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New York Times
17-07-2025
- Entertainment
- New York Times
Can You Really Disappear Online?
CAIRA: But what is the most embarrassing thing that you have found about yourself on this project? MAX: Oh, easily 200 LiveJournal posts. That was, yeah, without question — CHRISTINE: And those are, like, diary entries, essentially? MAX: We're not talking about the content today. CHRISTINE: I'm Christine Cyr Clisset. CAIRA: I'm Caira Blackwell. ROSIE: I'm Rosie Guerin, and you're listening to The Wirecutter Show . CAIRA: This episode is called: 'Can You Really Disappear Online?' CHRISTINE: Caira. CAIRA: Hi. CHRISTINE: It's just us today. CAIRA: I know. It feels so weird. CHRISTINE: Rosie is out again, so I thought this would be a great opportunity — there's a vast difference in age between you and me. CAIRA: Okay. CHRISTINE: And I'm going to ask you a very 'Gen Xer asks a Gen Zer a question,' okay? How much of your life is online? CAIRA: Oof. CHRISTINE: What's your footprint online? CAIRA: I am embarrassed to say that I've tried really hard to make sure a lot of me is online. I Google myself constantly to make sure that my efforts are not in vain. CHRISTINE: What is it? How many search-page results are actually about you? CAIRA: All of them. CHRISTINE: Okay, great. CAIRA: It helps that I have a really nice, unique name. But yeah, it's all me. CHRISTINE: I think that only two pages of Google are about me. I have a pretty small footprint. I've been a journalist for over 20 years, so there's a certain amount of my work that's online, but for the last maybe 10, 15 years, I've been pretty guarded online, and so I suspect — well, you know what, actually? I was really surprised recently. I Googled myself, and I was surprised by how much information was online. CAIRA: They get a lot of you. CHRISTINE: Yeah. It's creepy. There was information about my parents and about my sibling, and about old addresses, and that is creepy. CAIRA: Yeah. That part doesn't feel good. That's definitely not what I'm trying to do when I want to be online. I like the things that I want up there, but then, of course, there's always this part of the internet that gets more of you than you're willing to give. CHRISTINE: That's right. So it's not only creepy, there are real data-privacy and security issues related to all this information that any of us have online, especially if we've had a lot of social accounts, or we've just been living our life online. And that's why I was super interested when I learned that one of our colleagues, Max Eddy, who writes about data privacy and security for Wirecutter, he took on this really wild task for an article he just published about trying to erase himself from the internet. CAIRA: Wow. Big task. CHRISTINE: Yeah, this is a big task, especially for someone who is a journalist, but I think for probably any human being in 2025. CAIRA: Yeah, Max's amazing piece is actually part of a larger package for Wirecutter that just published. It covers all kinds of data-security issues, from tons of different journalists at Wirecutter, and some of the topics are about what to do if your data has been leaked or stolen, or what to do with a late loved one's online accounts, and how your smart devices might actually be watching you. So yeah. CHRISTINE: So creepy. CAIRA: A lot of good information. CHRISTINE: It's a lot of good information that I think is sometimes hard to find, and I'm so excited that Max is going to come on the show today. So after the break, we will talk with Max about the modern-day quest to erase himself from the internet, why he tried it, and why you might want to too. We'll be right back. CAIRA: Welcome back. Today we're talking with Max Eddy, who is Wirecutter's writer covering privacy, security, and software. He's written a lot about how to get the most out of your computers and your phones, and he's our in-house expert on how to protect yourself from online scams and surveillance. CHRISTINE: Welcome to the show, Max. MAX: Great to be back. CHRISTINE: It's great to have you here. Today we're going to talk about this gonzo project that you took on to disappear from the internet. What does that even mean? You are a journalist, you have a big footprint on the internet. How extreme did you get with this project? MAX: So as you just said, I publish online, and have done that for most of my working life, so unless this was a backdoor effort to fire me and not tell me, no, I didn't delete any of my stories, I didn't delete my bylines, and I did actually end up leaving a lot of stuff up there. Disappearing from the internet, the experts will tell you that that is a fantasy, you can't actually do that. So knowing that, I decided that, okay, if I can't disappear, then maybe I can get control and try to take control of as much of it as I could. CAIRA: Why would you even think to do this? What are the security implications for having your personal information, and your photos, and all your old embarrassing social media accounts, and other info about yourself on the internet? MAX: So why I did this is because it was an opportunity to apply a lot of different strategies and try them out. But why normal people who are not me would want to do this is that there's a lot of information out there about ourselves that we have shared knowingly on things like social media and other platforms, and that is out of your control once you've put it out there. So being able to take control of that information, I think a lot of people want to be able to do that. They want to be able to present themselves the way they want to be presented online. So you probably shouldn't set out to delete yourself from the internet, because it's just not going to happen. But if you try, you can definitely reduce the amount of stuff that's out there and control the stuff that is. CAIRA: Okay, that makes sense. I actually deleted my entire Facebook account because I saw that all the photos that I had on there, they were just making my skin crawl, so I just went ahead and got rid of that. But what is the most embarrassing thing that you have found about yourself on this project? MAX: Oh, easily 200 LiveJournal posts. That was, yeah, without question — CHRISTINE: And those are diary entries, essentially? MAX: We're not talking about the content today. MAX: Seriously, though, I completely forgot. I knew I'd signed up for that. I did not remember writing 200 posts. CAIRA: That's a lot. MAX: That one in particular was like being confronted with an old version of yourself and having to look at that distance between the two of you. So that is one of the disorienting things that does happen when you try to clean up nearly two decades of internet use … you're going to find a lot about yourself that you've forgotten about, and you will definitely notice that you're not the same person anymore. CHRISTINE: This is making me so nervous about what is on the internet about me that I haven't found. So we're going to get into all of the steps here that you took, Max, and from your piece, what I've gleaned is that you basically tackled this in three different places that you really focused your effort. Google was the first; you really attempted to remove yourself from Google search results. Number two was social media; you audited your online accounts, like Instagram, Facebook, and other accounts. And then you tackled the third place, public records, which … we will get into that a little bit later. So let's talk about that first bucket, the Google bucket. Why start with Google? How did you figure out what was online about yourself, and physically what did you do? Did you just do a vanity Google, essentially? MAX: I think a lot of people do go to Google first to see what's out there about them. I think that's a very understandable impulse. So I did start with Google because of that, because it's where most people are going to go first, and for reasons we'll get into, that is where you're going to encounter a lot of people who have your information for sale. So what I did was, I went onto Google, and I put in my name, and I looked around at what was there. I put in some variations of my name, I put in my name plus address, I put my name plus phone number. I would recommend, if you are curious about what's out there, start with those. Also toss in just your phone number, just your address, any email addresses or screen names that you've used. CHRISTINE: So you're basically being a detective of your own self. You're a PI looking up all the information you can find. MAX: I think that's a really good example, because that's the kind of person that's going to be doing this if they're trying to find out about you. But when you're searching for yourself on Google, you will be overwhelmed by the stuff that's on there. So while I think it's good to get the lay of the land, you're going to drive yourself nuts if you try to make a comprehensive list of every single place that you've been on there. One way that I found was to use my password manager. I've been using a password manager for a very long time. I found out I had 356 accounts in it. And using another service called Have I Been Pwned, which lists data breaches, you can enter your email address and see what accounts you have whose information has been released online. So using that, I was able to pare down that 356 to 27, and then going through manually, just looking at all the accounts that I had in my password manager, I found another 30 or so that I was like, 'There's going to be a lot of information in these sites.' So once I had that list, I could start with that. CHRISTINE: If you are not someone that is using a password manager currently, and you're listening to this and saying, 'Oh, maybe I should be using one,' if you were to sign up for an account for a password manager today, would that help you find all of those old accounts, or would it basically just be collecting all the accounts you're currently using? MAX: So when you sign up for a password manager, if you've never used one before, it can gather them as you log in to them. And if you're not using a password manager … I'm not going to shame people, but maybe do that. It's really one of the best things you can do to protect yourself online, to have unique complex passwords for every single site and service that you have an account with. CHRISTINE: Okay, so just to reiterate, though, it's not going to help you find those accounts you had five years ago or six years ago or 20 years ago. It will help you going forward. MAX: If you don't have that, then you are going to have to do some Googling. You're going to want to look at Have I Been Pwned. I found Have I Been Pwned to be really useful, not just for finding the accounts that had been breached but also accounts that I had completely forgotten about, like I have not scrambled a song in 20 years, and I didn't have it in my password manager, but it was in a data breach, my information was in that, and I was able to find that through Have I Been Pwned. CAIRA: Is … Have I Been Pwned, do you have to pay for that? MAX: It is free. CHRISTINE: Is that specifically a site that helps find data breaches? MAX: It helps you find your information in data breaches. So when you go to Have I Been Pwned, you enter your email address, and it's going to search through all of its millions of records of data breaches. And if your email address appears in that data breach, then it will pop up a little message below listing all of the data breaches where it has found that email address. I'm emphasizing this because that's not going to be a complete list. If it was a data breach that didn't have your email address, or if it was an account that didn't have your email address, then it's not going to show up there. So the tool is limited, but in terms of ways to check to see if your information has been exposed, this is by far the most comprehensive and easiest to use. When you see that your data has been exposed in a data breach, changing your password can be a good idea if your password was exposed, or if you're just concerned about it. It's usually, like, a good policy in general. But if your password wasn't exposed, then that's not really the issue. The issue is that there was personal information about you exposed. So for example, if you see that you were in a data breach, that means whoever has that breached information can now infer some things about you, that you have an account on this website. What they can do with that is try to log in as you; they can try to find your password from another data breach, if it wasn't in that one, and just try it and see if it works, because a lot of people recycle their passwords. So what you do next is going to depend on what information was exposed. We actually have a story about this as part of this larger package about what to do after a data breach, where we do walk you through what you should do when this happens. There's an argument to be made that all of your information is already out there, but you need to address every data breach separately. CHRISTINE: Okay, I'm writing that down on my arm, and I'm going to do that right — MAX: Should probably spell that, it's Have I Been Pwned, P-W-N-E-D, which is great to write out but terrible to say out loud. CAIRA: Such a millennial title. Okay, so removing yourself from Google search, how do you do that, and how successful can you be doing that? MAX: So Google actually offers a tool to help limit your appearance in Google search results called Results About You that shows you results that have your personal information in it. This tool is limited, and it's really important that people understand that there are certain criteria that have to be met before Google will suppress that search result. So that's the first thing. And the second thing is that that information is not going to be removed, it is only going to be suppressed. So the information is still out there — it just might not be appearing in search results, but that information is still out there, which is the second thing that I did. So the second thing I did was to address the sites that had my information. Most of those are data brokers, and they compile information about individuals, and then they sell that information to whoever wants it. So I went on to take care of that. CHRISTINE: Can you explain what a data broker is? They basically are vacuuming up all of your information and selling it? MAX: So yeah, data brokers gather personal information and then sell it. They're usually taking it from multiple sources, and in some cases they're connecting the dots that aren't connected. So for example, maybe they're able to get a name and a phone number over here and a name and an address over there. And now they've got a name, a phone number, and an address. And when you collate all that information together, you can assemble some pretty specific dossiers on individuals and names, addresses, phone numbers. Sometimes relations — like cousins, parents, that sort of thing — will be in these records that they have for sale. CAIRA: What are some companies that people might be able to recognize? Do you have any examples? MAX: A lot of these companies might object to being called data brokers. A lot of them refer to themselves as 'people search sites' or 'record search sites.' So there are companies out there who work to remove this information from data brokers, data-removal services, and some of the companies that they classify as data brokers would be Spokeo, That's Them, Alabama Court And again, these companies might object to that distinction, and I'm not going to make a judgment about that, but these are the sites that the data-removal services are operating with. CHRISTINE: So what do you do if you find that your information is on these data broker sites? What steps can you take to get the information off of those sites? MAX: So most of these data brokers are going to have some kind of mechanism to remove your information. You can request that they take those records down, and that process can be very tedious, and it also requires you to engage with them maybe more than you would be comfortable with. I did try to do this, and I got skeezed out really, really fast; I don't want to give them more of my information, they're already selling it. So you can do this on your own. What I did for this story was to sign up with data-removal services that do that for you. So they search these data broker sites for your information, and then they send the opt-out requests, and then they handle all of the follow-ups and everything that goes with that, so you never have to touch any of it. CAIRA: Oh, I actually used one of those, and I was so shocked at the things that it called from the internet. Like, my mom's address and phone number was attached to my information. MAX: That's actually one of the things I found fascinating about this experience, by the way. Like, the information sold by data brokers is freakishly accurate and long, and then it's not. I saw individuals that clearly were supposed to be me, my name, my age, and a couple other pieces of information, like … well, unless there's another Max Eddy out there with the same age as me, that's unlikely. But in different addresses or addresses near to where I used to live, but not there. And I think this is really interesting, because these companies are really selling themselves on the idea that you can find people, but I'm not sure how true that is. There is, yeah, a lot of accurate information there, and there's a lot of not-accurate information in there. CAIRA: Well, I'm happy for that, actually. CHRISTINE: How much does it cost to hire one of these or use one of these services, these data-removal services? Is it expensive? Because that service sounds like it's well worth some money to me versus going through and trying to do this DIY. MAX: So in our guide for data-removal services, one of the things I discovered is that the cost of a data-removal service is wide-ranging. On the low end, I found one for $20 a year, on the high end it was well over $300 a year. And the difference between them is very broad and complex. But yeah, I think you're going to end up spending probably about 100 bucks. CAIRA: And how successful have you found these services to be? MAX: I had to sign up for about a dozen of these in order to write our guide about them. And the problem with that is, I had a bunch of these data-removal services all removing my information at the same time, and that meant we weren't able to correlate who was doing what work. So we