. But honest endpoints still make a fragile number, because single days are volatile: the sustained late-May level was under half that peak. The fragility is a property of daily endpoints, not of intent.

• On monthly aggregates, total ChatGPT referrals grew 5.7x from January to May. Still excellent. Already a long way from 37.

• Split treated from untreated, and the tide appears. The AEO bundle described above was applied only to the YouTube corpus. The rest of glasp.co never got that treatment. It was not frozen, to be fair: site-wide work such as performance tuning and some LLM-oriented schema continued everywhere, but that touched both groups equally, which is exactly what a control is for. Those untreated pages still grew 3.5x over the same window, riding ChatGPT’s own growth. Treated pages grew 6.1x. The difference between those two, not the raw curve, is what our work can claim, and if the shared site-wide improvements helped the control at all, the true treatment effect is understated, not overstated.

• The defensible effect of the intervention is about 1.8x to 2.3x. An interrupted time-series model on the weekly treated-to-control ratio finds a discrete 1.82x jump (95% CI 1.31 to 2.54) aligned exactly with the January rollout, stable across every specification we threw at it, including engagement-filtered traffic at 2.27x.

• And we still will not call it proven. The most conservative test we ran, a placebo permutation across the pre-period, returns p=0.16: the pre-period is short and noisy enough that jumps almost this large occasionally appear by chance. So the paper says “suggestive, not conclusive,” because that is what the data says.

One more result from the paper matters for anyone protecting an existing search channel: Google organic clicks to the rewritten pages declined about 25 percent, which is in line with the site-wide and industry-wide trend for the window, with no deindexation. SEO Guard held. AEO and SEO are not in tension if you guard the boundary explicitly.

The methodological takeaway costs nothing to adopt: hold out an on-domain control. If someone quotes you a raw AEO multiple on a channel that grew 3.5x untouched, they are taking credit for the weather. Full model, robustness checks, and reproduction code are in the paper.

What the last two months added

The May 5 peak did not hold; ChatGPT referral sessions came down substantially through June and July, and chasing that decline taught us more than the growth did. Five updates.

1. Why AI citations rose again in June: page selection beats page polish

Round one was about rewriting existing pages. Round two changed how pages get born. Instead of generating articles in bulk and hoping demand arrives, we now create pages almost exclusively from observed demand: recurring AI-bot 404 patterns, AI Assistant requests hitting thin placeholder pages, and real queries from search data.

The cohort math is stark. Using Search Console’s bulk export in BigQuery, we measured what share of newly created pages earned any Google impressions, by creation month. Pages created March through May: 0.3 to 0.8 percent. Pages created in June under the demand-driven flow: 13.4 percent, roughly 17x higher, with July tracking similarly. We checked the obvious confounder: the generation prompt had not materially changed since mid-March. The writing stayed the same; the selection of which pages deserve to exist changed. In programmatic content, a perfectly optimized page nobody asked for is still a page nobody asked for.

2. Bing Webmaster Tools is the AEO dashboard nobody reads

A fair question about round one: why care about search indexes at all if the target is ChatGPT? Because ChatGPT’s live web search has long drawn on Bing’s index as a major grounding source. A page invisible to Bing has a far narrower path into a grounded ChatGPT answer, no matter how good its TLDR is. So we connected Bing Webmaster Tools and its API into the same measurement loop, and found that Bing now reports something none of our other sources do: how your pages are used by AI, not just by searchers.

Over the trailing 30 days, our pages were cited about 62,000 times in Bing-grounded AI answers, averaging around 2,000 citations a day in a steady weekly rhythm, even while ChatGPT referral sessions swung violently. Against 3.2 million indexed pages site-wide, the number of pages actually cited on an average day is around 520. And the Grounding Queries report lists the literal questions AI answered using our pages, hundreds of them in any given window, from the Feynman technique to Australian civil liability law. If the 404 log tells you what should exist, grounding queries tell you what already works. Both are free. Almost nobody reads either.

3. Why the next round has to go deeper than the TLDR

Those Bing numbers contain a hard message. 486 cited pages out of 3.2 million indexed is not an indexation problem; it is a selection problem. Our working model of AI citation now has three stages: a page has to be discovered, then chosen as the best answer, then clicked. The Bing data says discovery is essentially solved for us, since the index has everything. Title and TLDR rewrites got us into the candidate set. They do not win stage two against a page that actually answers the question better, and they say nothing about stage three at all.

So the current rewrite generation works on substance, not surface, aimed squarely at being chosen. Where the grounding data shows a real question, the page now needs to contain the real answer: Q&A sections deepened from four entries to six or eight, with the actual grounding query as the lead question and concrete details and quotes from the source video, not four sentences of polite summary. We are also undoing some damage from our own first pass: earlier rewrites sometimes optimized away the entities that make a page findable, show names, episode numbers, people, products, so those are being restored. And every rewrite now passes a grounding gate: if a number is not in the source material, it does not get written. An answer engine’s trust is rented, and one hallucinated statistic is an expensive way to lose it.

We said last time that we had not yet closed the loop from rewrite to measured lift. This time we are doing it properly: the Q&A deepening is running as a randomized test, with eligible pages split into treatment and control, which is exactly the experiment the paper’s limitations section said someone should run. When it reads out, we will report the result whichever way it points. Stage three, whether a chosen page actually gets the click, is designed into this generation of rewrites but not yet measured. We would rather tell you that than screenshot another curve.

4. Two operational notes, offered as tips

First, audit your own firewall before you optimize anything. While investigating the summer decline we found our own security rules answering a share of AI-bot requests with 403s: at the worst point, roughly a quarter of ChatGPT-User requests were being rejected, one page type was blocked outright, and a rate-limiting rule was intermittently refusing ChatGPT’s own retrieval infrastructure. We had spent months optimizing pages for bots we were partially turning away at the door. We could also pin the decline on this rather than on some model-side change, because Copilot referrals, grounded on the same Bing index, never dipped. The control-group habit pays off across engines, not just across page groups.

Second, the generation itself now runs on Claude Code instead of metered API calls. Article generation and rewrites used to run through the OpenAI API and were burning tens of dollars a day at full pace. We moved the pipeline onto Claude Code running continuously on an always-on Mac, with a keepalive script that restarts the generator whenever it stops and there is queue left. It is slower per page and it rides a flat subscription instead of a meter, which changes what is economical to attempt at 400,000-page scale. Slow and flat beats fast and metered when the queue is effectively infinite. How we use Claude Code inside Glasp has turned into a story of its own, honestly one of the more interesting operational changes we have made this year, and it deserves a future Hatching Growth issue of its own.

5. The flywheel’s first tick

The original essay ended on a hypothesis: ChatGPT cites a page, a writer or researcher follows the citation and links to it, link equity compounds, and SEO strengthens as a byproduct of AEO rather than a parallel investment. The paper’s strict test found no measurable organic-traffic lift inside the study window, and we stand by that. But the slower dial has started to move. Backlinks to the YouTube corpus keep appearing from sites we never pitched, and Glasp’s domain authority, 69 to 70 when this experiment began, now reads 71. There is also a structural reason to expect this loop to speed up: a growing share of the web’s articles are now researched and drafted with ChatGPT or Claude in the loop, and when the researcher is an AI, the sources it cites are the sources that get linked. Being the page an answer engine reaches for no longer just wins the answer; it wins a place in the next generation of articles. One point on a vendor metric proves nothing on its own. It is exactly the size and kind of signal the flywheel would produce first, though, so we are noting it here and will keep reporting it either way.

The mental model, revised

• Your server is the sensor. Logs over vendor dashboards; 404s are a roadmap; AI Assistant volume is live human demand.

• Measure against a control, or you are measuring the weather. The tide alone was 3.5x. Our work was worth about 2x on top. Both numbers deserve to be said out loud.

• Selection beats polish. Demand-driven page creation moved hit rates 17x; no rewrite ever did that.

• Getting seen and getting chosen are different problems. Titles and TLDRs solve the first. Only genuinely better answers solve the second.

• Guard the channel you already own. SEO Guard cost us nothing and protected everything.

The open questions from the first essay stay open: what AEO traffic converts into, and whether any of this works from a cold start. If you have signal on either, we would genuinely like to compare notes.

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"It is neither wealth nor splendor, but tranquility and occupation which give you happiness."

― Thomas Jefferson

* Today’s newsletter is brought to you by Hashiri.AI.

If you’ve ever pasted splits into ChatGPT and typed “how was this run,” you know the routine: explain everything, every time. Hashiri.AI already knows. It syncs Garmin or Apple Health, scores your readiness each morning from sleep and HRV, and plans today’s run to match, with your race in sight. You just ask.

Free to start at hashiri.ai.

Hi friends,

We hand-picked 3 good pieces of content to inspire and motivate you now and in the future. Keep track of the insights that resonate with you by highlighting them with Glasp💡

If you want to reread or highlight this newsletter, save it to Glasp.

Save to Glasp

📚 3 Good Recommendations

Agent swarms and the new model economics
by Wilson Lin (17 mins)

• Coordination is the real cost: On the same task, the old swarm sprawled to 54 crates and generated 70,000 merge conflicts before it had to be paused. The redesigned one settled on nine crates early and logged under 1,000 in four hours.

• Not every step needs a frontier model: Opus 4.8 planning with Composer 2.5 doing the work came to $1,339. GPT-5.5 in both roles came to $10,565. Very few moments in a large task genuinely require the most expensive intelligence.

• Less code, same result: Both swarms passed the same test suite for a SQLite implementation. The old one needed 64,305 lines of engine code. The new one needed 9,908.

Save to Glasp

How to Apply Tiny Experiments: A Field Guide to Curiosity-Driven Learning
by Glasp (12 mins)

• A PACT replaces the goal: Instead of “get 1,000 subscribers,” you commit to “I will publish one short essay every week for eight weeks.” Purposeful, Actionable, Continuous, Trackable, and entirely inside your control.

• Outcomes become data, not verdicts: A missed goal arrives labeled as failure. A finished experiment just produces findings, and that reframe lowers the stakes enough that you actually start the next one.

• Plus Minus Next: What went well, what drained you, what you will try next. Run weekly, this is what turns a string of experiments into a direction instead of a random walk.

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This is AGI: Sequoia AI Ascent 2026 Keynote
by Sequoia Capital (32 mins)

• A revolution in computation, not communication: The internet, the cloud, and mobile were all about how information gets distributed. AI is the first wave about how information gets processed, and that is why it behaves differently from every platform shift before it.

• Build toward your customers, not toward the capabilities: The counterintuitive part of their MAD framework (Moats, Affordance, Diffusion). New model capabilities arrive constantly and what you build on them may be irrelevant tomorrow. Your customers change far more slowly, so wrapping yourself around them is the more durable moat.

• The diffusion gap is the opportunity: Capabilities spread into the market far slower than they are created, and every day the frontier models move faster than the average Fortune 500, that gap widens. That gap is where application-layer companies get built.

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📣 Community Updates

• 🟦 75,000 Books and 80,000 Posts:

  The community has now brought over 75,000 Kindle books into Glasp and published more than 80,000 Posts. Highlights are where reading starts, and Posts are where it turns into something worth sharing. Import your books here.

• 🟨 13 Ways In, 8 Ways Out:

  Glasp now imports from 13 sources, including Kindle, Pocket, Matter, Wallabag, Instapaper, and plain CSV, and exports to 8, including Notion, Obsidian, Roam, Tana, Workflowy, and Zotero. Your highlights should not be trapped inside any one tool, ours included. Set yours up here.

  

• 🟥 Turn Your Highlights Into Flashcards:

  Anki Export is new. Send a passage you highlighted straight into Anki and it becomes a spaced repetition card, so the thing you thought was worth marking is still with you in six months. Try it here.

  

• 🟩 Automate Glasp With Zapier:

  Glasp on Zapier now covers four triggers and two actions: New Bookmark, New Document, New Highlight, New Summary, plus Create Bookmark and Create Highlight. Log every highlight to a spreadsheet, file summaries into Notion as they appear, or push links in from wherever you find them, with no code. Browse the workflows here. If you would rather build directly, the API docs are here.

🤝 Ask

Two small favors, and both take about a minute. Reviews are how new readers decide whether to trust us, and rating counts weigh heavily in how these stores rank and recommend.

• 🟥 Review the Chrome Extension:

  Hubros wrote this in June without us asking for it. Reviews like this are the main reason someone new decides to try Glasp at all, and they take about a minute. Leave yours here.

  

• 🟨 Rate the Mobile App:

  The iOS and Android apps are far newer than the extension, so each rating counts for much more there. Rate it on iOS here and on Android here.

❤️ Gratitude

Thank you for sharing and mentioning us on X, LinkedIn, and/or your blogs. 🙂 We appreciate your support! Please don’t hesitate to ask us anything at any time. Also, feel free to join our Reddit Community ;)

• Glasp AI Writing: AI-Powered Research & Content Creation Tool on AiToza

  

• Glasp on Your Trusted AI

  

• YouTube Summary & ChatGPT by Glasp on Chrome-Stats

  

• Glasp: A Review of the Social Web Highlighter on Dir2AI

  

• Glasp Web Highlighter: PDF & Web Highlight on EXTPOSE

  

• Glasp on Aona AI

  

• My browser was destroying my focus — these AI extensions fixed it on inkl

• 생산성 개선 (Productivity improvement) on GitHub (kodingwarrior)

• Quais são as ferramentas baseadas em IA generativa, como o ChatGPT, e os principais plugins? (What are the generative AI-based tools, such as ChatGPT, and the key plugins?) on Betheme

• YouTube Summary & ChatGPT by Glasp 2.1.1 for Google Chrome 擴充功能 on 軟體王 Softking

We hope you enjoyed reading this newsletter!

See you next week ;)

Best,
Kei and Kazuki

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If you highlight on the web every day, you have probably felt the small frictions: a highlight that will not stick on a stubborn page, a sidebar that takes a moment too long, an interface that only speaks English.

Glasp Extension v2.0.0 is our answer to all three. It is the biggest rewrite since we launched, and it is rolling out now.

What is new

• A new highlighting engine. Faster and more reliable highlighting, everywhere.

• A redesigned sidebar. Cleaner, quicker, and easier to live in.

• Suggested Highlights. AI picks the key sentences, you accept with one click.

• AI Overview. Get the shape of a page before you read it.

• A better Community experience. Discover what others highlighted on the same page.

• 7 languages, Dark and Light themes. Make the sidebar yours.

Two quick notes before you dive in.

1. Do you already have v2? Look at the extension. If the UI looks new, you are on v2. Another sure sign: if the update page opened by itself for you recently, that only happens after the extension updates, so you are already on it.