actually started a year-long experiment at Wirecutter, where we have a bunch of different writers sign up with different services, and we are tracking what results they see over time. So what the data-removal services say, and what certain specific data brokers say they have on these individuals. And that's what we're trying to figure out, is how effective they are compared to each other. I can say that, having signed up for a lot of them, there's a lot less information about me out there right now. So they do work. I interviewed some people at data-removal services, and they told me that sometimes data brokers will relist your information even after it's been taken down. CHRISTINE: Oof. It's like a Whac-A-Mole situation. MAX: Absolutely. And there are hundreds of these sites that are selling this information, and they sell to each other, so it's very complicated, and that's the downside of it. You sign up for this, and it does a great job, but you need to leave it there perpetually. CHRISTINE: This is really a service where it's probably best to subscribe and have it just working all year long to clean up your profile online? MAX: Yeah, so far that's what we think. One of the things we're going to be looking at is, do they actually do a lot more over time in this longer experiment that we're doing? CHRISTINE: So Max, just even this first step of approaching what information is about you on Google and how to suppress those results, or how to remove information from these data brokers … it sounds a little bit intense, and I think it might be intimidating for people. I want to hear just your very simplified version of what we just talked about. MAX: Sure. So I think everyone should take a look at Google's Results About You tool. Google is the most popular search engine, and seeing what's out there and using its own tool to suppress some of those results is a great first step. It costs nothing, it takes a few minutes to set up. You can then go and send data-removal requests to data brokers. You can do it yourself. I really want to stress, you can do this yourself for free. There's a lot of data-removal services that actually have free subscription options; they will tell you where the stuff is, but you have to do the opting out yourself. So you don't have to pay for these, but you will invest a lot of time and effort in that. And if that's not worth it to you, or if you would rather just have someone else do it, take a look at a data-removal service to do that for you. CHRISTINE: And you can go to our website for specific recommendations on those. MAX: Absolutely. CAIRA: Awesome. Okay, so we're going to take a quick break, and then when we're back, Max is going to cover the last two steps that he took, which is scrubbing himself from social media and then tackling public records. Plus, we'll cover some of the unexpectedly emotional parts of disappearing online. Be right back. CAIRA: Welcome back. Max, before the break, you told us about the first step that you took to remove yourself from the internet, which is figuring out how much of your information is online and definitely checking Google. So now let's talk about the last two buckets, which is social media and then public records. Social media itself is a beast. How hard was it to remove yourself from everywhere, like, Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, all of that stuff? How'd you go about doing that? MAX: So the thing about social media is that it's actually not the only place where I found my information. I found that there are bio pages on Patreon and Kickstarter and other services like that. So if people are listening at home, take a look at these other sites that you're signed up for, and see what information you've shared with them and that they share publicly. It's really startling what's out there, and you can clean that up pretty simply. But with social media, that's a little more loaded. We interact a lot over social media, and it doesn't necessarily make sense to remove everything or entirely delete your account. And in my case, I actually chose not to delete my account in most cases. That said, deleting your account is easily the fastest and simplest way to do this. I chose not to do that, because I wanted to keep my accounts alive but inactive, and I was concerned primarily about impersonation. Maybe some of that's vanity — I am a Google-able person, and I didn't want someone else popping up on Twitter and pretending to be me — but this can affect anyone, really. A couple years ago, my aunt was on Facebook and discovered that someone else had created an account in her name and was going around to all the family members and asking for money. CHRISTINE: Oh my gosh. CAIRA: That happens so much on Facebook, I feel like I hear that all the time. MAX: But impersonation can happen to anyone, and if you don't have an account on that service anymore, it can be hard to prove that you are the real you. It is doable, but for me it was more valuable to maintain control of those accounts but just leave them empty. Most websites and online accounts are going to require you to enter information about yourself, and they won't let you create the account without that information. They won't let you save the information unless it's all in there. So you can't just delete your email address and then hit Save, and Twitter would be like, 'Yeah, that's fine. I don't know who you are. That's great.' So I created what the experts call synthetic data, which is basically just made-up information about myself. So imagine, if you will, a Twitter account or a social media account, there's a username, there's a photo, usually, and then all of that's tied back to, usually, an email address somewhere in the background that's probably not visible, but it is part of the account. So I tried to address all of those things. I found a bitmap generator to create random colorful images, just dots, and I replaced all of my user photos with that. I found a text generator and used that to create names and fill in information that required text. So there's a lot of 'lorem ipsum'–style names for me around there now. I wanted to get my name off, and my screen names off of them, as much as I could. And then I use an email-masking service, which lets you create unique email addresses for every site you want to sign up for. What it does is, it forwards any emails sent to that email address to your real email address, and you can respond to it the same way, and it'll appear to be coming from the masked email. And then if you want to get rid of it for any reason — if you're getting a lot of spam, if you just don't want it, you can't seem to get rid of that newsletter, it's there all the time — you can just delete the email address, and it forwards to nowhere. It's just gone. CAIRA: Oh, cool. CHRISTINE: So presumably with all these unique emails and passwords you're using, going back to the password manager, you're using the password manager to help you manage all of those, right? MAX: Absolutely. CHRISTINE: Because if I started a unique email for everything that I have, I would be in big trouble. CAIRA: Locked out. MAX: Yeah, 356 online accounts, and I worked on 55 of them for this. So yeah, I had generated 55 unique emails for this project. CHRISTINE: This seems like I should be giving a lot of people my masked email. MAX: So the downside of a lot of masked emails is that they are random text, and it's like, 'Oh, yeah, you can just hit me up at X123Q57@ CHRISTINE: It's like the old version of dating, and people being like, 'Can I get your number?' And you're like, 'Yeah.' CAIRA: It was six digits. MAX: So the idea here, though, is, when you're using these masked-email services, they're great for a lot of things, but what I really wanted to do was to break apart all the connections between my accounts. So remember earlier, when I talked about how data brokers get information from lots of different places and connect those dots together? I wanted to make that either impossible or so very, very difficult that they would not bother trying. So all of the pictures are different, you're not going to be able to put them together and say, like, 'Look, same user photos here and here, people recycle those a lot.' They won't see the same usernames. As often as I could, I tried to get rid of usernames, because most people recycle those, as well. And if you don't want to have a consistent internet presence, you want each of those to be different. And then email, while that's not usually visible to the outside, the companies who run those services can see that, and I wanted to make sure that you wouldn't be able to connect it via email, either. So every piece of it that should have been searchable, I tried to make unique. CAIRA: Do you suggest that everybody does all of this? MAX: No. CAIRA: Okay. MAX: No, but I think for the purposes of this project, it was like, 'Let's see if we can do this.' CAIRA: Yeah. MAX: 'How painful is it going to be?' And I think it's a useful framework. CAIRA: Okay. MAX: So let's say you're signing up for something that's low value to you personally. You just need to sign up for it for whatever reason. I don't know — CHRISTINE: To get a 20%-off coupon or something. MAX: Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. That's a perfect example. So you have to create an account somewhere where you don't actually want to have an account. Don't use the same username that you use everywhere. Use a masked email, and don't put a photo of yourself on it, use just any photo you can find or generate one randomly. And I think that this can be really useful on social platforms where your actual presence isn't required. If you're playing a video game or something, people don't need to know your name or see your face and your friends, you'll find them in some other way. So I think people can use these tools and then make decisions about how much of their information they want to share. How public do they want to be with this? On something like Facebook, where you are making a judgment about who the person is, you're probably going to want to use your name. I think they have policies about that still. And you're probably going to want to use a photo that people that you care about would recognize. But for other things, you don't need to do that. CAIRA: So how long did this take? MAX: The whole project was over the course of about three weeks or so. For those social media accounts alone, that was three or four days. It gets a little hazy for me towards the end, because working on Facebook was such an absolute nightmare for me that I frankly could not keep track of what was happening in my life. I went into a fugue state and emerged several days later. It does take a lot of time, and especially what I was trying to do — to remove my posts from these accounts but leave the accounts up — is very difficult to do. Most sites … pretty much every social media site I went to does not have an option to edit what posts are available. So I had to find other ways to do this. So in the case of LiveJournal I mentioned earlier, I had to go through and manually delete every single one of them. And for Twitter, I used a tool called Cyd, C-Y-D, it stands for Claw Back Your Data. And this will automatically delete your posts, your likes, your direct messages, and your retweets. There are other tools that will help you do this. I had a really good experience using Cyd on a personal Twitter account. It still takes a long time, though: For an account with 70,000 posts, it took about three and a half hours to get through. CAIRA: Oh, wow. MAX: Just the posts. CHRISTINE: Max, did it feel weird to remove images and personal journal entries, and all these deeply personal things that many of us share parts of ourselves on social media? I'm wondering: Watching you yourself disappear from these places, what did that feel like? MAX: It was awful. I can only say how it felt for me. I don't know what other people would experience, but at first it was really fun, because it was like, 'Oh, look at all this stuff, it's just flying by.' You see it for a second. It's like watching your life flash before your eyes. But then I took in, like, oh, every time something appears there, it's being deleted. So like, 'Oh, look, there's a picture of my wedding, and it's gone' and 'Oh, there's a picture of my pet rat, Johanna, gone.' And it starts to add up after a while. It starts to feel pretty bad. Whatever urges were there to share my life and connect with people like that … it hurt, that, a little bit. CAIRA: I had no problem deleting my Facebook account. MAX: And it's so different for everyone. I was agonizing over the tagged photos on Facebook. I'm talking to my spouse about that, and they're like, 'Oh, I deleted those years ago. Tags are stupid. What's your problem?' I don't know what my … I know what my problems are, but everyone's going to respond to it differently. And I do want to underline that sometimes it's painful, sometimes it's liberating. It's going to be a different experience, and I think that's also going to inform how you go about that. I would be lying if I said that the reason why I didn't delete all these accounts was because of privacy and control reasons. Some of it was just hard for me personally. CAIRA: Okay, Max. So let's talk about this last bucket. It's about tackling public records. And this does, I will admit, sound very boring, but it also does sound important. So what should people absolutely know about online public records that have their info? MAX: So removing public records is really difficult, because the existence of their record is usually required by law. For example, real estate purchases, voter registration, some court proceedings, stuff like that. And there's very rare exceptions for when that can be changed. So New York state, we have certain laws that say that if you are a survivor of domestic abuse, then you can have public records either redacted or removed. And that's true in other places, as well. But if you just don't want that information out there, you don't really have any means available to do that. And that's why it might be best to just see what's available in your state, and perhaps there's some options that are available for you. You will have to do some of that on your own. CHRISTINE: You cover some of that in your piece that just published. MAX: Yeah, you can read about my experiences doing that. CHRISTINE: Great. So Max, before we move on, I just want to make sure that these last two areas that we talked about, social media and public records, that we have the CliffsNotes for people at home if they're interested in doing this. So give us the very, very simplified version: For social media, what are the steps? MAX: For deleting your social media information, deleting the account is the fastest and easiest way to go about doing that. What I did, removing the data and then keeping the account alive, is much harder. So everyone's going to have to make a choice about that. And then when it comes to public records, just be aware that it's very difficult to get that information removed. Finding it can be an educational process for what's out there about you, and it's also an opportunity to engage with your community and find out what rules and laws are available for you. CAIRA: Before we wrap, we usually ask our guests one final question: What's the last thing you bought that you've really loved? MAX: The Kobo Libra Colour. It's an e-reader, and I'm a sucker for E Ink. CHRISTINE: So why do you like this better than a Kindle? MAX: I broke up with Amazon many, many years ago. CHRISTINE: Ooh, okay, good for you. CAIRA: Good for you. MAX: I like a lot of things about Kobo. The direct integration with my library is really nice. I can have that delivered directly there. I also just like how they look, I like how they work. CHRISTINE: Well, thank you so much, Max. I feel like I learned a ton this episode. CAIRA: Yeah. MAX: Thank you. Happy to be here. CHRISTINE: Caira, do you feel intimidated by this list of things that you need to go out and do now? CAIRA: Okay, I'm going to be honest. I haven't even done the things from the last data and security thing that we talked about, like getting a password manager. CHRISTINE: Well, you just have more things to add to your list, then. CAIRA: Yay. CHRISTINE: What was your biggest takeaway? CAIRA: One of the biggest things that I really learned is that a lot of the information that I was so proud to have about myself online, people are making money off of that. CHRISTINE: Yeah. CAIRA: So that's not great. Don't love it. And there's also just so much more information that I do not want on the internet. CHRISTINE: Right. CAIRA: So to that end, I think I'm going to try using Google's Results About You tool, because I do have Delete Me, and it should be culling some of that information that I don't want on the internet. But I don't want to rely just on that; I should be doing my own research, too. CHRISTINE: Yeah, I feel like when it comes to all this data-privacy and security stuff, I get a little intimidated, and just I freeze up, and I don't do anything. And so I think I really need to just pay attention. And I think the first thing I'm going to do is, I'm going to go to that site Have I Been Pwned, which is … what is that name? It's a ridiculous name. CAIRA: You wouldn't get it. CHRISTINE: I'm too old. But I am going to go to that site and see what data-privacy breaches my information has been involved with, to just get a lay of the land. CAIRA: I like it. CHRISTINE: So if listeners at home want to find out more about Wirecutter's coverage, or if you want to check out any of the products that we talked about or to read about Max's journey or any of these other data-privacy pieces that we had come out this week, go to or you can find some links in our show notes. That's it for us this week. Next week, Rosie will be back. Thank you so much for listening. Bye. CAIRA: Bye. CAIRA: The Wirecutter Show is executive produced by Rosie Guerin and produced by Abigail Keel. Engineering support from Maddy Masiello and Nick Pitman. Today's episode was mixed by Catherine Anderson. Original music by Dan Powell, Marion Lozano, Elisheba Ittoop, and Diane Wong. Wirecutter's deputy publisher is Cliff Levy. Ben Frumin is Wirecutter's editor-in-chief. I'm Caira Blackwell. CHRISTINE: I'm Christine Cyr Clisset. Thanks for listening. CAIRA: And you have to be my accountabilibuddy. CHRISTINE: Your accountability buddy? Yeah, I will totally — CAIRA: Accountabilibuddy, Christine. You got to make it one word.
New York Times
17-07-2025
- Entertainment
- New York Times
A Day at the Beach
KIT: Imagine this beach. We're all going to go, and there's sun and there's sand and there's wind, and we're like, 'Oh, I can't wait to get there.' And then we spend the entire day sort of trying to mitigate and block the sun and the wind and too much sand. CHRISTINE: I'm Christine Cyr Clisset. CAIRA: I'm Caira Blackwell. ROSIE: I'm Rosie Guerin, and you're listening to The Wirecutter Show . CHRISTINE: This episode is called: 'A Day at the Beach.' ROSIE: Hi, guys. CHRISTINE: Hey there. ROSIE: I'm coming in hot with something you didn't ask about me. CHRISTINE: Oh, wonderful. ROSIE: You did not ask to know this, but I'm going to tell you that I'm not much of a summer beach person. CHRISTINE: Sacrilege. What do you mean? CAIRA: Does that surprise you? CHRISTINE: That … no, it doesn't actually surprise me. ROSIE: I like the beach in the winter. CAIRA: She's just always in her flannel gear bag. ROSIE: You know the vibes. Summer beach in New York and New Jersey. It's the crowds, the heat, the schlepping. It's not my vibe. CHRISTINE: Yeah, I get that. There are a lot of people on the beach out here in the summertime, but I love the beach. I will go to the beach every weekend. I love it so much. It's so great. CAIRA: I really can't do it, either. I'm kind of in between you and Rosie. I just want to fly out to somewhere warm with clear water and not bring anything with me except my bathing suit and a towel. CHRISTINE: Now I can get behind that idea too, but one thing I have to say about the beach — and this is not just the beach, this is also going to the lake with my family in the summertime or even hanging out at friends' who have pools out in the suburbs or whatever — is that this is really a category where I really do think you need to have the right gear to make the day. You've got to have the shade. You've got to have something comfortable to sit on. It can really make the day better. So we are going to talk about that a little bit today. We're going to bring on our resident beach expert, Kit Dillon. He is a senior staff writer on our outdoor and travel team. Kit lives in Hawaii, where he tests a bunch of beach gear for us. He's also a surfer, so he's spending a lot of time in the water and on the beach. He basically does beach very, very well. CAIRA: Yeah, his job is beach. CHRISTINE: That's right. CHRISTINE: We're going to take a quick break, and when we're back, we'll talk with Kit Dillon about how to up-level your beach gear. We'll be right back. CAIRA: Welcome back. With us now is Kit Dillon, who's a senior writer on Wirecutter's travel and outdoor team. He's also a surfer who spends a lot of time on the beach. His whole job is actually beach, like Ken from Barbie. Kit has written a bunch of our guides to beach shelters, coolers, beach bags, and all kinds of other beach gear. And he also covers luggage, and you may have heard him a few months back on our episode about that. CHRISTINE: Kit, welcome. It's great to have you back. KIT: Hi. It's good to be back. ROSIE: Kit, it sounds very oppressive to be known as the Ken of Wirecutter. What are you doing all day? Are you just sort of sitting on beach chairs, staring out at the Pacific? Is that how you're calling that testing? KIT: That is actually a lot of the testing, as absurd as that is. ROSIE: I love this for you. KIT: It's really nice. No, it's a good part of the job. ROSIE: So tell me, I mean, within the scope of a day at the beach, what does the testing look like? KIT: The actual testing part is really great, because like you said, you're just sitting there, and you're trying to enjoy the things you have. Setting it up and sort of getting to the beach is a total pain, and it's sort of tripled, because you're bringing everything you need to go to the beach normally. Then you bring everything you're testing to go to the beach to use, and then there's sort of all the ephemera that comes with opening boxes at the beach and then dragging this up, back and forth. CHRISTINE: People must think you're a weirdo. KIT: You look like an absolute … yeah, it's nuts. ROSIE: It looks like you're going to live. KIT: It looks so crazy. There'll be, like, eight shelters just in a row, and there's just one guy sitting under each one. I try to find very private places, and even then people walk by, and you're like, 'Oh.' CHRISTINE: 'Why is this guy on this deserted beach with eight shelters? This is weird.' ROSIE: Well, the thing is, it can't be overstated that not all things that folks at Wirecutter test end up as picks. So you're testing stuff that is, like, might not be the vibe. KIT: Absolutely. CHRISTINE: But you're not just testing in Hawaii. You've got people testing, or you're testing, in other places too, right? KIT: So we try and get these things all over the country, largely California, a little bit in New Jersey and New York, some bits of the Carolinas, just trying to test for all the different kinds of conditions and types of beaches. There actually seem to be many types of beaches that you can go to. And some equipment works a lot better in some places than others, and we can get into that. CHRISTINE: I want to know, Kit, obviously anyone could just get whatever for the beach. You could just get a little, flimsy umbrella. You could bring whatever you have at home. What is your case for getting some beach equipment that's really good beach equipment? Does it actually make your day better at the beach? KIT: I really think it does. There is sort of a limit. There's a bar, I think, with beach gear, where if you do get the kind of right stuff and the slightly better stuff, it does make the day just easier. Usually the stuff that's a little bit better is lighter, it's easier to set up. It's usually a little bit stronger. You're more comfortable. All the sort of things you want are just there and then easier to use, which ultimately … which is if you're dragging it from a car to the beach back and forth. The beach is a weird place. It's pretty strange. CHRISTINE: Tell us more. What do you mean? KIT: Well, there's a friction to it kind of, right? We sort of go, we imagine this great place, we imagine this beach that we're all going to go, and there's sun and there's sand and there's wind, and we're like, 'Oh, I can't wait to get there.' And then we spend the entire day sort of trying to mitigate and block the sun and the wind and too much sand, and the water's too cold, and 'I need something to put over myself to cover.' Everything sort of becomes about defending against the very place, and then we leave, and we go, 'That was amazing. What a good time. What a great day.' ROSIE: This is my diatribe about the beach. This is like, I'm like, you go to the beach in November to take a walk, and you can look around and you see the water and you see the thing. Or you go to the beach in the summer to surf. It's like, I'm going to but I don't want to go and schlep, and then just fart around. CHRISTINE: Oh, so you're very beach-task oriented. ROSIE: Beach task. CHRISTINE: You want to have a task, a walk, a surf. You're going to do something. I think that the scenario that you just described, Kit, of sort of struggling on the beach to enjoy yourself and then afterwards feeling it was a really good time, I feel like there's a lot of things in life that are worthwhile doing that are like that. ROSIE: Like childbirth? CHRISTINE: Childbirth, parenting. Caira's looking at us like, 'Oh God.' KIT: It speaks to the human condition, I think, for sure. CHRISTINE: It's … a little struggle is good for us. If it's too easy, we won't appreciate it, I think. KIT: Yeah. CAIRA: Okay. You've done all of this gear testing, and you obviously spent a ton of time on the beach. What are the items you think are really worth investing in? KIT: I mean, the easiest ones are a beach shelter, a very good chair, and a cooler. Pretty much, you've got yourself covered. CAIRA: Okay, so walk us through that one by one. Let's start with the beach shelter. What is that, and what makes a good one? KIT: They've been coming out with these new types of … if you forget about the classic beach umbrella that we all know, they're coming out with these new stretchy fabrics that are held up by tent poles, or they sort of float in the wind a little bit. These kind of large coverings that can give you a lot more shade over a bigger area than a normal umbrella, and you're not sort of chasing that shade around, because you have this sort of big postage stamp that you can sit under. And the good ones can fit four or six people under them. So these are becoming kind of a lot more common now. CAIRA: And if it's just a piece of cloth, I imagine it's a lot easier to pack, right? You're not bringing a whole tent to the beach. KIT: Right. They're super light. An umbrella can sometimes be this 6-foot kind of heavy thing you got to put on your shoulder if you're trying to include a chair. There's always sort of that image of the beach dad dragging four things. You see it every time you go down, and you see this sort of one family with just too much stuff. There's one way to cut that down a little bit. CAIRA: And what's your pick for that? KIT: So there's one which we can get into, which is …it's so specific that we have to talk a little bit about it. The other one is this sort of Sun Ninja. It's nice. It's nylon stretchy fabric over these aluminum tubes. It kind of looks like a Bedouin tent; if you imagine briefly what a Bedouin tent looks like in your mind, then that's kind of what this looks like. ROSIE: What's the first one that we need to dive deep into? KIT: The deep dive one is called the Shibumi, which has … it's a terrible name, but that's what it's called. CHRISTINE: 'Let me break out my Shibumi.' Yeah. KIT: I know. ROSIE: 'Honey, did you bring the Shibumi?' KIT: That's an interesting, very unique design. I love it. TikTok does not love it. And it's essentially just an arc of aluminum tube, very thin aluminum tubing you'd find in a camping tent, and a light piece of parasailing fabric stretched across this. And the wind kind of hits this, and then ideally this will sort of float and levitate over your heads, suspended from this one arc of single tubing. So it's very elegant. It does work, as long as the winds are sort of constant and light and from one direction. CHRISTINE: Am I correct that this was developed down in North Carolina? KIT: Correct. CHRISTINE: I was on a vacation down there a couple years ago, and I looked out at the beach, and there were 50 of these on the sand. They're, like, a turquoise and a dark blue color. Everyone had the same one, and I remember thinking the wind here is perfect for these, but I feel like back in New York, I'm not sure that these would work so well, and I actually don't see that many of them up here. KIT: You really do need somewhere like the Carolinas, or Florida to a degree, as well, where you have just a constant breeze from the water to the shore, and it has to always sort of be the same direction. And in South Carolina basically it's like that all summer long — just one direction hits the shore. In Hawaii we get sort of variable winds, so it can work really well. The nice thing about it is it actually is really good against assaulting winds: If you have really high winds, this thing will be fine, but it's loud when you're sitting under it. It's sort of whipping away. CAIRA: So it sounds like a flag blowing in the wind. KIT: Yeah, like a huge flag. So now they've come out with a sort of wind-assist aspect to it, which are these tie-downs that sort of hold the ends down. So when you have no wind, you can kind of stretch it out a bit like a lean-to, which makes it an excellent product. It's just one of these things — that it can be so great, and it's so light and so easy to carry and so easy to set up, one person can do it in about a minute — that we can't not make it a pick, because it's just so amazing to use. But when it doesn't work, it can be irritating for some people. CHRISTINE: I think my family has a beach shelter, and it's much more cumbersome than this. And my husband and I, fortunately, we get along, and we can put it together without fighting, but I have witnessed a lot of other people on the beach putting together beach shelters. CAIRA: Just ruining their marriage. CHRISTINE: It does seem like a source of tension, especially if it's a poor design that's hard to put up or it just doesn't do well in wind. I think that's one case for getting a good shelter, is to just save a relationship. CHRISTINE: What about umbrellas? If somebody is listening, and they're like, 'I don't want a shelter. It sounds like too much of a pain.' Surely there are good options. I've seen some, but I'm not sure what qualifies as a good umbrella, because I think the classic problem with the umbrella is, it's either this flimsy thing, a little bit of wind happens, and it's like a tumbleweed down the beach, and they don't provide that much shade generally. So what do you recommend for a good umbrella? KIT: All of it's true. There's a really big difference, I think, between the good and bad umbrellas. So when I was young, we used to go to Maine a lot, and some of my earliest memories are our umbrella just getting caught in some wind and then whipping down the beach, and all the parents running and trying to … apologizing as you sort of run. ROSIE: I would've been their kid on that same beach in Maine, so I'm sure I caught your umbrella at least once. KIT: Yeah. So they are getting better. A lot of them come now with a sort of sand augers and anchors, and they sit a little bit better. The best one we found, it's called the BeachBUB All-in-One Umbrella System. CHRISTINE: Oh, these names. It's a system. KIT: Another great name. Yeah, it's like setting up a column in the middle of the beach. It will not go anywhere. The wind could be a hundred miles an hour, and this umbrella just brushes it off. CHRISTINE: So any other umbrellas you'd recommend? KIT: Yeah, so we do recommend this other Sport-Brella Premiere XL that sort of leans on its side. CHRISTINE: Is it the kind that looks like it has ear flaps that go down off the side? KIT: Yes, like an umbrella that tipped over. You sort of secure the edges. It creates sort of a half of a tent, half of an umbrella. They're pretty good, except obviously you have to kind of position those against the wind, because if you face it, and the wind catches it, you've just created this giant wind tunnel for it to suck and do and disappear. If you want one that's not, like, a zillion dollars but can kind of withstand some gusts of wind, we have the Coolibar umbrella, which has a nice covering underneath the umbrella, so it does block a lot of UV rays, and it's about $75. It's pretty good. I just wouldn't expect it to stand up against strong wind. CHRISTINE: So what I'm hearing, though, is if you want a really good beach shelter or umbrella, you got to put down some money. These are not cheap things. How much are we talking? KIT: Yeah, I mean the Sun Ninja is actually not too expensive. The Shibumi is in the $200 range. ROSIE: It looks like the BeachBUB's, like, $150. KIT: Yeah, so you're in the hundreds for sure already. CHRISTINE: But in theory, some of these nicer pieces of equipment will last you longer than the cheapo thing that will just die. KIT: For sure. Shibumi should last almost your whole life; I mean, you'd have to really work hard to break it. BeachBUB, as well, is built like a tank. Yeah. CHRISTINE: Yeah, it's just pennies per year. ROSIE: Invest in your beaching future. CHRISTINE: Yeah, that's right. CAIRA: Okay, we're gonna take a quick break. And when we come back, Kit will tell us his picks for the best beach chairs and coolers. Plus, what you can skip for your next outdoor adventure. Be right back. CAIRA: Welcome back. We're here with Kit Dillon talking about the gear to invest in to make your day at the beach feel like a day at the beach. We've covered shade. What about chairs? I love this image of you sitting down in a bunch of chairs lined up on the beach, but how do you decide what makes a really good chair? KIT: Strong, lightweight, easy to carry, and then ideally comfortable and supportive. And some notes have been getting back — from older testers, especially — is a lot of these beach chairs are so low to the ground that they're really difficult to get in and out of. So we've been looking for, and I think we found, finally, a chair that's kind of a little bit higher, a little taller seated chair but still has a reclining function in these things. CAIRA: Tell us more about that. What's the name? KIT: So that, again, made by Shibumi, they just came out with a lightweight strong chair that you can clip two chairs together, carry easily on your back with one person, which is sort of an innovation, so to speak, in this world. And they make a chair that's low to the ground and/or a model that's high to the ground and is easier to sit in and reclines, and it's quite comfortable. It's not the most comfortable. That would go to the Yeti, which again is an absurdly priced beach chair. CAIRA: Well, how much is it? KIT: It is over $300. CAIRA: For one beach chair? KIT: For one, single beach chair. CAIRA: One seasonal beach chair. KIT: I know. ROSIE: Is it, like, a massage chair? What is this chair doing for you? KIT: I like this chair more than I like my couch. I will take this thing, and I'll go anywhere with it. It is so comfortable, and I think it's something about the tension that they've figured out in the fabric. It's just sort of supportive enough. It's like being cradled at the beach. I set that up with my BeachBUB, I'm so happy. And it's also, like, $600 worth of equipment. CHRISTINE: Oh my gosh. KIT: You know. CHRISTINE: Wait a minute. Is this chair the traditional kind of Tommy Bahama–style chair that it's, like … is it, like, a backpack chair, a beach chair that you bring to the beach, and you put it down, and is it also kind of one of these lower types of beach chairs? KIT: Yeah. Yeah, it reclines further than the Tommy Bahama. And imagine the Tommy Bahama, just oversized. It's just bigger. It's sort of a Texas-sized chair. CAIRA: But what is the deal with the Tommy Bahama chairs? Because it's a very popular chair that you will see. Are those not good enough? What's the deal? KIT: No, they're a top pick. They're still our top pick. They're light. They're easy to carry. They're not too expensive. They're comfortable. They're low to the ground. It's just they've been the standard for so long that companies come in and they start to use new materials, and they make things a little stronger, and there's a lot of room to improve. But again, it's the beach. How comfortable are you ever really going to be at the beach, and why are you trying to be comfortable at the beach? Because it's sort of inherently an uncomfortable place. ROSIE: This is the existential thinking that I like when I'm talking about the beach. CHRISTINE: When we talk about the beach. ROSIE: Let's not be frivolous when we talk about the beach. Let's be real. CHRISTINE: Yeti makes amazing coolers. We recommend a few of them. You've mentioned that coolers are something that we should be thinking about for the beach. I have long had this terrible Igloo cooler that I think I got at a CVS, but if we're talking coolers for the beach, what do you recommend? KIT: We do like Yeti, but — CHRISTINE: How much better is a Yeti cooler? KIT: It's not that much better for most people. There's certain things that Yeti does really well. They're really sturdy. I mean, originally they were designed to stand on, to fish from off of a boat. They just wanted something structurally very sturdy; a 250-pound person could stand up on it and cast away without tipping over the boat. That was the original intention. They have about 3 inches of insulation all the way around. That's the big innovation of the Yeti. CHRISTINE: But you actually recommend … I think your top pick in our guide is this brand RTIC. Am I saying that right? KIT: RTIC. CHRISTINE: RTIC. No, come on. KIT: Arctic Circle. RTIC cooler. CHRISTINE: Well, now you know. KIT: Yeah, no. So for most cases we like the RTIC. It's basically the same amount of performance. The one we particularly like is ultra lightweight. It's inexpensive, really good insulation, particularly on top, where it matters. And that's kind of replaced the, if you imagine, all the old Colemans, the Igloos, that sort of the '90s era of coolers have really been outclassed by this new wave of cooler companies. CHRISTINE: What makes … I was at Target the other day, and I saw a whole wall of these RTIC coolers next to a bunch of Coleman and Igloo coolers. What makes these RTIC coolers better? KIT: Well, first, they have 3 inches of insulation on top, which the Igloos and Colemans almost certainly do not. The plastic that RTIC uses is just thicker, stronger. It's a sturdier