2. You will be signed out once. The upgrade signs you out of the extension a single time. Nothing is lost. Just click Sign in inside the extension and you are back, with every highlight where you left it.

1. Highlighting that just works

The engine underneath the extension has been rebuilt. Pages that used to fight back, long articles, heavy web apps, oddly structured layouts, now behave. Highlights land where you put them and save faster.

Nothing changes in how you use it. Select text, highlight, done. It simply stops getting in your way.

2. Suggested Highlights: let AI do the first pass

Open the sidebar on any article and Glasp will suggest the sentences worth keeping. Skim them, click the ones you agree with, and they become your highlights.

This is not a summary that replaces your reading. It is a first pass that respects it. You stay the editor, and the AI just does the pointing.

3. AI Overview before you commit

Not every article deserves twenty minutes. AI Overview gives you the shape of a page up front, so you can decide whether to read closely, skim, or move on. It pairs naturally with Suggested Highlights: get the overview, then keep the lines that matter.

4. See what others highlighted

The Community experience in the sidebar has been improved. On many pages you can now see what other readers marked as important, which is often the fastest way to find the part of an article people actually remember.

This has always been the idea behind Glasp: learning is better when it is not done alone.

5. Your language, your theme

Glasp now speaks English, Español, Français, Português (BR), Tiếng Việt, 日本語, and 한국어. There are two separate settings for it, and you will find both in Preferences:

• Interface Language. The language of Glasp itself, menus, buttons, the sidebar.

• Summary Language. The language your AI summaries come back in.

They are separate on purpose. Plenty of people want the interface in their own language while still reading source material in English, or the exact opposite: an English interface with summaries in their mother tongue. Now you can have either.

Both are saved to your account and synced to the browser extension and the mobile app, so you set them once. Summarize an English article and the summary comes back in your language, without asking for it every time.

Both default to Auto, which follows your system, so if you have never touched these settings you may already be seeing Glasp in your language. If you want to pin one, pick it from the list instead of Auto.

One honest note: only synced surfaces are translated for now, so you may still meet English in a few corners. We are working through them.

Theme lives right below, with System, Light, and Dark. Unlike language, theme is saved per device, so you can run Light on the laptop and Dark on the desktop.

How to make sure you are on v2

Browsers roll out extension updates on their own schedule, so most of you will get v2 within a day or two without doing anything.

How to tell you already have it: open the extension and look at it. The redesigned sidebar is unmistakable. And if the release notes page opened by itself in a tab recently, that only happens right after the extension updates, so that is proof too.

Curious what else has shipped? The full version history is at glasp.co/extension-update. It is a changelog to read, not a button that updates anything.

If you want v2 right now: go to the Glasp page on the Chrome Web Store, uninstall, then install again. That is the one method that updates you for certain. Your highlights live in your account, not in the extension, so nothing is lost.

Pro tips

• Try Suggested Highlights on a long read first. That is where the time saved is most obvious.

• Pick your theme before you forget. Sidebar settings, Dark or Light, takes five seconds.

• Signed out after the update? That is expected, and it happens only once. Click Sign in inside the extension.

• Kindle readers: auto-sync arrived in v1.3.0. Extension Settings, then Kindle Integration, and your Kindle highlights sync on their own.

v2 took a long time to build, and it exists because of what people told us was annoying. If something feels off, or something feels great, reply to this email. We read every reply.

Happy highlighting,
The Glasp Team

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If you want to reread or highlight this newsletter, save it to Glasp.

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Hi, I’m Bobby Powers! I run the Leader & Learner publication, where I share two posts per week that will help you become a more curious leader and learner.

I read 70+ books per year, and I’ve been doing that for the past decade. Each year of reading has brought new favorites that I share near and far with friends, family, and online readers.

In an earlier post, I shared the 30 best fiction books I’ve read in the past decade. Since then, I’ve wanted to expand that list to my 100 favorites of all time, including some absolute faves I read much longer than 10 years ago.

This list contains a bit of everything: new novels and classic literature, standard prose and graphic novels, YA fiction and mature books, and bestsellers alongside books you’ve never heard of.

Reading recs are inherently subjective, so I know you’ll disagree with some of the books I’ve included. (Feel free to share your thoughts in the comments.) But I also know several on this list will catch your eye and join your TBR list.

Here’s my Top 100 list, alphabetized by author’s last name. I included a 3-4 sentence summary for each one.

Little Women by Louisa May Alcott

For years, I pre-judged this book,  thinking I wasn’t part of the target market for a coming-of-age story about four sisters. I was 100 percent wrong. Alcott’s classic about Meg, Jo, Beth, and Amy Marsh is meaningful, fun, and inspiring.

The Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Atwood

I appreciated The Handmaid’s Tale even more when I learned that Atwood tried to ensure every crazy event in the book was derived from real events from prior totalitarian regimes. That makes the storyline even crazier (and more depressing). Follow along as the handmaid Offred rebels against the oppressive patriarchal regime of the Republic of Gilead.

Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen

Remarkably, it took me until my mid-30s to read Austen. Now I know why her books have a prominent place on nearly every Top 100 list ever written. (And yeah, I’m now a fan of Mr. Darcy.) Pride and Prejudice delves into social classes, outdated gender roles, family, vanity, gossip, and psychology.

The Compound by S.A. Bodeen

This was one of my favorites I stumbled upon during my young adult (YA) fiction binge years ago. It follows a boy named Eli who’s lived underground for six years. His family has sheltered to avoid some unknown, horrible thing, but you’re left wondering what that is for the majority of this fast-paced read.

Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury

Fahrenheit 451 is one of the first books that taught me classic literature can be fun. I was immediately sucked into Bradbury’s dystopian world that turns the role of “firefighter” on its head. In the bleak world of this story, the government has banned all books, and society’s firefighters are government agents tasked with burning any books they discover.

Red Rising (#1) by Pierce Brown

Just like everyone else in the country, I jumped on the YA bandwagon after reading books like The Hunger Games. Red Rising was the best series I found to scratch that itch, and the first book of the series is one of the most unputdownable books of all time. I’m usually able to predict where a book is headed, but this one fooled me multiple times.

The Master and Margarita by Mikhail Bulgakov

Bulgakov’s classic novel served as a scathing critique of the political and religious oppression in Stalinist Russia. The devil comes to earth and wreaks havoc in Russia alongside his motley crew, which includes a black cat, a tall man with broken glasses, and a hitman. I’m still trying to process the allegorical layers of this book because there’s so much to unpack.

If On a Winter’s Night, A Traveler by Italo Calvino

Speaking of tons to unpack, this book is a mind trip. I read it with a book club, and I’m thankful I did because it’s one of the most complex books I’ve read. In this postmodern narrative, Calvino weaves 10 separate storylines together to explore how reading shapes our lives.

In Cold Blood by Truman Capote

This “non-fiction novel” is arguably the most famous true crime novel of all time. But rather than reporting the mere facts of the case, Capote injects a unique blend of subjectivity and emotion into this true story about the brutal killing of four people in Holcomb, Kansas. Capote’s writing format influenced many future nonfiction authors.

Ender’s Game by Orson Scott Card

Mostly because I didn’t enjoy reading in junior high and high school, I didn’t read this book until I was an adult. It still packed a wallop. The plot centers around precocious Ender Wiggin, who’s enrolled in a military school and pitted against fellow students and otherworldly foes in this fast-paced sci-fi novel.