material. The Yeti is even more sturdy because of its method of manufacturing. Still, if you hold up an RTIC, you're like, 'Oh man, this thing's really tough.' ROSIE: So I've got little kids. I see people on the beach hauling stuff with beach carts, for instance. My sister-in-law and brother-in-law have one. I've used it. It's great. They're so expensive. I know the idea is, invest in your beach experience, but who are beach carts for? Are they worth it? KIT: I think they're worth it. I don't have children yet, so I don't have one that I keep around. CHRISTINE: I have our pick, Rosie. ROSIE: Did it change your life? CHRISTINE: It is like getting an SUV for your beach experience. It is worth it. ROSIE: I thought you might say that. CHRISTINE: I think it really changed our beach experience. We were kind of like, 'Why didn't we do this sooner?' It was a real upgrade. KIT: I will say, the sitting at the beach and watching people come and go and set up and do their things, and the thing that separates the pros and the amateurs is absolutely the beach cart. When you see a family come down with the beach cart, you're like, 'Oh yeah, they know what they're doing here. They're already miles ahead of everyone else.' CHRISTINE: I will also say that the one that we recommend, which is the Mac Sports Heavy Duty Collapsible Cart, it has these big, crazy fat wheels on them that just kind of go over the sand really well. They're not like regular wheels. The people I see with the regular wheels, they're, like, getting stuck in the sand and pulling the thing, and it looks very frustrating. ROSIE: You walk by, and you're like, 'Sucker.' CAIRA: You're gliding by, Rosie. Gliding. KIT: You either need a really wide plastic wheel or there's some carts that are a very soft, thick rubber. If you're looking at any kind of carts here, somewhere, just look at the wheels first. CAIRA: Kit, I heard that you actually just finished testing a bunch of kids pool and beach toys with a couple of other Wirecutter writers. What was the coolest thing that you tested for this project? KIT: That was actually a really great project. I'm not going to lie, it was awesome. CAIRA: Yeah, rub it in, that's fine. KIT: Just, like, 30 kids at a pool, and you're just throwing toys at them, being like, 'What do you think of this? What about this one?' You know, the coolest thing that I think we stumbled upon, you know, a number of toys, increasingly they're made from, you know, biodegradable materials. So you'll see, like, sand-building kits that are made out of this material or things that you can, like, search for inside the pool, like, little dive toys. It's nice to see people moving away from that sort of disposability when we go to the beach particularly, but also the pool. We know there's too much plastic, so why are you bringing more plastic to this place? CAIRA: Well, when it's a kid's toy, too, they just, they are always losing stuff. Like, you take a plastic bucket to the beach, and you're probably not coming home with it. KIT: Right. And so that's where, actually, so this one thing that I was enjoyed was this … called the Sand Dipper, which is a sifter. It basically … you look like an old-timey gold miner or, you know, you pick up all the sand, and you're sort of sifting it through this basket, and then you get shells and bits. So it's fun, you know, it's a little bit exploratory if you have young children. But then afterwards, when they have … when you're sort of packing up, you can go and kind of dig where they were playing, and you'll find, like, GI Joes and whatever was probably left behind or buried. CHRISTINE: I'm looking at a picture of it, and it looks kind of like a cross between a sifter and a shovel in the toys. CAIRA: Oh, like a litter-box scooper? CHRISTINE: Yeah, it's almost like a big litter-box scoop for your toys. ROSIE: So you can take home all the sea glass and cigarettes your heart desires. CHRISTINE: Are there any things in this beach category that you think are things that people are constantly marketed for going to the beach that you have tested, that you're just like, 'Eh, not really worth it'? KIT: Yeah, no, for sure. I mean, beach blankets with built-in sand anchors that are so … these nylon tarps that have these corners that you can put sand in, as if you can't just put down a blanket and put sand on the corners or weight it down with a chair. And then the other one is … the one that's the most absurd is sand-repelling beach blankets. These things that you find, plastic sieves that you lay out, and then apparently when sand hits it, it's supposed to sort of fall through, and then you just have this plastic area that you can sit on. Just don't go to the beach. If you hate sand, don't go to the beach. CHRISTINE: Do you hear that, Rosie? ROSIE: I heard it. CHRISTINE: So what I'm hearing here is, if you are dedicated and want to have a great beach summer, whether that means going to the ocean, hanging out by the lake, going to the pool, get some good shade, whether it's, like, a shelter, whether it's an umbrella, that's really where it's worth spending some money. Comfortable chairs, always going to be good. You're never going to regret that. And a cooler, if you're the type of person who likes to bring yummy things to eat, and then also a cart. A cart is going to be a real up-level for people, especially families, if you're schlepping a lot of stuff to the beach. KIT: That's about it really, pretty much all the way there. CHRISTINE: All right. Keep it simple. KIT: You solved it. CHRISTINE: Kit, thank you so much. It's been so great having you on the show. KIT: Oh, thanks so much for having me. ROSIE: Bye, Kit. CAIRA: Lovely to have you on. CHRISTINE: Caira, Rosie, are you going to change your tune? Are you going to become beach people this summer? CAIRA: No. ROSIE: Nope. CAIRA: But this was fun. ROSIE: This was so fun. I loved learning about all of these things, and it really confirmed my desire to not visit the beach in the summer. I have to reiterate, I love being there in the fall. I do not want to be there between Memorial Day and Labor Day. CAIRA: Rosie has rested her case and mine. CHRISTINE: All right. Well, then, what was for you in this episode? What is something that you are actually going to take away? CAIRA: I think my takeaway is that you can't go wrong with the Tommy Bahama chair. I don't know if I really would use it just for a beach chair, though I actually have been looking for a chair to just sit outside of my apartment building like an old man. CHRISTINE: I've seen lots of people take them to, like, music festivals. CAIRA: And, you know, it seems like a solid chair. ROSIE: Lean into that life, that Tommy … that Tommy Bahama life. CAIRA: Yeah, totally. CHRISTINE: Get some flip-flops. ROSIE: We're going to the beach this summer with some family, and I'm taking some of this advice very seriously. And I'm going to rent a cart, because I don't like the schlepping. Anything to kind of alleviate some of the tension of 'Let's pack everything up, let's schlep it, let's put it down, and then let's schlep back.' CHRISTINE: Yeah, I think it's worth it. Just spend that money, get that cart. So I'm gonna get a new cooler. I think I'm going to go with this … I hate to say this, but this RTIC cooler. I hate that name. ROSIE: Be bold. CHRISTINE: Yes, I will. And I'm super excited, because we are going to drop a bonus episode later this week about snacks and recipes that are great for taking to the beach. That will be with New York Times Cooking editor Tanya Sichynsky. I think we'll get some good ideas for what to pack in my new cooler. ROSIE: That's great. Tanya is incredible. She also writes The Veggie newsletter. Can't wait to talk to her. One more bonus takeaway here, I think, that sums it all up is, invest in yourself, right? Invest in yourself. Take your own pulse. If you're a beach person, I love that you are, Christine. I respect you, Caira. I see you. Thank you. Treat yourself. If you can, invest in this stuff, because it might make things a little bit simpler, and it might make the day a little bit sweeter. CHRISTINE: Don't suffer at the beach with things that are making your life worse. ROSIE: Don't suffer. ROSIE: If you want to find out more about Wirecutter's beach coverage, Kit's reporting, go to or you can find a link in the show notes. That's it. Have fun at the beach, you all. See you next week. CHRISTINE: See you there. And don't forget to check your podcast feed for that bonus episode! ROSIE: Bye. CHRISTINE: Bye. CAIRA: The Wirecutter Show is executive produced by Rosie Guerin and produced by Abigail Keel. Engineering support from Maddy Masiello and Nick Pitman. Today's episode was mixed by Catherine Anderson. Original music by Dan Powell, Marion Lozano, Elisheba Ittoop, and Diane Wong. Wirecutter's deputy publisher is Cliff Levy. Ben Frumin is Wirecutter's editor-in-chief. I'm Caira Blackwell. CHRISTINE: I'm Christine Cyr Clisset. ROSIE: And I'm Rosie Guerin. CHRISTINE: Thanks for listening. CAIRA: Your whole job is beach. I love it. KIT: I've got a little song, too. CHRISTINE: Yeah, we're going to have that part at the end. It's all coordinated and choreographed —
New York Times
17-07-2025
- Entertainment
- New York Times
Journaling Through Life's Plot Twists With Suleika Jaouad
SULEIKA: Lots of people buy a journal — CAIRA: Yeah. SULEIKA: — fill out the first couple of pages, leave the rest blank — CAIRA: Guilty as charged. SULEIKA: — then buy another journal, because that one's ruined. CAIRA: It's the aesthetic. SULEIKA: And it contains the evidence of your failure to commit. CHRISTINE: I'm Christine Cyr Clisset. CAIRA: I'm Caira Blackwell. ROSIE: I'm Rosie Guerin, and you're listening to The Wirecutter Show . This episode is called: 'Journaling Through Life's Plot Twists.' ROSIE: Hi, guys. CAIRA: Hey there. CHRISTINE: Hi. ROSIE: So we're doing something a little different today. CHRISTINE: I've worked here a long time, and we have a lot of coverage on the site that is really supportive of a creative practice. So we have reviews for musical instruments, for things that can help you become a better cook, art supplies. You obviously don't need to buy gear or new things to be creative — anyone can be creative. Watch kids: They'll play around with sticks out in the mud, and they're very creative. But I do think that if you are approaching a creative practice, and you really get into it, having the right tools can … it's the right tool for the right job, right? So I think there are some real benefits to having that. ROSIE: So whether you find joy in making elaborate meals or working on a novel, playing music, we're going to talk about strategy for unlocking creativity today. And our guest is Suleika Jaouad. She's an artist, she's a journalist, she's an author. She writes the Substack called The Isolation Journals, and her most recent book is called The Book of Alchemy , and it explores how journaling can help unlock your creative potential. This is going to be a really, really special conversation. CAIRA: Oh, yeah. And if you're a New York Times reader, you might recognize Suleika from the column she used to write. It was a little over a decade ago, it was called Life Interrupted, which basically documented her experience with cancer in her early 20s. She also wrote a New York Times Bestseller about this experience, called Between Two Kingdoms. ROSIE: We're going to take a quick break, and on the other side, the two of you will talk with Suleika about how journaling can unlock creativity. And a little later you'll talk with Wirecutter writer Arriana Vasquez about some unexpected journaling tools. And I'll catch up with you at the back! CAIRA: Welcome back. With us now is Suleika Jaouad. She writes the popular Substack The Isolation Journals, and her most recent book is called The Book of Alchemy: A Creative Practice for an Inspired Life. Today we're digging into how journaling can really help you become more creative. CHRISTINE: Suleika, welcome to the show. SULEIKA: Thanks for having me on. CHRISTINE: We are so pumped to have you here. For listeners who aren't familiar with your story, can you tell us a little bit about how you started journaling as a daily practice? SULEIKA: So I have been journaling from the time I was old enough to hold a pen. As the kid of two immigrants, who showed up on the first day of kindergarten not speaking a word of English, I felt a palpable sense of being a misfit. What was so appealing about the journal, as a kid, is that it was a space where I could fully show up as I was. It wasn't beautiful writing, it wasn't even grammatical writing, it was a place to put all of the thoughts and feelings swirling around in my head that I felt I couldn't really share out loud. And so the journal, for me, really felt like a refuge. But it wasn't until I got sick at 22 and was diagnosed with leukemia that the journal really became a kind of lifeline. I don't think it's an exaggeration to say that journaling saved my life. It was a container where I could write through whatever was happening and use it in whatever way I wanted, as a kind of reporter's notebook on some days, where I'd record overheard gossip between the nurses. A place where I could vent, a place where I could talk about the things that I couldn't say out loud, my fears around my illness and my prognosis. Emotions that felt somehow unsavory, like envy in watching my friends on Instagram traveling and starting their jobs and going to parties, and all the other big and small milestones of young adulthood, at a time where I felt profoundly stuck. CAIRA: It's just really interesting, because usually when people hear 'journaling,' they think it's childish. They think of the little notebook with the lock and the little hearts dotting the I's. The way that you mentioned in your book, like, there's scientific research that shows that journaling can have a real impact on mental health, and the benefit of it. So can you just kind of talk a little bit about that? SULEIKA: Yeah, the history of journaling is a fascinating one. People have been looking to the journal since the beginning of time, to record historical events, to record personal events. And there is evidence that shows the benefits of journaling, everything from reducing anxiety and stress to even improving your immune system. But I know anecdotally, both in the context of my own life and a Substack I write, called The Isolation Journals, the very real and, dare I say, transformational impacts of the journal on one's life. CAIRA: And that's why your Substack is so popular, is because people really felt a connection to you and what you were doing, right? SULEIKA: Yeah. I started it in the early days of the pandemic, and the idea was to share this approach to journaling that I had cultivated when I was sick, in the form of a 100-day project, one journal entry a day with a short passage and prompt for inspiration, with a larger community. Because so much of what we were struggling with in those early days of lockdown felt familiar to me as someone who'd had to be in medical isolation, who couldn't leave my house. And to my great surprise, by the end of that first month, we had over a hundred thousand people from all around the world — CAIRA: Wow. SULEIKA: — of all ages, not only journaling individually but also sharing those journal entries with one another. And what was so interesting about that project was that journaling didn't always look the way my journaling did. I am someone who keeps a kind of traditional journal — or has, for much of my life — a notebook and a pen. But one of the very first women we heard from during the early days of that project was a mother from Minnesota who'd lost her 13-year-old daughter. And she decided that for her 100-day journaling project, she was going to use her daughter's old art supplies and make a visual journal entry every day of a memory with her daughter. And it became a kind of grief journal for her. And what she said that moved me so much was that it was the first time that alongside the immense, indescribable pain of losing your child, she, for the first time, was also able to access the joy of remembering her, of being able to commune with her in this kind of creative way. CHRISTINE: That is so beautiful. The Isolation Journals, this a 100-day project at the beginning of the pandemic, this is sort of the genesis of your new book. For listeners who maybe aren't familiar with the book, it is filled with these awesome essays from some very, very famous writers. You've got people like Gloria Steinem, George Saunders, you have Salman Rushdie. But you also have people that are not famous who have contributed essays to this book, and then there are also writing prompts. So can you tell us a little bit about how the book developed from that project? SULEIKA: Despite being a person who is primed to enjoy journaling, I think, like a lot of people who've attempted to journal, there are moments where I either fall off because I'm tired of repeating the same old things — CHRISTINE: Yeah. SULEIKA: — and I feel like I'm stuck in my life, and therefore I get stuck in my journal entries. Or other times where I don't journal, and it's usually when I need to journal most, and that's because there's something that feels too tender to look at, it's a little too hot to touch. And so I've tried every kind of journaling over the years. But what I arrived at, with The Isolation Journals, was this notion of being prompted. And I'm not someone who typically — if someone had instructed me to write to a prompt — thought I would've enjoyed that. It would've probably felt like homework to me and a little too directive. But the experience of reading a short essay, of reading a prompt, has a kind of kaleidoscopic effect of sort of twisting the chamber, and the light falls differently. And sometimes I love the prompt, and it immediately sparks an idea. Sometimes I hate the prompt, and that's interesting in and of itself, and I write about that. Sometimes I ignore the prompt altogether, but there's one sentence I read in the essay that moves me. And so The Isolation Journals has continued, it's now a weekly newsletter. But in the course of running The Isolation Journals, I've gotten the privilege of gathering these incredible essays and prompts from the most creative people I know. And when I say 'creative,' I say that very broadly, because yes, there are the George Saunders, et cetera, of the world, but many of the contributors in this book are not people who you would typically think of as creative. Our youngest contributor was 6 years old at the time, two-time brain cancer survivor, named Lou Sullivan. We have a man who writes an essay and prompt who's days away from execution in solitary — CAIRA: Oh wow. SULEIKA: — confinement in Texas. We have a beautiful prompt from a young mother who is about to become widowed, whose husband is sick, and is anticipating a new beginning. It's such a wide range of people who, to me, embody that spirit of creative alchemy. CHRISTINE: I want to talk a little bit about something that you talk about in this new book, how the act of journaling has this ability to heal creative wounds. Can you talk a little bit about that and maybe some specific examples that you've seen, maybe in the people that are involved in The Isolation Journal community, or who've just responded to you personally? SULEIKA: Yeah. So my husband, to me, is Jon, who I met at band camp when I was 13, but now, to the rest of the world, he is Jon Batiste, who — yeah, I'm obviously biased — is a brilliant musician. CHRISTINE: I think there's no dispute that he is a brilliant musician. CAIRA: No, he's a musical genius. SULEIKA: Musical genius and brilliant person, full stop. And I dedicated this book to him, because in some ways I think he was my first teacher in the idea of creative alchemy; he's also one of the contributors in the book. But when I was 22 years old, and I found myself here in New York City, stuck in a hospital room for about two months, Jon, who was an old friend from band camp, learned that I was sick. And he ended up showing up with his entire band, unprompted, unannounced, at my hospital-room door. And right there in my hospital room, he and his band began to play. And as the sound of the tuba and the melodica and the saxophone filtered out into the hallway, patients and doctors and nurses started to poke their heads out and to come around my room in curiosity, and everyone began to clap their hands and to dance and sing. Now, oncology wards are not joyous places. I think it's safe to say they're typically music-less places. But in the place of the beeping IV poles and the wheezing of monitors, Jon transformed what was an incredibly grim and difficult day into the most joyous of second lines. And I think witnessing that led me to start to think about how I might enact my own experiences of creative alchemy. And for me, that's always taken place in the journal. And so I've gotten to witness so many people doing that in their own ways. One of my favorite early community members of The Isolation Journals is a man named Charlie Greenman, who's in his 80s. Had never journaled before, didn't really think it was for him, and has become one of our most ardent active members of the community. And he loves journaling. The way he described it, he said, 'It feels like an adventure, and I have no idea where it's going, but the best thing is, I don't need to know.' CHRISTINE: You're also a really creative person in other ways too — you paint, you have other creative practices. Do you find that journaling kind of speaks to those other creative practices? Like, I find, for instance, if I meditate in the morning, I tend to have a better, calmer day, and everything seems to connect a little bit better. Do you have a similar experience when you journal? SULEIKA: Absolutely. I feel like I am made of chaos until I put pen to paper. I'm someone who doesn't quite know what I'm feeling or how to even begin to untangle my thoughts until I start to write them down. And one thing that's very important for me is that the journal be a place where you abandon any sense of judgment. It can be sentence fragments, it can be lists, it can be doodles — there's no right or wrong way to do it. I rarely go back and read my journals, because I don't want to ignite that pilot light of self-consciousness. It's really a place where you come as you are; whatever comes out is great. I do it for as long as I want, or for 30 seconds if that's all I have, as long as I do it consistently. And I do think that it has informed every aspect of both my creative work and my life. I, three years ago, found out that the leukemia was back, I was going to have another bone marrow transplant, went into the hospital, and I was like, 'I've got this.' I brought, like, six journals. I had my medical journal, my reporter's notebook, I had my personal journal. And my vision was temporarily impaired for a couple of weeks, and I wasn't able to journal. And so I started keeping a visual journal. I'm not a trained painter, and started using watercolor, and I have become obsessed with painting. It is a whole new creative language that I certainly would never have stumbled across without the act of keeping a journal. And I think that, to me, is what keeps it endlessly enlivening and interesting, is the ability to write without any goal or outcome in mind, where you get to follow the thread of your intuition without knowing where it's going to lead. And that kind of stream of consciousness, to me, is so important in getting to the truth beneath the truth beneath the truth, and just taking a small moment to take a deep breath, to sit down, and to write my way back to myself. CAIRA: I feel like a lot of people will read your book, or hear your story, listen to this podcast, and feel inspired, and then there's so much freedom, that you can do whatever you want, and that's awesome. But sometimes it could also be a little bit daunting, just the idea of … you could do anything you want, but where do you start, and how do you keep going? Do you have any advice to help people who want to start this, continue doing it consistently? SULEIKA: Yeah, I mean, I think that's one of the hardest things, because lots of people buy a journal — CAIRA: Yeah. SULEIKA: — fill out the first couple of pages, leave the rest blank — CAIRA: Guilty as charged. SULEIKA: — then buy another journal, because that one's ruined. CAIRA: It's the aesthetic. SULEIKA: And it contains the evidence of your failure to commit. So for me, what's always helped is some kind of accountability. I love the 100-day container, and the book is designed as a kind of 100-day project, with a hundred essays and prompts. But maybe start with 10, maybe start with 30. I love doing it in community. I have … I guess it's unofficially called a sort of journaling club, where we read an essay prompt, write for 10 minutes, and we don't share the journal entry, because that's private, but we talk about what came up. CHRISTINE: Do you do this together in the same room? Are you doing this virtually? Does it — SULEIKA: I've done it both ways. CHRISTINE: Okay. CAIRA: Yeah. CHRISTINE: Okay, but at the same time, together, in community? SULEIKA: Yeah. CHRISTINE: Okay. SULEIKA: With a group of people, it could be friends, it could be … I actually know someone who's doing it with her daughter, it could be a two-person journaling club. I find that having some set number of days that you aim for, to begin with … because the consistency, to me, is important. It's a little bit like going to the gym, you don't really reap the rewards of it unless you keep doing it. CAIRA: Yeah. SULEIKA: And something to prompt you, because I don't know about you, but the blank page immediately summons all of the questions. Certainly the big question of 'What is it that I possibly have to say?' And so just having a little directive that might push your train of thought, in an unexpected or new direction, I find to be useful. And whatever comes up is great. If it's your grocery list, wonderful. If it is a petty grievance, fabulous, you're no longer carrying that around in your body, you've externalized it onto the page. CAIRA: Yeah. SULEIKA: Yeah. CHRISTINE: We're going to take a quick break, and when we're back, we're going to talk brass tacks of journaling. Suleika, we're going to talk about your favorite tools for journaling. And then after that, we're going to bring on one of our colleagues, Arriana Vasquez, to talk about some unexpected digital tools that we've reviewed and recommended. We'll be right back. CAIRA: Welcome back. We're here with Suleika Jaouad, author of The Book of Alchemy. So earlier we talked about how adopting a journaling practice can help you unlock creativity, and now, we're going to get into some of the practical details. So, Suleika, because this is a Wirecutter podcast, of course we have to discuss your gear. So you are a pen-and-paper person, right? You have to handwrite. SULEIKA: I am a pen-and-paper person. You do whatever works for you. I personally can't resist the Backspace bar. CAIRA: Oh, me too. SULEIKA: And so in order to not self-edit, the inkier the pen, the better. I actually use a fountain pen, a Lamy pen. CAIRA: Oh, wow. SULEIKA: And I like the feel of palm on paper, and I'm less likely to scratch things out or to start over. CHRISTINE: Do you have a favorite paper that you use? 'Cause if you're using a fountain pen, what's your paper of choice? SULEIKA: Yeah. Okay, so — CAIRA: Is it, like, an old, wrinkled scribe? SULEIKA: Yeah, exactly. I make the paper by hand. CAIRA: Yeah, you make it by hand, you mash it up. SULEIKA: I have a collection of journals. I love a drugstore composition book from a country, if I'm visiting a new country. I have my Leuchtturms and my Moleskines. I'm really not precious about the actual journal itself. Right now I'm using a Leuchtturm, and I like the Leuchtturm a lot. CHRISTINE: They have really nice, soft paper. I mean, the texture of the paper is very lovely. SULEIKA: Yes, they have, like, this acid-free, ink-bleed-proof paper, which is especially important with the fountain pen. CAIRA: Sounds like it. SULEIKA: Yeah. CHRISTINE: Yeah. CAIRA: Well, I actually want to get back into your ritual of journaling. Do you always do it at a specific time? Are you outside? What does your physical setup look like? SULEIKA: Yeah. CAIRA: How do you get into your journaling habit? SULEIKA: So we talked about accountability as something that I find to be important in order to do it consistently, but I also think folding it into a nonnegotiable part of your routine is important. So for me, perhaps the only nonnegotiable part of my routine is my first cup of coffee. Nothing else is going to happen until I have that first cup of coffee, and so that's when I journal. CAIRA: Okay. SULEIKA: Different times, I would journal in the five minutes it took for my French press to steep, and then I would keep journaling, but it's usually around my first cup of coffee. My other nonnegotiable part of my routine is walking my dogs, so I'll do it when I get back from walking my dogs. But I think the most common thing I hear is, 'I don't have time to journal.' And to anyone who says that, I would suggest that they look on their phone at the number of hours they've spent on their social media app of choice. What I would say is that you make time for the things that you value — CAIRA: Yeah. SULEIKA: — and that are important to you. And so one thing I really try to do for myself is to lower the barrier to entry. I don't adhere to a page count or, certainly, a word count. My feeling is, if I show up, even if it's a couple of sentences, that is more than enough. I'm much more interested in the consistency of it. CAIRA: Yeah. SULEIKA: Because in the act of being consistent, especially if I'm not making it too complicated, I'm more likely to return, and I'm more likely to reap the benefits of it in a way that does make me prioritize it. CHRISTINE: Is there anything else that you use in your creative practice, beyond pen and paper, that helps kind of support your journaling practice? SULEIKA: I love ritual, and I'm always designing and redesigning little rituals for myself. I love a candle, or some incense or something. Typically when I journal, it's curled up on the couch with my coffee, with my dogs and some kind of a candle or something. CHRISTINE: Do you have a favorite candle right now? SULEIKA: Oh my gosh, you're asking my … I am obsessed with Le Labo's Santal — I'm going to get it wrong — Santal 26. It's woodsy, but it's not overpowering. It kind of reminds me of an incense that my parents burned, I think that's why I like it so much. And it lingers for a long time, so I love that candle. Other things that I use that kind of get me into a creative mode is watercolor. I've been keeping a visual journal in addition to a written journal, and that can be a doodle, it can be one swatch of a color. I've been really excited to sort of expand my earlier definitions of journaling and to see how that kind of shifts the way that I think and the way that I then move through my day. The other thing I have on my desk are stacks of the journals of some of my very favorite writers. CAIRA: Oh. SULEIKA: And I find that to be really inspiring. CAIRA: That's awesome. Do you have any particular ones that you're loving right now? SULEIKA: Well, I'll tell you the ones that I always have on my desk. Susan Sontag's — CAIRA: Oh yeah. SULEIKA: — journals, Virginia Woolf, Audre Lorde's The Cancer Journals. I love Frida Kahlo's journals, because they're a kind of hybrid of writing and painting. Sylvia Plath, because she's actually so delightfully funny and wicked. Yeah, I think I'm just fascinated by how people write and think when they're not doing it with an audience in mind. CAIRA: Thank you so much for joining us, Suleika. SULEIKA: Thank you. CAIRA: So now Arriana Vasquez is in the studio with us, and she's Wirecutter's home-office writer. And she's here to chat about journaling tools that Wirecutter recommends. Arriana has tried a lot of these different tools, so we're really excited to chat with her. Arriana, welcome. ARRIANA: Hey, thank you. This is exciting. CAIRA: We actually just talked with Suleika about journaling with a paper and pen, but Wirecutter also recommends some digital tools, right, for journaling specifically, like digital notebooks. What even is this? ARRIANA: Imagine your favorite e-reader, like a Kindle or a Kobo, that's the size of a sheet of paper — you can write on them, you can draw notes, you can do sketching. It's a different feeling than writing on a glass like a tablet; there's a little bit more friction with the pen on the surface. It's not an LED screen, it is an E Ink screen, so you get that feeling more of like a pencil or a pen on paper. CHRISTINE: And is a device like this storing your entries in the cloud? Are you able to access them from other devices? ARRIANA: Yeah, all of our picks have a folder structure inside, where you can organize all your notes into different things; you can have a journal and a to-do list and various things. And then, sometimes with a subscription, sometimes buying the device, depending on the model you get, you can have all of that stuff uploaded to a drive, a cloud, your Google Drive, or their personal online servers, whatever you need. CHRISTINE: Okay, great. So, Arriana, why choose an E Ink type of notebook over traditional pen and paper? Why do you like to journal on E Ink? ARRIANA: It's best illustrated. So imagine you're a notebook-and-pen person, right? You've got a notebook dedicated for your bujo or your daily planning. You've got a notebook dedicated for, maybe, a small art book, if you do some kind of sketching, and some tools. You've got a notebook dedicated to your journal, maybe. I know some people who carry those things and also individual index cards, so they can quickly jot down a note and then later transplant that into whatever notebook it goes into. That takes up a lot of space and can be kind of heavy. And then on top of that, there's also your phone, your tablet or your laptop, whatever other digital devices you're carrying to exist in our digital age. On the other hand, you've got one very slender, lightweight device that has folders for your journaling, your to-dos, your big projects and plans. All of our picks have an app of sorts that has an art space, so you can do your pencil sketches or your arts or do your doodles. While digital notebooks are not indestructible, if your notes are backed up to the cloud and your water bottle opens in your bag, you haven't lost all of that the same way that you would if your notebook got wet and you didn't get a chance to wipe everything down really quickly. CHRISTINE: Right. You brought one into the studio, can we see? ARRIANA: Yeah, this is the reMarkable, which is a pick. CAIRA: I like that name. ARRIANA: Yeah, it is pretty cool. CHRISTINE: Can you describe what this looks like? ARRIANA: Imagine a really thin composition notebook, like a notebook where most of the pages have been ripped out, and it's maybe only a quarter of an inch thick. It's got a lock and an unlock, and then when you unlock it, it's just a really simple user interface with all the notebooks that you have. You can hit a plus sign and open a quick sheet, for example, and that's essentially like a little art space. So if you wanted to draw on it or — CAIRA: It's got a pen attached to it the way that an iPad would, too. ARRIANA: Yeah. CAIRA: Okay, I am actually really surprised at the way that this feels to write on. I'm also a pen-and-paper person, because I am very tactile. This does feel like it's kind of like writing on a whiteboard with a marker. CHRISTINE: Right. CAIRA: I'm shocked. CHRISTINE: Let me try it. CAIRA: It doesn't feel … like, I've tried using my iPad to write notes, because I like the idea of having some place that is easy to organize my stuff, but I always ended up not doing it, because I just didn't like the way that the stylus was gliding over the iPad screen. ARRIANA: Yeah, I've tried a bunch of different solutions for that for the iPad. There are companies that sell alternative pen tips that are a slightly more coarse silicone, to try to imitate the drag of a pen on glass. There are also screen films that you can add here. It's really hard to replicate pen and paper, but I think this — CHRISTINE: This does a pretty good job. ARRIANA: It does a really good job. CAIRA: It does. CHRISTINE: I like the way it feels. So if I, say, wrote a journal entry on this, will it somehow magically turn my handwriting into type? ARRIANA: It does have writing-to-text recognition. CHRISTINE: Okay. So let's say I was working on a novel — ARRIANA: Yeah. CHRISTINE: — and I was at the beach, writing my novel. I could write it all in hand, and then I wouldn't have to go back and type it up. It would just go to the magical — ARRIANA: Yeah. CHRISTINE: — place that would — ARRIANA: I mean, I've tried it a few times, and it's pretty good. Like, my handwriting can put any doctor's handwriting to shame, it's real chicken scratch. But it was able to get most of my barely passable letters into actual words that I could read. Which is nice, 'cause my handwriting is so bad when I'm journaling, especially if I'm moving fast and in a flow and getting things out, it gets really bad. CAIRA: Yeah. ARRIANA: And then I'll go back three days later, and I'm like, 'I can't tell what the heck I wrote.' CHRISTINE: Right. CAIRA: Yeah. ARRIANA: So it's a very handy tool. CHRISTINE: Can you tell us what our picks are? ARRIANA: Yeah, so the primary pick is by Supernote, it's the Nomad, and it's smaller, more portable. It's a little bit different writing experience than this is, in that you kind of have to press through, like old, old tablets, but it's fantastic. And if you're someone who really likes a premium pen, the pens that you can get from Supernote are, like, weighty, and they feel like a premium pen. This is another one of our picks, this is the reMarkable 2. And then the other pick we have is by a different brand, it's for people who don't want to necessarily use the Amazon Kindle app, it's by Kobo. And it's similar to this one that we have here, the reMarkable; it also gives you the opportunity to use other third-party stuff if that's what you prefer, if you don't want to use Kindle. CHRISTINE: Okay, great. And what is the ballpark price of these notepads? ARRIANA: As far as prices go, this unit here, the reMarkable 2, is $400. And they range in price from $300 to $400, and they go up from there if you want more features like color, for example. So the prices are still kind of high, definitely way more than a notebook and a pen would be, but you're going to have this for a lot longer. CAIRA: Thank you, Ari. Thanks for coming. CHRISTINE: That was so great. ARRIANA: This was cool. CHRISTINE: I'm very intrigued by these. ROSIE: I'm back. CAIRA: Hello. ROSIE: Hey, I want to hear how it went. CAIRA: It was great. ROSIE: What did you all learn about creativity? CHRISTINE: Oh, so good. Well, I was just really into this conversation with Suleika. I loved so much of her advice. And I am going to take something that she talked about in this episode: If you're trying to establish a habit, rolling it into a nonnegotiable sort of event that you do in your day anyway. So for her, it was having a cup of coffee; that's when she journals. I feel like that's a really good time for me to pair some writing, as well. And then it was also great to talk with Arriana. I'm really into these digital notepads. I think I want one. They're kind of expensive. CAIRA: I'd be interested if they cut the price in half. ROSIE: Yeah, it's just something I should wait for a sale. CHRISTINE: Maybe, maybe. They're three to four hundred dollars, so they're not cheap, but I really like that you could also use some of them as an e-reader, so I could find that — CAIRA: That's really cool. CHRISTINE: Yeah, I could find that as a way to justify it. CAIRA: It's like a tool for the future. It's really so futuristic. It's pretty awesome. CHRISTINE: Yeah, it's awesome. ROSIE: What about you? How was the conversation for you? CAIRA: I feel inspired. I really liked Suleika's encouragement to not set a solid goal for yourself. Just kind of go with it, whatever makes it easiest for you so that it's a very low barrier of entry, so you just, like, roll journaling into your daily routine. And I think I'm also gonna get a fountain pen. CHRISTINE: Oh yeah. ROSIE: A fountain pen? CAIRA: Yes, she literally writes with a fountain pen. ROSIE: Like Shakespeare did? CAIRA: Yes, exactly. CHRISTINE: I mean, I think he had a quill. No? ROSIE: Oh, forgive me. CAIRA: Old-age fountain pen, isn't it? But yeah, I also like writing on pen and paper, and I really like a super-inky pen, so I'm gonna try it. ROSIE: That's awesome. I love that. If you want to find out more about Suleika, her book is called The Book of Alchemy. We'll link it here in the show notes. And you can also check out Arriana's recommendations for digital notebooks. That's it for us for this week. Talk to you soon. Bye! The Wirecutter Show is executive produced by me, Rosie Guerin, and produced by Abigail Keel. Engineering support from Maddy Masiello and Nick Pitman. Today's episode was mixed by Rowan Niemisto. Original music by Dan Powell, Marion Lozano, Elisheba Ittoop, and Diane Wong. Wirecutter's deputy publisher is Cliff Levy. Ben Frumin is Wirecutter's editor-in-chief. CAIRA: I'm Caira Blackwell. CHRISTINE: I'm Christine Cyr Clisset. ROSIE: And I'm Rosie Guerin. Thank you for listening. CAIRA: Grrrreat. I started saying that now. It just rolled off the tongue. ROSIE: Yeah, it does. CAIRA: Rosie always goes 'grrrreat' when we're done.