Alice in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll

Carroll’s story is weird, entertaining, and creative. It’s also super short: 110 pages. I mainly read this because it’s on the Top 200 list I’m working through, but I enjoyed it enough that I pressed on and also read the sequel Through the Looking-Glass.

And Then There Were None by Agatha Christie

Authors like Chuck Palahniuk recommend using a “clock” to drive your story forward and build suspense. This book’s title serves that purpose: As one character after another bites the dust, you know how close you are to the ultimate conclusion. The book’s final reveal remains one of my favorites in fiction.

Ready Player One by Ernest Cline

The year is 2045, and the world has been ravaged by poverty, climate change, and war. The majority of humanity copes with the world’s destitution by immersing themselves in the virtual reality of the OASIS — the brainchild of computer scientist James Halliday. Halliday has decided to bequeath his fortune to whoever can find the Easter egg hidden inside the OASIS, and teenage gamer Wade Watts thinks he’s up to the challenge.

The Alchemist by Paulo Coelho

The Alchemist follows the story of a young shepherd boy who yearns to travel the world and become rich. The lessons he learns on his journey show him that he may very well be focused on the wrong things in life. Just like many readers, I found Coelho’s book to be inspiring, magical, and well-written.

The Hunger Games (#1) by Suzanne Collins

This series kicked off my multi-year reading binge of YA fiction when I was in grad school. Collins’s conclusions of books leave something to be desired, but she sure knows how to craft a cliffhanger at the end of a chapter. After reading this series, bow-shooting badass Katniss Everdeen became one of my favorite fictional characters.

Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad

In this short book with tons of depth, sailor Charles Marlow joins an ivory trading firm, where he keeps hearing stories about a powerful and enigmatic man named Kurtz. Marlow’s obsession with Kurtz grows until he finally meets the man. That fateful meeting occurs much later in the book than I expected, and the story’s conclusion brilliantly connects back to the story’s title in multiple ways.

Jurassic Park by Michael Crichton

I’m guessing you’ve watched the movie but never read the book. If so, check out the book because it’s a fun way to re-live this larger-than-life story. Plus, Crichton is enough of a nerd to make the science believable. (He began his career as a doctor.)

Pines (Wayward Pines I) by Blake Crouch

It’s hard to express exactly how good (and underrated) this book really is. Two federal agents go missing in Wayward Pines, Idaho, and the Secret Service agent who’s sent to find them realizes a lot is going on behind the scenes in this spooky town. I flew through this book and immediately read the rest of the trilogy.

Charlie and the Chocolate Factory by Roald Dahl

Growing up, I watched the old Gene Wilder movie multiple times, but reading the book gave me the chance to experience the joy anew when Charlie unwraps the chocolate bar containing that glorious golden ticket. Dahl is one of the best children’s authors of all time, and this book is a must-read for both kids and adults. It’ll help you rediscover your childlike wonder and whimsy.

The Maze Runner (#1) by James Dashner

Sixteen-year-old Thomas wakes up in a maze, surrounded by a bunch of boys whose memories are gone. The rest of the trilogy follows Thomas as he tries to discover where he came from and what happened to his society. Dashner also wrote multiple prequels to this story, and I enjoy some of them as much as the original trilogy (which is quite rare).

A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens

I debated whether I wanted to read this because I already knew the story, but I’m glad I did. It’s a quick read (~100 pages), well worth an hour or two of your time. Dickens’s visceral storytelling will induce you to hate Scrooge before his conversion and make you want to hug him afterward. A Christmas Carol is so iconic because it captures the powers of gratitude, selflessness, and kindness—all qualities we could use more in the world today.

Oliver Twist by Charles Dickens

Similar to some of its classic lit peers, Oliver Twist can be slow at times, but it’s also packed with social criticism and depth. Dickens is brilliant at creating memorable characters like Fagin and the Artful Dodger. Having experienced poverty and child labor himself growing up, Dickens was able to write about those topics from personal experience, and they became themes in much of his work.

Dungeon Crawler Carl by Matt Dinniman

What a fun ride! After disaster strikes the planet, Carl & his ex-girlfriend’s cat Princess Donut struggle to survive while the universe watches on intergalactic TV. Thanks to my friends Rob and Ashlie for recommending the audiobook version. The narrator Jeff Hays is 10/10.

All the Light We Cannot See by Anthony Doerr

Doerr rocketed to popularity with his Pulitzer-winning novel All the Light We Cannot See. The story depicts a fragile WWII-era friendship between a blind French girl and a young German boy. It’s one of the most beautifully written books I’ve ever read.

Cloud Cuckoo Land by Anthony Doerr

Cloud Cuckoo Land swirls through the lives of five fictional characters throughout history, from 15th-century Constantinople to present-day Idaho and not-so-distant interstellar space. (I grew up in Idaho, and I don’t often see my state reflected in literature, so that made me smile.) Doerr artfully connects all five threads in this heartfelt and thought-provoking story.

Room by Emma Donoghue

Donoghue’s disturbing novel will stick with you. The protagonist and her son are kept in an 11’ x 11’ room for seven years. The room functions as their entire world until they finally get a glimpse of a different life.

Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoyevsky

Dostoyevsky’s work deserves a spot on any list of top novels. The most memorable thing about Crime and Punishment is the sense of guilt that haunts the protagonist Raskolnikov. The book explores the psychological burden that follows every action we take.

Rebecca by Daphne Du Maurier

I’ve never read anything else like Rebecca. The entire novel swirls around the absence of a person: the deceased and mysterious Rebecca de Winter. When a new woman marries de Winter’s husband, she quickly realizes that everything in the de Winter mansion still revolves around Rebecca. Throughout the entire novel, the reader and protagonist breathlessly wonder...who was this Rebecca??

The Count of Monte Cristo by Alexandre Dumas

Simply put: my favorite novel and the most epic revenge story of all time. It’s girthy but so worth the time that I’ve actually read it twice. Everyman Edmond Dantès is condemned to prison for a crime he didn’t commit—a plan masterminded by two men Dantès thought were friends. When Dantès emerges from prison, he cannot wait to enact his vengeance.

The Circle by Dave Eggers

Eggers erects a Black Mirror-esque world in which a social media company slowly dominates every aspect of life. As the tentacles of the billion-dollar behemoth wrap around more aspects of their users’ lives, the reader begins to wonder: Is this book maybe a little too real? The book made me a huge fan of Eggers, prompting me to check out his other work as well.

The Shards by Bret Easton Ellis

Ellis weaves elements from his own life (he’s the protagonist) into a fictionalized story about a serial killer terrorizing Los Angeles. Throughout the book, I wondered what was true and what wasn’t, which was a fun and unusual sensation. (Note: This book contains quite a bit of explicit content. No surprise, given that it’s written by the same guy who penned American Psycho.)

The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald

The Great Gatsby relays the emptiness of fortune and the pangs of love better than any novel I’ve found. It’s also a lurid portrayal of the Roaring Twenties that will make you want to suit up and talk your way into one of Gatsby’s lavish parties. At roughly 200 pages, this is a quick read and one of my top 10 favorites of all time.

Gone Girl by Gillian Flynn

Every one of Flynn’s books is dark and twisted, and this one is my favorite. A woman named Amy Dunne disappears, and passages from her diary indicate her husband Nick may not be the gentleman he seems. Not only is this book an incredible psychological thriller, it’s also told in a unique storytelling technique that inspired emulation from multiple other authors.