New York Times
11-06-2025
- Entertainment
- New York Times
The Death of Durable Appliances
CAIRA: Well, now I want to know what's better about a $120,000 stove than the one that's like, I don't know- RACHEL: Beyonce owns it. La Cornue. CAIRA: Of course she does. RACHEL: It comes in pretty colors. CAIRA: Is it made of gold? RACHEL: Actually, yes, it is. CAIRA: Of course it is. RACHEL: Yeah. CHRISTINE: I'm Christine Cyr Clisset. CAIRA: I'm Caira Blackwell. ROSIE: I'm Rosie Guerin, and you're listening to The Wirecutter Show . CHRISTINE: This episode is called: The Death of Durable Appliances Caira. CAIRA: Christine. CHRISTINE: We're the only people in the studio today. CAIRA: Rosie needs to stop leaving us unsupervised. CHRISTINE: Actually though Rosie has been dealing with something that we're going to talk about today. Her refrigerator broke a couple weeks ago- CAIRA: I know. CHRISTINE: ... and she had to deal with it. CAIRA: That sucked. I think her refrigerator was out for like a week. CHRISTINE: Which is so inconvenient. If you have a family, you're trying to cook, are you supposed to do? You don't have a fridge. I have honestly heard this from a bunch of people over the last couple of years, I've had several friends whose refrigerators have just died. They've come home, the fridge is dead, all the food is rotten. And I think a lot of people end up in a situation where they're like, "Do I fix it? Do I just replace it?" There's this whole cost analysis that happens. And this relates to a piece that I just finished editing with our senior staff writer, Rachel Wharton, who specializes in large kitchen appliances. CAIRA: Love Rachel. CHRISTINE: She's awesome. And she spent the last six months doing this very intense deep dive to answer the question of whether appliances die faster than they used to. CAIRA: I need her to answer this question, because I'm so tired of hearing my parents say, "They don't make things like they used to." They don't sound like that, but that's how they sound in my head. CHRISTINE: Well, I mean, I hope they're listening and they can fact check you on this, but yeah, I think it's a common belief that people have that appliances die sooner than they used to. And the interesting thing about Rachel's piece is that the answer is pretty complicated. There's a lot of nuance to it, and I think that a lot of listeners will be surprised by some of the answers. CAIRA: Oh, man. I wanted it to be simple cut and dry- CHRISTINE: Never. CAIRA: ... but I'm really interested to hear about this. So when we're back, we're going to talk with Rachel Wharton about some of the biggest reasons your fridge, or your stove, or your washing machine, or dishwasher may not last more than a decade. CHRISTINE: And a little later we'll get Rachel's best advice for how to buy appliances that really can last decades, because they do still make these. We'll be right back. CAIRA: Welcome back. With us now is Rachel Wharton, who is a large kitchen appliance writer who has a master's degree in food studies from NYU where she currently teaches graduate level food writing. She has also co-authored more than a dozen cookbooks, and she's won a James Beard award for her food writing. So cool. CHRISTINE: Welcome to the show, Rachel. RACHEL: Thank you so much for having me. CHRISTINE: You and I have been talking a lot lately because I have been one of your editors on this feature that we're going to talk about today. So I hope you're not sick of me. RACHEL: No, not at all. CAIRA: You don't have to lie to her. CHRISTINE: Rachel, you really have an interesting background for reviewing kitchen appliances. You're the type of writer we're really lucky to get at Wirecutter, where you have this very deep well of knowledge about your topic. So, I'm really curious because we in our office do not have a setup where you can test big ovens and refrigerators. So, that means that you actually have to review these large appliances in a different way than most of our writers, you're not getting everything in the office and testing. So tell us, how do you go about reviewing all of these large kitchen appliances? RACHEL: I spend a lot of time walking around the aisles at Home Depot, and Lowe's, and showrooms. I cobble together by spending as much time as possible where these appliances live, opening them up and hoping that the guy who works at Lowe's isn't going to get mad at me for taking the bottom of the GE oven out. Every time he would turn the corner I'd take it in and put it out, and I'd open them and turn the knobs. And anytime I visit any friend I'm like, "Oh, what fridge do you have? What stove do you have?" And I just cobble it all together in that way, and go to trade shows and spend more time than anyone else at those trade shows in the little showrooms they have set up, and one way or another I make it work. CHRISTINE: And you're also relying pretty heavily on- RACHEL: Reporting. CHRISTINE: ... research and reporting, right? RACHEL: Yes. CHRISTINE: So, tell us about that. How do you find out about durability, and what people are liking and not liking about certain appliances? RACHEL: I talk to everybody. I talk to repair people and product designers, and I talk to literally everyone I know about what they own and what they have, and the issues that they find. And I just keep my eyes and ears open because everybody has a stove, an oven, a microwave. Everybody has these things, so everyone is a source. CHRISTINE: That's awesome. CAIRA: I love that. So, you just finished this reporting on this epic deep dive on why appliances don't last as long as they used to, which I think that's something a lot of people have been suspecting. I know that I hear my parents and my grandparents talk about it all the time, but it's not like the average person has much proof. Did you always assume that to be true? Why did you choose to do this piece in the first place after years of using kitchen appliances? RACHEL: So, around last year there were all kinds of stories and consumer surveys about how appliances weren't lasting as long, according to the people who said their appliances weren't lasting as long. And there were a bunch of consumer market research reports that said the same thing, but they didn't have any background data whether it was really happening, and if so, why? And I'm a reporter and I'm like, "A, is this even true? Do they not last as long? And B, if not, what's going on?" And I just wanted to answer those questions. CAIRA: Okay. So, can you spoil it for us? What did you find? Are appliances less durable than say, 20 or 30 years ago? RACHEL: Well, definitely 40, 50 years ago. Breaking news, appliances do not last as long as they used to. CAIRA: So people are right. RACHEL: But it's not by anywhere near as long as people used to think they lasted. CAIRA: then the why is the real question. It's not like a who done it, it's a why done it. RACHEL: Why done it, yes. Every bit of this surprised me. Nothing was what I expected to learn, which is always the case, and that's why this is fun. One of my favorite quotes is one guy was like, "Everybody thinks about that one 50-year-old fridge in their grandparents' basement, and they don't remember the other 4.5 million from that period that are now in the landfill" Lifespan has gone down, but most everyone I spoke to said it was never 30, 40, 50 years. It was like 20 at most, 10 or 15. So it's going down, but not by anywhere near as much as people think. CHRISTINE: Rachel, I think one reason that a lot of people would assume that appliances don't last as long as they used to is planned obsolescence. And that's the business practice where corporations are intentionally designing products to break faster so that you'll buy more, and just feed this consumer train that happens that we live around capitalism. CAIRA: Capitalism. CHRISTINE: Capitalism. Yes, thank you. Thank you, Caira. So, your finding was much more complex than this, right? It wasn't just planned obsolescence, but how does planned obsolescence play into why appliances don't last? RACHEL: I definitely found that planned obsolescence does exist, and like many people I had just assumed that planned obsolescence was truly brands making things to fail at a specific time. But I talked to a lot of people who were product designers who worked for many, many different kinds of brands, and they helped me define what it really means in the industry, which is that they design products to last a certain lifetime, so they do have a target lifetime, and it's for the ultimate cost of the product, what they want it to cost at the end. And they usually also target the element of the appliance that's going to fail first, so they work around those two things. So, that's planned obsolescence. They know that it's not going to last forever, and that's how they do it. CHRISTINE: Even though they could design these things, if they weren't designing for the weakest element they could take an approach where they make something that lasts a lot longer, right? RACHEL: Yes. And as part of my reporting I really wanted to talk to the super high-end luxury appliance makers, stoves that cost $125,000- CAIRA: Oh my God. RACHEL: ... because I wanted to hear what they did, how did they ensure that their things would last forever? And I also talked to product designers who make similar kinds of appliances for the medical industry where they cannot fail. So, I knew that it was possible, and I also talked to people who restore old stoves to learn how those are made to see with the same resources and tools we could make an appliance that lasted forever. CAIRA: So, it's possible technically. We have the technology to make things last forever, or close to it, but most people are not going to have access to those- RACHEL: And they cost a lot. They would cost a lot more too. CAIRA: That's right. RACHEL: Most of the time. People who study product obsolescence actually break it down into multiple kinds, which is really cool. And one of the ones that's most prescient to this conversation is psychological, which is where it's actually us. We want the new product, we want the new product because we think it's cool, or trendy, or hot. So, even if our old one still works, we are choosing to replace it with something that we want more. CHRISTINE: That sounds like something we're all dealing with all the time for all products. RACHEL: Yeah. CAIRA: It's funny to put it in the light of large kitchen appliances though, because as somebody who's renting I'm not thinking like, "Oh, I want the fancy new oven," but I could totally see that allure. CHRISTINE: You have to live with certain things when you rent, but when you own you can switch it up if you want. RACHEL: Yes. And so, designs are now increasingly modern. So, you want the modern look, you don't want the side-by-side fridge that has the obviously 1997 dispenser. CHRISTINE: Right, exactly. RACHEL: Yeah, I heard from a lot of people that what's happening is when people renovate their kitchens, maybe you didn't use to replace your appliances, but now when people renovate, which happens maybe every six to eight years in American homes, people are getting a new appliance too at the same time. CAIRA: Six to eight years. What are we, millionaires? RACHEL: Well, there's no place to move, so everyone's just renovating. CHRISTINE: Yeah, so they're reinvesting in their current house. Yeah. RACHEL: It's funny, the real estate, I've heard from so many people also how real estate is so tied to appliance sales and renovation, and what people do. CHRISTINE: That makes a lot of sense. So beyond obsolescence, you found four major reasons why appliances are less durable. Efficiency and safety regulations have changed the way appliances are made, price wars from international competition have influenced durability, appliances have become more like computers, which we're going to get into a bit. And then, repairability is now complicated, probably because of all of the factors we just mentioned. So, let's talk about those four points one by one. Let's start with efficiency and safety regulations. How has that decreased durability of appliances? RACHEL: Well, first I just want to say that every single service technician I spoke to was like, "Rachel, don't even get me started. It's the government." That was their immediate answer. I was like, "Why don't they last as long as they used to?" "It's the government." So it wasn't until really the early 2000s and that's when you started seeing changes. So appliances had to meet efficiency standards, which is both the fuel that they use and the water that they use. And so, they had to do all kinds of modifications to make that happen, making them lighter weight, all kinds of other stuff. CHRISTINE: And some of these regulations actually made appliances safer, right? RACHEL: Oh, yeah. So, we no longer have pilot lights in our gas stoves burning away all the time. And refrigerators, and washing machines, and dishwashers are light years more efficient than they used to be. I mean, now we know that hand washing dishes or hand washing your clothes uses more resources than these appliances do. CAIRA: Yeah, that's so wild. CHRISTINE: So, they've made appliances more efficient, they've made them in many cases safer, but it's also meant that manufacturers have had to change the way that they make these appliances. And in some cases it has decreased the longevity of these machines. Certain parts fail faster now or the materials that they use, they're just less repairable. RACHEL: Repairability is the big issue most of the time. So for example, copper is now aluminum, and all the service techs were like, "You could wail against copper with a blowtorch and completely repair it a million times, and just melt it down and put it back together." And they were like, "Aluminum, you can't do that at all," so you basically have to replace the whole piece. CAIRA: What's the difference between copper and aluminum in terms of efficiency? How does that make it more efficient? RACHEL: Aluminum is lighter weight, and lightweight is something that you look for across the board with appliances because then they they require less energy to be shipped, and they require less energy to do almost everything.. Also, aluminum didn't rust the way copper did. That move did a lot of things, it gave them a lot of benefits. CAIRA: That makes sense. CHRISTINE: But it's just inherently not as repairable as something like copper- RACHEL: I don't think you can repair it. CAIRA: You just have to replace the whole part. RACHEL: Yeah. So if you have a leak, I mean, I know a lot of people who would call repair people to come fix the leak in their refrigerator every six months, and they just kept the fridge running that way. And now that's not possible, you can't keep your fridge running. You would have to pay to get this thing replaced, which is expensive. CAIRA: At that point why not just buy a new fridge? RACHEL: Foreshadowing. CAIRA: Can you tell us a little bit about how international competition has impacted appliance durability? RACHEL: Yes. So, in my reporting people told me that there was this really big shift, maybe like 2010-ish, when LG and Samsung in particular, probably others, entered the United States market. They had already sold consumer electronics, but they started selling fridges, and stoves, and dishwashers, and they were packed with features that Americans had never seen before. They would have a screen, or they'd have really beautiful lighting inside the fridge, and they also would mess around with the pricing, like once or twice a year the prices would be just impossibly low. And then everyone started to try to race to actually do both of those things. CHRISTINE: So they were racing, manufacturers were racing to have more features for less money essentially. RACHEL: Exactly, yeah. CHRISTINE: And an interesting finding in your reporting is that appliances today are actually, when adjusted for inflation, cheaper than they were a couple decades ago, right? RACHEL: Yes. Almost everyone I spoke to who's in the industry would scratch their heads and they would be like, "But my car, when adjusted for inflation, is now like $60,000 as opposed to $30,000 and it's like the reverse with my fridge." Many people would make the point that it's actually the same price. You can get a fridge for $800 in 1950, you can get a fridge for $800 now or less. CHRISTINE: Right, which when adjusted for inflation, that's bonkers, right? RACHEL: Yes, yes. CHRISTINE: And a lot of that has been caused because of this international competition where you've got these other brands coming in and competing with U.S. manufacturers. RACHEL: Right. And manufacturers, what I was told was that they have to be able to meet that price and not lose money somehow. And one of the ways you do it is you think about how your machines are made. CHRISTINE: And then you end up making your machines with cheaper components to meet that lower cost. RACHEL: And many people made sure to say that it doesn't affect the performance, what it often affects is repairability. You use one big modular plastic piece instead of 10 metal springs. I was just in a repair shop yesterday and she was showing me the element that changes the heat in your oven from the '80s, and the one that changes the heat in the oven from the 1960s and the one now, and there's increasing amounts of plastic in it and fewer pieces, and they're less repairable. CHRISTINE: Okay. So, I just want to pause for a minute and recap what we just talked about. So, appliances are less durable than they used to be, but they're not dying as quickly as some people think. Part of the reason is planned obsolescence, but that's only part of it. There is some intentional designing these products to last not as long, but it's not as big of an issue as people might think. And then, a couple of reasons truly why these products aren't lasting as long as they used to are efficiency and safety regulations that have improved the safety and efficiency of our appliances, but have just inherently decreased the lifespan and repairability of those appliances. And then, what we just talked about, price wars, the pressures we've felt because of these international companies coming in and selling fancier features at less cost. CAIRA: We're going to take a quick break, and then when we're back we'll talk through the other reasons appliances are less durable today than they were a few decades ago. Plus, we'll get Rachel's best advice for buying appliances that will actually last. Be right back. CHRISTINE: Welcome back. Before the break we talked about some of the reasons appliances don't last, planned obsolescence, regulations and international competition. Now let's talk about the next reason, appliances have become much more high-tech. Rachel, how does technology impact the durability of appliances? RACHEL: Yeah, I mean, I've basically been told by everyone appliances are basically consumer electronics. They just also happen to clean our clothes and keep our food cold. How does that affect them? I mean, we all have phones and computers, how often do you change your phone and your computer? The same issue is with appliances, probably harder because they have to deal with heat, cold and humidity. CAIRA: So, that's like when we had Michael Sullivan on to talk about kitchen gear that will hopefully last for a lifetime, and he was saying that you can't really expect your coffee machine or your electric kettle to last as long as something as simple as- CHRISTINE: Like a cast iron skillet. CAIRA: Yeah. Or maybe even a really nice knife set, because the things that have more buttons that deal with heat and cooling just end up breaking faster. It sounds like the same rules apply. RACHEL: Yes, and a lot of times you don't even realize that your appliance has these digital computer components because you tend to think of it as being analog. But these days, primarily because of the regulations, a lot of the tech that's embedded started because it was to make them incredibly efficient. Compressors that weren't just on or off, but worked at a set speed, which requires a computer, or sensors that know how much water's in something, which requires a computer, or fancy lights that make your fridge look prettier, which requires a computer. But we don't perceive them as being computer driven, but they are. CHRISTINE: And so, that's a huge, huge difference between an appliance you could buy, say in 1996 versus an appliance you would buy 30 years later, here today in 2025, right? RACHEL: Yeah, they are loaded with computer boards- CHRISTINE: They're loaded with computer boards. And back in the '90s even, these appliances didn't have very many computer components in them. RACHEL: And there's increasingly more in them because our appliances do increasingly more things. CHRISTINE: Which we love, right? RACHEL: Yes. The problem is us. I mean, most of us don't want an appliance that has zero features, that doesn't have a digital timer display, it doesn't ding when something's done, doesn't have lights inside the oven. And we want more efficient fridges, we want fridges with four kinds of ice, or even one kind of ice. We want convection cooking and we want our no preheat air fry, we want all those things. CHRISTINE: There's nothing wrong inherently with that, but it will impact how long your appliance lasts, most likely, right? RACHEL: Yes, definitely. CHRISTINE: Just like you get a fancier phone that has all of the bells and whistles, you're not going to expect to use it for more than maybe like- CAIRA: Seven years, maybe? CHRISTINE: ... seven years or something. Yeah. CAIRA: And that's a long time for a phone. CHRISTINE: That's a long time for a phone. RACHEL: I mean, yeah, you might even still have a rotary dial phone but you can't use it to access anything because you got to go boop-boop-beep-boop. CHRISTINE: Right, but it still works. RACHEL: The same thing with an appliance. CAIRA: Well, I can imagine now the repairs must be so difficult because it's different per appliance in general. Do you expect that any guy that you can call up to repair your appliances has to know all these things? Or is he going to bring his IT guy with him? What's happening? RACHEL: Exactly. I mean, I was told by many people that the repair landscape is really broken, because there might be 25, maybe more, appliance brands. Each one of them has proprietary computer boards, and each one of them has a handheld tool typically that you always have to be certified to use it. And so, they can end up with more than a dozen, two dozen of these and then the appliances get updated, and that's just one example of how it's hard. CHRISTINE: Right. So essentially, and this is the last finding you had in your reporting, is that because these machines are so complex now, it's just become so much harder to fix them, A, but also it's really hard to find a technician that can actually do it. People aren't going to be trained on all the new stuff. RACHEL: Yes, it's unlikely that they could be because it's a lot of work and a lot of constant updating of what's happening inside these machines. CHRISTINE: We hinted at this a little bit earlier, but because it is harder to repair these machines now, it takes a lot of time, energy, money. You found that sometimes it's better to just buy something new rather than have it repaired, right? RACHEL: People definitely do that, because you do the math, you do the math and you're like, "For just a couple hundred dollars more I get a new appliance, I restart my warranty, it's clean, it's brand new, it has that cool new feature that I really want like no preheat air fry." And at this point, service technicians are actually recommending it. I mean, one guy told me if the cost is 50% of a new one, don't even think about it. 40%, think really hard. And if it's a dishwasher, just go ahead and throw it away. I mean, what I actually see is a lot of service folks are pivoting to also sales because that's so much a part of the service landscape now. CHRISTINE: That seems like a conflict of interest. CAIRA: Yeah. RACHEL: Yes. I guess yes and no. I mean, those repair technicians, they got to keep in business too, right? CAIRA: That's true. CHRISTINE: That's true. CAIRA: But how are you supposed to compromise with yourself on the sustainability factor of it all? What is that doing to the environment if every time my fridge goes out I'm throwing it away after three or four years? RACHEL: One of the nice things about living in New York City is we have that thing where we can actually put ours on the street- CAIRA: Somebody will take it. RACHEL: ... and someone will take it, repair it, resell it, strip it for the metal parts. We're very lucky. That might actually exist elsewhere, but we are extremely lucky to have that option. Otherwise, you have to do the work yourself. Lots of municipalities have programs to get it to the right place, but do not think for a second that if your big box retailer hauls it away it's going to where you think it's going. It's going to the trash. CAIRA: If somebody does want to invest in a great fridge, or stove, or some other kitchen appliance that will last potentially decades, what can they do? What is your best advice for how to buy? RACHEL: Well, you can either go high or go low. So, for most of us that might be go low. They still make machines that are just the old-fashioned machines. They have three things that can break, and you could probably fix all of them yourself if you really wanted to. CHRISTINE: Give us a couple examples. What are these types of appliances? CAIRA: I'm thinking like a classic white stove or oven. RACHEL: Classic white stove where there's no window into the oven, there's no timer, there's no clock. You don't know what temperature it is. CAIRA: That's exactly my oven. She's describing my kitchen. CHRISTINE: I have a slight upgrade. I have a HighPoint, but it has a digital clock. RACHEL: Oh, that is a slight upgrade. CAIRA: Mine is just an oven with a flame. RACHEL: And the fridges, you have one little knob where it's like cold, colder. That's basically it. CHRISTINE: And specifically those top freezer fridges, right? They're very, very durable, they look the same as they did in the '70s. RACHEL: Yeah. CHRISTINE: So, you could go low. You could go for the cheapest, most durable appliances- RACHEL: And those really could last you forever. CHRISTINE: Right, okay. The problem is a lot of people want something fancier, right? CHRISTINE: I know. Hello manufacturers, can you please make a version of this that's just a few modifications and it would look like totally rad? CAIRA: If it just looked vintage, "vintage," I wouldn't be upset. RACHEL: It's not that hard to do. It wouldn't be that hard to do. Please, hear our pleas. CHRISTINE: Hear our call. So, what about the high end? RACHEL: Yeah, high end, things can still break. They still have computers. They have some features, but they're not loaded with features. Many people said, "It took us four years to add an ice maker and it was like the most basic ice maker because we're not going to cram unnecessary technology into our products. We want them to work." But also they're really designed to be maintained and repaired. Maintenance is a huge part of a really luxury machine. A lot of times you pay extra to have someone come and do it for you. We have Wolf stoves at our office, and someone comes and cleans them for us so that we know that they're going to last forever. And they're also meant to be repaired. Even the computer boards, with all of the other stuff that you can buy, if it breaks you throw it out, maybe you throw out the machine. With the high end, trained tech folks will really rebuild the board and then recertify it, and it's worth it because of the cost of the machine. So, they can also last a lifetime. And many people even hand them down to their kids or their family members because they're so beautiful. CAIRA: So, it's like the difference between buying a Honda Civic, which can be repaired by anybody basically, will run forever, as Christine knows, she had one for like- CHRISTINE: I had a- CAIRA: ... my entire lifespan. CHRISTINE: ... Toyota Corolla for 25 years. RACHEL: Oh, I had a Tercel. Oh, you can also get a vintage. You can get a vintage stove, which are all mechanical. They're also very, very expensive and they will also last forever. And then, a couple of the luxury ones, you can get some stripped down luxury too. So, where you're not only getting all mechanical, you're also getting that nice look. CHRISTINE: And when we're talking high end, give us some of the brands. You mentioned Wolf, those are really famous for their stoves. What are some other brands? RACHEL: There's actually a whole world that I don't even know. I mean, there's like Wolf, Sub-Zero, Blue Star, Garland. They start at like $10,000 for anything. That's low and then they go up- CHRISTINE: That's the entry point price. RACHEL: And then go up from there. They're expensive. CHRISTINE: If someone cannot afford a Sub-Zero fridge or a Wolf oven, it's just not in the budget, but they also want more features than they can get in this super low budget class of appliances that will last a long time, they want something that's more in the middle. Are there any smart shopping strategies they can use to try to pinpoint appliances that will last longer? RACHEL: Get the fewest amount of features that you can live with. Maybe skip the screen in the door or the newfangled ice that's cubed, and squared, and round and comes from three different places in the refrigerator. Skip the brand new function that everybody's talking about, and just go with the ones that you really think you need. Because the more features, the more likely anything is to break. The simpler machine, the less likely it is to break. So, that's step one. Step two, if you haven't heard of a brand, if you're like, "What is this?" That's a really good sign maybe you should skip it for now. Wait until you've heard of it, wait until everybody has it. Same with new models, brand new stuff. Especially these days when people are pitching new features and technology the same way we hear about it from Apple and Samsung with phones, wait until that technology has been road tested a little bit. I would also look for an extended warranty. Extend that baby. Extend that baby as long as you can. I also heard from so many people that one of the big reasons appliances fail is that we do no maintenance. I know we don't want to do any maintenance. And by maintenance it often just means cleaning your appliance, cleaning the jets on your gas stove, cleaning the inside of your oven, cleaning out the filters in your dishwasher, and your washer dryer and your lint from your dryer. We don't do those things anymore and they really do have an effect. I heard that from many, many, many people. Another thing you can do is read your manual. Number one, it often tells you things that you shouldn't be doing that you never would have thought you shouldn't be doing, and then you can save it from breaking. And number two, usually they have five or six error codes in there and they're like, "If this happens, do this," which you wouldn't even know unless you looked in your manual. And you can also learn a little bit more about how to repair it. Maybe there's some things that you can fix, or you at least know enough that when the repair person comes you know if they're headed down the right track. CAIRA: Okay. I think a lot of people, myself included, might feel a little intimidated by the thought of trying to repair their appliances themselves. Are there resources that you found that really could help things that reading a manual, maybe looking at YouTube, but things beyond those two simple things? RACHEL: So, a lot of folks told me that they're seeing an uptick in people wanting to repair things themselves, which given the state of the economy you could completely see happening. But there's an increasing amount of resources for people who want to learn how to repair things themselves, like websites that have schematics and a scale of whether as a regular person you should attempt this repair, links to parts that you can order and other people who have fixed them. And there's all these community clinics where you can go in with an issue and people might be able to help you do it if you don't want to spend money on a repair person. CAIRA: I like that. CHRISTINE: I love that. CAIRA: Kind of like Reddit specifically for repairs. Before we wrap, we always ask our guest one final question. What's the last thing you bought that you've really loved? RACHEL: Vintage boots. CAIRA: Vintage boots. CHRISTINE: Tell us more. CAIRA: Are you wearing them? They're pretty. CHRISTINE: Oh, those are cute. CAIRA: A cute little teal color and a tiny little heel. RACHEL: I got them from one of the bazillions of amazing thrift stores that are near my house in Brooklyn, and I took them to my cobbler who's around the corner. And I took him three pairs at the same time and he was like, "You like vintage shoes?" And I was like, "Yes." And he's like, "Mink oil. You got to promise me you'll start rubbing them all with mink oil so that the leather doesn't crack and they last a lot longer." He was very concerned that I wasn't protecting my vintage boots. CAIRA: Very Wirecutter answer of you, Rachel. CHRISTINE: Yes, very much so. CAIRA: Love it. Well, thank you for being here. RACHEL: Thank you so much for having me. CHRISTINE: Caira, are you ready to go buy a bunch of new appliances? CAIRA: Oh my God, I would love to, just if I had $30,000 to spare in my rental. But wow, Rachel knows so much. CHRISTINE: She really does, that was a very interesting conversation. I think it really opens up how complicated this topic is. So, what are you taking away today? CAIRA: I mean, it's interesting because I'm not in the market for any of these things right now, but I still love to hear it and it's great advice to know that when I'm eventually going to do this I think I'm just going to go middle of the road. I'm going to get something that's moderately priced, has been around for a minute so it's been tested and has a bunch of reviews, and just not too many bells and whistles. I don't really need a fridge with an ice dispenser, I can live without that. Stuff like that. CHRISTINE: Yeah, the ice dispenser is actually something we found in consumer surveys breaks really frequently. It's like one of the things that breaks the most on fridges. CAIRA: I mean, I remember that from my childhood fridge. The ice never worked. CHRISTINE: Yeah. So, I am taking away from this episode, I think it's so interesting that at the very low end and at the very high end you can still get these very durable appliances, for different reasons, but essentially they're simpler than the stuff in the middle of the road. And I think that's really interesting. And one other thing that was really fascinating in editing Rachel on this piece, and then just even in this conversation, is this idea of psychological obsolescence and how I think this is something we all fall into, we're marketed at, we see stuff on Instagram, but I will think about that. Does something really actually need to be replaced or can you get more life out of it? CAIRA: Yeah, that's really good. If you want to find out more about Rachel's coverage on large appliances or planned obsolescence, or if you want to check out any of the products we recommended today, go to or find a link in the show notes. That's it for us, until next week. CHRISTINE: The Wirecutter Show is executive produced by Rosie Guerin and produced by Abigail Keel, engineering support from Maddy Masiello and Nick Pitman. Today's episode was mixed by Katherine Anderson. Original music by Dan Powell, Marion Lozano, Elisheba Ittoop, and Diane Wong. Wirecutter's deputy publisher is Cliff Levy. Ben Frumin is Wirecutter's editor-in-chief. I'm Christine Cyr Clisset. CAIRA: I'm Caira Blackwell. CHRISTINE: Thanks for listening. RACHEL: You might even still have a rotary dial phone but you can't use it to access anything cuz you gotta go boop boop boop boop.