Limitless (fka The Dark Fields) by Alan Glynn

Copywriter Eddie Spinola starts taking an experimental drug called MDT-48 that turns him into a cerebral superhero. Once his brain starts firing on all cylinders, he begins making tons of money as a day trader. But then, he realizes that MDT-48 has a few dangerous side effects that propel him on a roller coaster for the rest of the story. (Btw, the 2011 movie adaptation starring Bradley Cooper and Robert De Niro has one of the biggest differences between book versus movie ending I can remember.)

Lord of the Flies by William Golding

Such a fascinating premise: A group of boys turns Darwinian after getting marooned on a small island. Their time away from their mommies and daddies originally seems fun, but things turn violent after factions divide the group. This 1954 book seems to have spawned many other stories of children placed in horrible situations, such as the 1999 book Battle Royale (and its 2008 American copycat The Hunger Games), along with TV series like The Wilds (2020–2022).

The Princess Bride by William Goldman

Taking another wild guess here: you’ve probably seen the movie but not read the book. The Princess Bride is a fun romp through piracy, romance, intrigue, murder, and revenge. You’ll leave the book with an even deeper love for Westley, Buttercup, and gang.

An Absolutely Remarkable Thing (The Carls #1) by Hank Green

Green’s book is one of the deepest, most thought-provoking novels I’ve read in years. He wrestles with soooo many big topics like social media, technology, fame, and equality, while telling a killer story along the way. Thanks to my buddy Alex for this recommendation.

The Scarlet Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne

This is one of the only books from my high school required reading that made the list. It’s an influential story that’s inspired many other works, and it’s also an incisive investigation of hypocrisy, gossip, and public shaming. I wish I could have appreciated the book’s full meaning when I read it as a teen.

The Sun Also Rises by Ernest Hemingway

I read this book back in 2018 while gearing up for a trip to Spain, and it was a great precursor for the trip. Hemingway’s classic novel tells the story of a group of American and British expats who vacation to Spain to take in the sights and watch the Running of the Bulls. The group fragments as tensions arise among the vacationers.

The Talented Mr. Ripley by Patricia Highsmith

If you love suspense and you’ve never read Patricia Highsmith, stop reading my article and go pick up this novel. Tom Ripley is many things: con man…genius…sociopath. After Tom reconnects with his old friend Dickie in Europe, Tom decides he’s too jealous of Dickie’s life to go back to his own boring old life in America, so he comes up with a unique way to live the life he’s always wanted.

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The Odyssey by Homer

Like many people, I had read excerpts of this novel previously, but never the full thing. To prepare for Christopher Nolan’s new movie, I read it, and it did not disappoint. I was impressed by the number of memorable scenes: the Cyclops, the Sirens, the bow-and-arrow challenge, Odysseus’s revenge on the suitors, etc.

Wool (Silo #1) by Hugh Howey

This story takes place in a dystopian universe where thousands of people live underground in a massive silo, and they’re not allowed to talk about what’s outside the silo. If they do, the punishment is to be sent out to die in the toxic atmosphere that surrounds the silo. When I first started reading Wool, I thought I knew where the story was going, but I was proven wrong several times. (I love that!)

Les Misérables by Victor Hugo

Although Les Misérables is massive and took me forever to read, it became one of my top 10 novels of all time. The biggest reason is that it contains several of the best examples of unconditional love I’ve ever read. It’s also a great primer on the June Rebellion of 1832 in Paris, shortly after the French Revolution.

Brave New World by Aldous Huxley

Huxley paints a dystopian world of genetic engineering and social stratification. My friends Tim and Whitney recommended this book to me, and when I heard they even named their dog after the author, I thought, “Wow, that book must be really damn good.” It was.

The Remains of the Day by Kazuo Ishiguro

Definitely a slow burn, but such a great book. The protagonist is a butler (Stevens) who served his boss honorably for 30+ years. He’s also an unreliable narrator, which was my favorite aspect of the book. As Stevens looks back on his career, he begins questioning whether the boss he served was such a great man after all.

The Will of the Many (Hierarchy #1) by James Islington

I’m not normally a big fantasy guy. While I’ve read classics like LOTR, Narnia, etc., I rarely read many modern fantasy series. But dang, this book may make me reassess! What pulled me in was the dystopian social hierarchy and magical system Islington creates in his fantasy world.

Bad Cree by Jessica Johns

My book club read this novel in 2024, and it became my hidden gem of that year. After a vivid nightmare, the protagonist awakens with a dead crow in her hand, and she realizes that her dreams are impacting her reality. Bad Cree is a gripping story of love, loss, friendship, and sisterhood.

The Green Mile by Stephen King

King originally released The Green Mile as a serial novel in six segments, but you can now purchase it as a single book. You’ll find some of King’s most emotional scenes and memorable characters in this book, including several inspiring acts of kindness. It quickly became one of my top 10 novels.

Misery by Stephen King

Author Paul Sheldon comes face-to-face with his biggest fan in this creepy novel. When Sheldon’s car crashes in the middle of nowhere, a woman named Annie Wilkes nurses him back to health. But then Wilkes decides to hold Sheldon hostage until he writes a new story about her favorite character from his books: Misery Chastain.

11/22/63 by Stephen King

I don’t enjoy many time travel stories because they tend to be confusing and overly sentimental, so when a couple of my friends recommended Stephen King’s time travel book 11/22/63, I was skeptical. Thankfully, King proved me wrong with a brilliant story that’s packed with compelling characters and hateable villains. What made me love this book is that it’s so much more than a “go back in time to prevent a bad thing” story. It’s a tale about love, loss, nostalgia, and sacrifice.

The Dead Zone by Stephen King

I’ve now read 32 of King’s books, and The Dead Zone is one of his best. I was amazed by his ability to foreshadow plotlines early in the book, then deftly connect back to them later in the story. Protagonist Johnny Smith develops the ability to see the future of any person he touches, and he doesn’t like what he sees when he comes into contact with ambitious politician Greg Stillson.

It by Stephen King

This 1,100-page monster of a book contains one of the most iconic villains in pop culture: Pennywise the Clown. Pennywise is horrifying, but so is the town of Derry, Maine, where the story is set. The plot revolves around a group of seven kids haunted by Pennywise who return to Derry as adults (28 years later) to try to take him down.

The Walking Dead (#1) by Robert Kirkman

The Walking Dead TV series is one of my all-time favorites, so I naturally wanted to check out the graphic novels. The series is quite long, but I’ve now finished almost the entire thing because the storyline has been so propulsive and fun. The books have been awesome, and they’ve kept me on my toes because there are some big differences between the graphic novels and the TV version.

The Plot by Jean Hanff Korelitz

Washed-up writer Jake Bonner is working as a professor when he meets brilliant and arrogant student Evan Parker. Parker tells Bonner the plot of a story he’s writing, then dies before he can publish it. So Bonner takes things into his own hands, only to discover there’s a dark underbelly to Parker’s story.

To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee

Easily one of the most heartbreaking books I’ve ever read. I assume you’re familiar with this story by now and have likely at least watched the award-winning movie, but even so, you should read the book. It’s a powerful depiction of racism in 1930s America with a few sprinkles of optimism and hope mixed in.

Rosemary’s Baby by Ira Levin

One recent Halloween, I decided to read the classic horror book Rosemary’s Baby. Levin’s foreshadowing and storytelling were so dazzling that I immediately ordered two of his other books: The Stepford Wives and A Kiss Before Dying. Together, those three books cemented Levin as one of my favorite authors of all time.