New York Times
02-06-2025
- General
- New York Times
You Should Be Traveling with a VPN
CHRISTINE: I'm Christine Cyr Clisset. CAIRA: I'm Caira Blackwell. ROSIE: I'm Rosie Guerin. And you're listening to The Wirecutter Show . CHRISTINE: This episode is called You Should Be Traveling With a VPN. Hey there, it's Christine Summer is rolling in and lots of people are probably making big summer travel plans and some of you might be going abroad. Today we're going to do a special mini episode about something that might help keep you and your information's safe while you're gallivanting about the world VPNs, which stand for virtual private network. If you're like me, you might be like, what does this mean? I don't understand this, but we're going to get into it in this episode because a VPN can be really helpful for keeping your information secure while you are web browsing. In just a second, Caira is going to chat with Max Eddy, a staff writer who covers privacy and security here at Wirecutter. He's been featured on another bonus episode of ours, about 23 and Me a few months back, and this week he's going to talk with Caira about what you need to know about a VPN, why it might be helpful and why you should probably have one if you're traveling overseas, we'll be right back. CAIRA: Welcome back. I'm here with Max Eddy, who is a staff writer who's covered privacy and security for over a decade, and now he's here to chat with me about VPNs. Max, welcome to the show. MAX: It's great to be here. CAIRA: I'm so excited to have you on, especially because I don't know much about VPNs. So could you tell us what exactly is a VPN? Explain it to me like I'm five. MAX: Sure, sure. So a VPN is a service, so you're going to need to buy a subscription. It's usually monthly, but you can find shorter term or longer term. And once you've purchased a subscription, you're going to want to install the application on your phone or laptop. The application is actually going to handle all the setup for you, so that's how you're going to interact with it. You open the app and from there you'll be able to turn the VPN connection on and off and select different locations to route your traffic. When you turn the VPN on, it does a few things to your web traffic, so all of the web traffic from your phone, from your browser, from applications, talking to the internet in the background, email, all that stuff is routed through an encrypted connection to a server that's operated by the VPN company. And that connection between your machine and the server is encrypted in such a way that your internet service provider, anyone who's trying to observe your traffic, cannot see what you're doing. And that protects your privacy on that end, and by routing it out through this server, that means it's harder for anyone watching your activities out on the web to connect that back to you. So let's say they, the omnipotent spying they is looking at a website and they see a little blip on it, that's your traffic, and they try to track it back. They're just going to see it coming from the VPN server and not from your computer. So it allows you to both change where your data appears to be coming from by selecting a different server in different location, but importantly, it protects your device. It sort of makes it seem that your traffic is somewhere else. We're trying to prevent observers from being able to correlate that information together. CAIRA: So why would you use a VPN? MAX: So a VPN can help improve your online privacy in a couple of different ways. Advertisers will have a harder time tracking you and your ISP, your internet service provider can't see what you're doing and when you're traveling, it means you can sometimes use streaming services or websites as if you were still at home. CAIRA: Right, right. I like using it if I'm in Canada and you usually can't use HBO Max somewhere than if you have a VPN located in New York. You can still use HBO Max, right? MAX: Sometimes. CAIRA: Sometimes it doesn't work all the time. So then why don't people just use VPNs all the time? MAX: Well, because most of your traffic is already encrypted and you have to pay for a VPN, so you really would end up paying for another subscription on top of your internet service provider subscription. The other reason is that it does slow down your internet connection and VPN companies have gotten better about this, but it is always going to have an impact on it, especially if you're connecting to a VPN server that's further away. So if you're in New York and you're pretending to be in California, it's going to be much slower than if you were connected to a VPN server in New York. CAIRA: So to make it a little bit more grounded in the real world, what are some examples of people who might want to use a VPN at home or abroad? MAX: So at home, someone might want to use a VPN if they really don't want their ISP to see what they're doing. Your internet service provider can see everything that you're doing, and legally they can sell that data. And I think also people who are just very concerned about trying to reduce their exposure to advertising trackers to pretty much anyone out there who is trying to observe your movements online. I think that's from the privacy perspective. From a usability perspective, there are people who might be trying to access streaming or some kind of online service that's only available in a particular region. You can do that with a VPN sometimes. But really when we look at VPNs, we look at them as a privacy product. This is what you're using it for. CAIRA: And then if you are abroad, what is a normal person going to use a VPN for abroad? MAX: So I think the most normal thing to use it while you're abroad is just a little bit more peace of mind when you're traveling in an area where you might not know what the privacy laws are like you might not know anything about the region, you might not ever be coming back either. So it's a little bit more peace of mind. It can make things a little bit easier while you're traveling. And most importantly though, I think the more practical thing that people are going to use a VPN for abroad is to access services that are only available at home. So if I am out in another country and I want to watch show on my favorite streaming platform, I might want to use a VPN so that I can appear to be in the US and doing that. Again, that doesn't always work, but there's lots of other services like you might want to be connecting to your bank or even just using the regular internet as if you were at home. That can be localized to your own language if you try to access Google somewhere else, it's not going to be in English probably. So there's a couple of reasons why you might want to do that. CAIRA: When I was in college, I studied abroad in Shanghai and they required us to have VPNs on our phones and our laptops because the government centers so much stuff. MAX: Anyone who's in a position where they feel like they might be targeted by a repressive government, a minoritized person, a journalist, an activist, that makes sense for them to use VPNs, and your example of being in Shanghai is a really great example because that's a situation where there's not only censorship where you need to use a VPN to connect to sites that would be unavailable where you are, but also because there's known to be a lot of surveillance and if you're trying to avoid or really mitigate that to some extent, that's an important thing to use a VPN for. CAIRA: Totally. So when people might be considering getting a VPN, what should they look for? What do you look for? MAX: So the most important thing I look at with VPNs is their commitment to transparency because a VPN, if it wanted to, could monitor its servers and see all the traffic that all of its users are accessing, and that's not good. So one thing we also look for is recent third-party audits. When I look at VPNs, I want to see that they're making some kind of commitment to security and privacy and that they're following their own policies. Obviously audits are not perfect, but they're a good tool to evaluate that. And you want to have a strong privacy policy. The company should be able to explain to you what data they're collecting and why and what they're doing to protect you and a transparency report if possible. That's a accounting of how many requests from law enforcement the company has received and how they responded to them. CAIRA: Oh. MAX: You want to see that as low as possible. And we also want to see companies that aren't leaning into fear, uncertainty and doubt in their marketing. Like I said earlier, VPNs are tricky because they do what they say they're going to do, but whether or not they make sense for you is going to depend on your particular situation and companies that try to convince you that you need this to survive. We don't think that's fair. CAIRA: Okay. So if it's really blasting, either you're being surveilled all the time, you definitely need this VPN because it's going to protect you, maybe don't trust that? MAX: Yeah. CAIRA: Okay. So that does sound like a lot of criteria. Did any of these VPNs that you tested actually cover all of that? MAX: Absolutely. And one of the things we do look at too is affordability and Mullvad VPN is a great choice for affordability. It's only $5 a month, a little over $5 a month, and they don't require you to reveal much personal information when you sign up. It's an interesting system, a little bit hard to get used to, but it's really convenient and it's a great way to protect your privacy. The only issue that we've ever had with Mullvad is that it only has servers in 50 countries. That should be fine for most people, but if you need to be in a specific country with your VPN server and it's not there, then that could be an issue. CAIRA: So do you have a recommendation just for people who only want a VPN when they're traveling abroad? MAX: Yeah, IVPN is cheap, easy to use. It does have some limitations, but it's great for traveling because they have very low cost, short-term subscriptions. So you can get a week subscription for just $2. So short trip, short VPN subscription. CAIRA: That's lovely. And do you have to put in a lot of information to sign up for IVPN? MAX: No, you don't. They have a pretty similar system. CAIRA: Oh, so it's quick, easy and cheap? MAX: Yeah. CAIRA: Amazing. Can you walk me through how I might go about picking a VPN? If I'm planning on traveling abroad, what does that decision tree look like? MAX: So first off, you're going to want to go and take a look at our guide at Wirecutter because we have not just our top picks, but a number of other ones that we think are good and situations where you might want to use them. First and foremost, people need to look at the cost. The average price of a VPN is about $10 a month. If it's more expensive than that, it needs to be offering you something extra in order to justify that cost. And like I said, you want to look at what assurances they're making you about their transparency, their security. You want to take a look at their privacy policy. They should be able to explain to you why they're safe to use. If you need to be in a particular region, you want to look on their website and see what servers they offer. Most VPNs will cover most major locations. That's pretty common. In terms of value. You want to make sure that you're getting it two to five devices depending on how much you're paying. So the low cost IVPN, week long subscription I mentioned that limits you to just two devices at the same time. Usually you can get up to five devices at the same time. So if you wanted to say, have one VPN account for two laptops, two phones, and then another device that'll have you all covered. CAIRA: Like a family plan? MAX: Yeah, exactly. You can actually get significantly more depending on how much you're willing to pay. Ideally, you should be able to select a server location manually, but especially if you're traveling, you're probably going to want to be routing your traffic to a specific location. So you want to look for a service that will let you do that. CAIRA: Can you briefly explain how you actually tested VPNs? MAX: Most of the time when I do VPN testing, I'm testing from where I live. And that's very limiting, right? Because your experience of using a VPN is going to be very dependent upon your internet connection, how far you are away from a VPN server and all these other variables. It gets really, really messy, really fast. So for this last round of VPN testing, I got some volunteers from the Wirecutter staff who tested VPNs on their homes at various locations across the country in various situations. So we had people in really rural areas, we had people in big cities, we had people in mid-sized cities and across the country, and we saw some strong trends. But it really underlined that where you are, your personal situation is going to have the biggest impact on whether or not that VPN is going to perform well for you. And it will be wildly different depending on where you are. So the reason we did this was to underline the advice that we give to people, which is, it's cheaper to buy a VPN at a year-long or longer subscription. It's much, much cheaper to do that, and they want you to do that, but you don't know how it's going to work in your home. So it's better to get the shortest possible subscription or use the free version of it if that's possible. Try it out at your home, see how it works, and if it even makes sense for the thing you're trying to accomplish. And if it does, then you can go ahead and sign up for that longer subscription. CAIRA: So let's say that you've traveled, you're back home. What do you do when you're done with a VPN? Does it just stay on your phone forever? MAX: If you no longer need a VPN, you should turn it off, uninstall it, and cancel your subscription. Because when you're connected to a VPN, it's always going to have an impact on your internet speeds. And that's because it's usually adding more distance to that. It's really easy to forget that it's on. So take a look in the application, see if you're still connected, disconnect, and then look in settings, make sure it's not automatically connecting. If you don't want it to be doing that, get rid of it. Live a great life. CAIRA: Do you think there's anything else that the curious novice might want to know about VPNs? MAX: There are some free VPNs out there that we actually do trust. Proton VPN does not limit your data for its free subscribers, but it does limit your locations. TunnelBear has a free subscription option that does limit your data, but not locations. So depending on what you're trying to do, one of those might be really good. Tor I should really mention it, is a much more robust privacy option that is free, but it is absolutely going to slow down your connection a lot more. Most people don't need to use VPNs all the time. It is a valuable tool that can solve a problem, but it only makes sense if it's one problem you're trying to solve. So if you don't want your ISP to see what you're doing, or you need to be in a specific location and a VPN is a really useful tool, but to make a really strong impact on your personal security, you should be using a password manager and enabling 2FA wherever you can. CAIRA: What is 2FA? MAX: Two-factor authentication. It makes it much harder for an attacker to take over your account even if they already have your password. CAIRA: So in a perfect world, you should have a password manager, a two-factor authentication, and a VPN when you're traveling abroad? MAX: I don't even think that's a perfect world. I think that's just the world we should live in. CAIRA: I like that answer. Okay. Well, thank you so much, Max, for coming and talking to me about VPNs. MAX: Thank you so much. CHRISTINE: If you want to find out more about Wirecutter's coverage on VPNs or if you want to check out the specific VPNs we recommended today, go to our website or check out our show notes. Thanks so much for listening. See you. CAIRA: The Wirecutter Show is executive produced by Rosie Guerin and produced by Abigail Keel, engineering support from Maddie Massiello and Nick Pittman. Today's episode was mixed by Catherine Anderson. Original music by Dan Powell, Marian Lozano, Elishiba Itoop and Diane Wong. Wirecutter's Deputy Publisher is Cliff Levy. Ben Fruman is Wirecutter's Editor-in-Chief. I'm Caira Blackwell. CHRISTINE: I'm Christine Cyr Clisset. ROSIE: And I'm Rosie Guerin. CAIRA: Thanks for listening.