The Stepford Wives by Ira Levin

Walter and Joanna Eberhart move to the beautiful town of Stepford, where every family seems picture-perfect: young, gorgeous, and deeply in love. But when Joanna’s friends begin acting strange, she starts to wonder if there’s something ominous hiding behind the town’s peaceful veneer. The Stepford Wives is a well-written, unnerving story with a surprising conclusion.

A Kiss Before Dying by Ira Levin

The storytelling mechanism used in this book makes it one of the most interesting novels I’ve ever read. As a little teaser, here’s what Stephen King has to say about it: “[The novel’s] real screeching bombshell is neatly tucked away about one hundred pages into the story. If you should happen upon this moment while thumbing randomly through the book, it means nothing to you. If you have read everything faithfully up to that point, it means...everything.”

The Great Divorce by C.S. Lewis

Theologian and Chronicles of Narnia author C.S. Lewis penned this fascinating allegory about a dead man exploring the afterlife. I first read this book back in 2009, then re-read it a decade later, and it was every bit as good the second time. The Great Divorce offers one of the most interesting takes on heaven and hell you’ll ever read.

The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe (Chronicles of Narnia #1) by C.S. Lewis

In this classic story, siblings Peter, Edmund, Susan, and Lucy discover that their caretaker’s old wardrobe contains way more than just dust. They stumble into the magical world of Narnia, where snow covers the earth, winter is everlasting, and good battles evil. As with many fantasy stories, this one is fun for both kids and adults.

The Giver by Lois Lowry

Similar to many of my favorite novels, The Giver is set in a dystopian community. Citizens generally do what they’re told and don’t ask questions—that is, except for 12-year-old Jonas. Jonas begins to unravel the community’s dark secrets and takes on an impossible challenge.

Bird Box by Josh Malerman

Bird Box is one of the best thrillers I’ve read. Malerman does an amazing job building suspense around an unseen entity that causes millions of people across the world to kill themselves. Scattered survivors live in fear, cowering behind blindfolds and shuttered windows.

Atonement by Ian McEwan

This is one of the most modern books on the Top 200 Books list I’ve been chipping through. It’s a haunting story of a young 13-year-old girl who makes a mistake that she regrets for the rest of her life. McEwan explores love, war, sadness, social classes, and forgiveness in this unforgettable book.

The Housemaid by Freida McFadden

Twisty, mysterious, and fun—this book is for people who love thrillers with dark plotlines. Movie adaptations always polarize readers, but I thought the 2025 adaptation was well-cast and did justice to the source material. As always, if you haven’t seen the movie, read the book first. But the movie is worth a watch too.

The Chain by Adrian McKinty

As soon as I read the synopsis of this book, I immediately wanted to buy it: a woman named Rachel gets a phone call saying her daughter has been kidnapped. In addition to paying a $25,000 ransom, Rachel must select and kidnap another kid to keep “The Chain” going. The request is the ultimate test of a mother’s love, and Rachel learns that her love goes deep.

The Silent Patient by Alex Michaelides

Michaelides’s rookie novel is a thriller about a woman who murders her husband, then refuses to speak for six years. This book kept me guessing until the end. Apparently, it did the same for thousands of other readers too because The Silent Patient spent months on the bestseller list.

V for Vendetta by Alan Moore and David Lloyd

The illustrations for V for Vendetta are amazing, and the storytelling is up there with any book I’ve ever read. The book’s political undertones sound oddly similar to some events that have happened in America in the past several years. Alan Moore’s work helped convert me to reading more graphic novels.

Watchmen by Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons

This graphic novel not only ascended to the heights of pop culture but also to literary greatness. It’s on countless “Top Books” lists, including the Uber-List of the Top 200 Books I compiled. Watchmen is a masterfully written and illustrated story about what happens when power gets into the wrong hands.

Death Note: Black Edition, Vol. 1 by Tsugumi Ohba and Takeshi Obata

A teenager finds a random black notebook that he learns has the power to kill anyone in the world. When I first heard that synopsis, I thought this graphic novel sounded interesting but perhaps corny. Then I read it and realized it’s way deeper than the summary implies. It delves into the nature of good and evil, capital punishment, and even game theory.

1984 by George Orwell

Orwell’s classic novel lives up to the hype. It was also the origin of the phrase “Big Brother,” the name Orwell gave to the fictional dictator in Oceania. Just like any good dystopian fiction, 1984 holds up a magnifying glass to our present day, questioning any form of government surveillance, censorship, and propaganda.

Animal Farm by George Orwell

Orwell certainly spooked the American public about the perils of Communism. Not only did he deliver the dystopian gem 1984, but he also wrote the allegorical classic Animal Farm. If you’re like most people, you read this novel in school. If you didn’t, it’s worth the read.

Akira 1 by Katsuhiro Otomo

I sometimes unfairly judge things I don’t understand. For years, I did that with manga (Japanese comics and graphic novels). Then my brother Trevor recommended this book, and I decided to give it a shot. Akira shattered my ignorance and gave me a deeper appreciation for this art form.

Fight Club by Chuck Palahniuk

I knew Palahniuk was dark, but holy crap, this book is intense! Regardless, I tend to enjoy dark books, so Fight Club was my jam. Palahniuk did a great job of jealously protecting the book’s secret until the end.

The Street by Ann Petry

The Street was published back in 1946, and few of my bookish friends seem to have heard of it. Petry offers a view into the experience of a poor, Black, single mom trying to make her way in Harlem. The story is simultaneously poignant yet page-turning, gritty yet beautiful, and depressing yet somehow still hopeful. This was also the first novel by an African-American woman to sell over one million copies.

Gates of Fire by Steven Pressfield

In this epic novel, Pressfield tells how King Leonidas led 300 Spartans against the massive Persian army in the Battle of Thermopylae. Pressfield’s imagery is so realistic that West Point, the U.S. Naval Academy, and the Marine Corps assign Gates of Fire to their young cadets. This book is one of my top ten favorite novels of all time.

The Prestige by Christopher Priest

You’re probably familiar with the movie (starring Christian Bale, Hugh Jackman, Scarlett Johansson, and Michael Caine), but I’m guessing you’re not familiar with the book. As with most book/movie duos, the story is a bit different, but both are fulfilling in their own way. If you’re a fan of the movie, a lover of magic, or simply a connoisseur of fiction, you’ll enjoy the story of this battle between dueling magicians who fight for supremacy in 1800s England.

The Name of the Wind (Kingkiller Chronicle #1) by Patrick Rothfuss

I’m immensely grateful to my friends Cris, Cary, and Alex for recommending this book. The Name of the Wind was mind-blowingly good. It’s the first book in The Kingkiller Chronicle trilogy, but Rothfuss has been slow-pedaling the third book of the series for over a decade.

Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone (HP #1) by J.K. Rowling

Having never read the Harry Potter books as a child, my Aunt Shannon recommended them to me when I was in college, and I asked, “Isn’t that just a kids’ series?” Shannon (rightfully) put me in my place. I gave them a shot, and they became my favorite series I’ve ever read. I’ve now turned many other adults onto Harry Potter because it’s exceptionally well-written and one of the best-plotted series I’ve ever seen.

Holes by Louis Sachar

This is another “kids book” that is so much more than a kids book. Regardless of the intended audience, I love well-told stories, and Sachar’s book about the “cursed” boy Stanley Yelnats hits the mark. Stanley and the other boys at Camp Green Lake detention center are required to dig holes all day, and when he figures out the camp warden is looking for something special, Stanley foils the plot.

What Makes Sammy Run? by Budd Schulberg

Schulberg’s 1941 novel What Makes Sammy Run? follows the budding career of Sammy Glick, a ruthlessly ambitious kid trying to become a Hollywood star. You won’t always like Sammy, but you’ll always find him entertaining. Schulberg’s writing is poignant, and the book became one of my all-time favorites.

The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue by V. E. Schwab

Addie LaRue is a heart-wrenchingly beautiful, modern-day Faustian story about a girl who makes a deal to live forever. The catch? Everyone she meets immediately forgets her…until she meets a guy named Henry Strauss.

Frankenstein by Mary Shelley

This book was much different than I expected. Shelley’s portrayal of the monster as a humane and loving creature was meaningful and moving in a way few monster stories can achieve. As soon as I finished the book, I kicked myself for not having read it sooner.

Maus I by Art Spiegelman

Art Spiegelman tells the story of the Holocaust in graphic novel form, using mice as Jews and cats as Germans. This true story follows Art’s parents living through the horrors of Nazi rule. Maus is the most inventive retelling of WWII you’ll ever read.

The Art of Racing in the Rain by Garth Stein

Told from the perspective of a dog named Enzo, this book is a tale of family, heartbreak, hard work, and redemption. I love when writers come up with new ways to tell stories, and Stein’s decision to tell this story from the dog’s perspective was clever. The book is a tear-jerker, but it’s worth the read.

East of Eden by John Steinbeck

East of Eden was my introduction to Steinbeck. It felt like a slog in some sections (it’s ~650 pages), but it’s also beautifully written and worth the time if you can maintain patience. I read this in a book club, which helped me process the book’s layers and historical context with friends.

The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde by Robert Louis Stevenson

“Jekyll and Hyde” is such a popular concept these days that I didn’t realize how late in the book Stevenson reveals the truth about those two characters. It was fun to read the story with today’s knowledge and consider how shocked UK readers must have been in 1886 when they read Stevenson’s epic reveal. I also love short books, and this one is ~120 pages.

Dracula by Bram Stoker

Stoker uses journal entries, letters, and newspaper clippings to tell this iconic story. The local peasants of Transylvania are leery of Count Dracula, who owns a creepy castle atop a hill. And when English lawyer Jonathan Harker stays in the castle, he realizes there’s good cause for the peasants’ concerns.

The Secret History by Donna Tartt

This book came out in 2004 and became an international sensation shortly thereafter, but it took me a long time to hear about it. I’m glad I finally did because I’m a sucker for dark academia fiction, and this is one of the best books in that genre. It’s a story about a group of college students who follow a charismatic liberal arts professor to dangerous places—in both mind and body.

The Queen’s Gambit by Walter Tevis

You’re probably familiar with the Netflix series based on this book (if not, go watch it). I grew up playing competitive chess, so this one was especially fun and nostalgic for me. I loved the strong female protagonist and her titanic struggle against the male-dominated field of chess (and her inner demons).

The Hobbit by J.R.R. Tolkien

Bilbo Baggins gets more than he bargained for when he opens his door to find a wizard and a collection of dwarves. He leaves his slow-paced life in the Shire to set out on a mythical quest with his new retinue, kicking off arguably the most famous fantasy series of all time. I loved the characters and the entire epic world that Tolkien paints. Read this one first, and if you like it, you should definitely read the entire Lord of the Rings series (next up on the list).

The Fellowship of the Ring (LOTR #1) by J.R.R. Tolkien

I often struggle with the long, mythical names of places and characters in fantasy books, so it takes an exceptional series to get me interested. This one did the trick. It took me about 100 pages until I really started to get into the story, but then I was hooked.

A Gentleman in Moscow by Amor Towles

Count Alexander Rostov is sentenced to stay in a Moscow hotel for the rest of his life, and nearly the entire novel takes place within the hotel’s four walls. Despite his challenging situation, Rostov’s wit, charm, and indefatigable spirit inject hope and energy into this book. The fact that Towles could overcome such a severe limitation and craft a compelling story within a single building shows off his writing prowess.

Personal Recollections of Joan of Arc by Mark Twain

Did you know Mark Twain was obsessed with the story of Joan of Arc and spent 12 years researching her life? In this biographical novel, Twain puts you right into the action of Joan’s life from the perspective of her page and secretary, Sieur Louis de Conté. I didn’t know much about Joan’s story before this, and it helped me understand how inspiring and heroic she really was.

Slaughterhouse-Five by Kurt Vonnegut

Vonnegut’s novels are nothing if not inventive and weird. Few people are brave enough or absurd enough to write an anti-war novel infused with a sci-fi story about a man traveling through time and meeting creatures from another planet. And yet, that’s exactly what Vonnegut did in Slaughterhouse-Five. (Btw, if you’re looking for amazing writing tips, check out his little-known writing advice book Pity the Reader.)

The Martian by Andy Weir

This book put Weir on the map, and he’s been a literary superstar ever since. His protagonist Mark Watney is one of the funnest and funniest characters you’ll ever find. Even though The Martian contains some intense science, Weir makes every page readable and interesting.

Project Hail Mary by Andy Weir

Weir provides another science-y and whimsical romp through space in Project Hail Mary. When the book begins, Ryland Grace finds himself on a spaceship light-years away from Earth. His two fellow astronauts are dead, and Ryland doesn’t remember who he is or why he’s there.

The Time Machine by H.G. Wells

H.G. Wells broke new literary ground with this book, which popularized the concept of time travel and became the first modern-day science fiction novel. He explores fascinating questions about the potential future of humanity as the gap between the rich and the poor expands. I loved this prescient book.

The Underground Railroad by Colson Whitehead

Whitehead reimagines the Underground Railroad as an actual, physical railroad. Even though it’s a work of fiction, you can feel the truth of the story and characters on every page. From the courageous protagonist Cora to the brutal plantation owner Terrance Randall, it’s a glimpse into life as a slave in the pre-Civil War American South.

The Picture of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde

The youthful Dorian Gray sells his soul for eternal youth, but his portrait continues to age, revealing Gray’s physical (and moral) deterioration. But the book is also a story of forbidden love in a society that disallowed homosexuality. Tragically, Wilde’s novel was even used in court as evidence against him in an indecency lawsuit.

The Book Thief by Marcus Zusak

Zusak introduces the most unique narrator in fictional history: Death. Death tells the story of a young foster girl named Liesel who resorts to stealing books because she loves them so much. (I can relate.) This story is set in Nazi Germany in 1939, and it carries all of the emotional heft you’d expect from a story in that setting.

For each book above, I included an affiliate link from Bookshop.org. (If you purchase a book, you’ll support me and local bookstores. Win-win!)

What am I missing? What should I check out next? Leave a comment below.

Looking for more book recs? You’ll enjoy these:

7 Incredible Novels You’ve (Probably) Never Heard About

15 Books That Tangibly Improved My Life

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We hand-picked 3 good pieces of content to inspire and motivate you now and in the future. Keep track of the insights that resonate with you by highlighting them with Glasp💡

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Understanding is the new bottleneck
by Geoffrey Litt (10 mins)

• Understanding code is about participation, not verification. As agents improve at self-checking, the real reason to understand what they build is to remain a creative contributor across many iterations. Without that fluency, your ability to evolve the system is limited.

• Three education-inspired techniques help. Structured explanations with quizzes, interactive “micro-worlds” (custom debuggers, step-by-step command centers), and shared team spaces for building common mental models.

• The goal is augmentation, not automation. AI’s greatest potential is helping humans understand better. Agents can generate tools that accelerate our learning, keeping us deeper in the loop rather than out of it.

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Control the ideas, not the code
by Salvatore Sanfilippo (6 mins)

• Control ideas, not code: With AI generating thousands of lines daily, reviewing code line-by-line is pointless. Focus on design and architecture instead.

• Reallocate time: Skip code review to spend more time on QA, new features, and writing DESIGN.md files that explain ideas in human language.

• Juniors still need fundamentals: New programmers should learn by building small projects (interpreters, databases) from scratch, not by reviewing AI output.

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How to Apply A Mind for Numbers: Learn Anything Faster With Your Brain’s Two Modes
by Glasp (13 mins)

• Two brain modes: Focused mode is deliberate concentration; diffuse mode is the relaxed state (walks, showers) where insights emerge. Effective learning means alternating between them.

• Recall beats rereading: Highlighted text feels familiar, but that’s an illusion. Close the source and reconstruct ideas from memory to build real understanding.

• Process over product: Procrastination comes from dreading the outcome. Commit to 25 minutes of effort (Pomodoro), not finishing, and the dread disappears.

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• 🟦 Diigo & Raindrop.io Import:

  You can now bring your highlights from Diigo and Raindrop.io into Glasp. Along with Kindle, Snipd, Readwise, Medium, Instapaper, and Hypothesis, your highlights can now live in one place. Connect them here.

  

• 🟥 80,000+ Audio Files Transcribed:
  Our Audio Transcriber has now processed over 80,000 audio files. We’re excited to see how the community is using Glasp to capture insights from conversations, lectures, and recordings.

• 🟨 Discover Popular Books:

  See which books Glasp readers are highlighting the most. The new Book Discovery page ranks the most popular titles imported from Kindle, so you can find your next read from what the community is actually reading. Browse them here.

  

❤️ Gratitude

Thank you for sharing and mentioning us on X, LinkedIn, and/or your blogs. 🙂 We appreciate your support! Please don’t hesitate to ask us anything at any time. Also, feel free to join our Reddit Community ;)

• Glasp YouTube Summarizer on FutureTools

  

• Glasp on SoftwareWorld

• Glasp on AIxploria

• YouTube Summary with ChatGPT & Claude on CHIP

  

• Layering Book: Build and Use a Second Brain on Read Medium

• Glasp on Aitoolsdirectory.com

• ＜徹底解説>拡張機能『YouTube Summary with ChatGPT』 の使い方と安全性！(<In-Depth Guide> How to Use and Safety of the “YouTube Summary with ChatGPT” Extension!) on AITech

• Quais são as ferramentas baseadas em IA generativa, como o ChatGPT, e os principais plugins? (What are the generative AI-based tools, such as ChatGPT, and the key plugins?) on SAPO

• Come riassumere un video YouTube in pochi secondi con l’AI (How to summarize a YouTube video in a few seconds using AI) on CeoGeek

• General Writing on Notion (500+ Best AI Tools (duplica esta lista))

We hope you enjoyed reading this newsletter!

See you next week ;)

Best,
Kei and Kazuki

--

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We’re excited to announce a new tutorial on Glasp: How to Import Your Medium, Snipd, Instapaper & Hypothesis Highlights into Glasp.

If you’ve been highlighting for a while, your best ideas are probably scattered across four or five apps. A quote saved in Medium, a podcast snip in Snipd, an article in Instapaper, a research annotation in Hypothesis. Each one useful, but none of them talking to each other. Scattered highlights are dead highlights: they only start working for you once they live in one place.

With Glasp’s import integrations, you can pull all of them into one library in a few clicks, and then actually put them to work.

Once your highlights are all in Glasp, you can:

• Plug them into any AI tool: the Glasp MCP Connector exposes your library to Claude and other AI clients, so they answer using what you’ve actually read, not the whole internet

• Feed your AI Clone: every highlight trains a personal AI built on your own thinking, so it can summarize, recall, and write in your voice

• Send them anywhere: export to Notion, Obsidian, and Roam, or as Markdown, CSV, and JSON, your data stays yours

In this tutorial, we’ll walk you through importing from Medium, Instapaper, Hypothesis, and Snipd, one by one.

If you want to reread or highlight this newsletter, save it to Glasp.

Save to Glasp

✍️ How It Works

Step 1: Open Settings → Integrations

Three of these (Medium, Instapaper, and Hypothesis) start from the same place. On your Highlights page, click + Import Highlights at the top to open the Integrations page, where you’ll find every import source under the Import section. (Snipd works a little differently, we’ll cover it last.)

Step 2: Import from Medium

Click Sync Now on the Medium card. In the modal, enter your public Medium username (e.g. @username) and click Connect. No integration token needed. Glasp syncs automatically (you can close the tab while it runs), and when it's done, click Go to My Highlights.

Full walkthrough: How to Import Highlights from Medium into Glasp

Step 3: Import from Instapaper

Click Import on the Instapaper card, then sign in to Instapaper. (We don’t store your login, it’s only used to authenticate.) Click Continue to Connect, and your highlights import right away.

Full walkthrough: How to Import Highlights from Instapaper into Glasp

Step 4: Import from Hypothesis

Click Sync Now on the Hypothesis card to open the Connect with Hypothesis modal. Click the Hypothesis API token link to get your token, paste it into the Hypothesis API Token field, and click Save API Token. Glasp syncs your highlights automatically.

NOTE: If the Hypothesis API token link shows a “Page Not Found” error, go to hypothes.is/login instead, log in, and copy your API token from there.

Full walkthrough: How to Import Highlights from Hypothesis into Glasp

Step 5: Import from Snipd (Mobile)

Snipd is an AI podcast player that saves any insight with a tap of your headphones, and it syncs to Glasp from its own app. Open the Snipd app, go to the Account tab (bottom-right), tap Settings at the top, then tap Export & Sync and choose Glasp Integration.

Tap Find your Glasp Access Token to grab your token from Glasp settings, then tap Connect. Done.

Tip: Each import is manual, not automatic. Whenever you add new highlights in one of these apps, just run the import again to bring them over.

Full walkthrough: How to Sync Your Snipd Highlights with Glasp

NOTE: Imported highlights are public by default. If you’d rather keep them private, adjust your visibility settings or upgrade to a Pro plan before you sync.

Everything you’ve ever highlighted, finally in one library, ready to be searched, exported, and handed to your AI.

If you haven’t already, sign up for Glasp and start bringing your highlights home.

👉 Sign up for Glasp

💡 Pro Tips

Now that your highlights live in one place, put them to work:

👉 Connect Glasp to Claude & ChatGPT with the MCP Connector: Let AI answer using what you’ve actually read

👉 Ask Your AI Clone: Turn your highlights into a personal AI you can chat with

👉 How to Chat with PDF on Glasp: Upload any PDF and ask questions, get summaries, keep highlights

Partner With Glasp

We currently offer newsletter sponsorships. If you have a product, event, or service you’d like to share with our community of learning enthusiasts, sponsor an edition of our newsletter to reach engaged readers.

Sponsor an Edition