John Cox

Blogs · @wyome · Now · Shelf

Now

What John Cox is watching, reading and listening to.

The shelf

Watch & Read

Athenana now knows the difference between a page and the film, book or record it's about. Here's what that adds up to.

Films and books get their cards. Save an IMDb, Letterboxd, Goodreads or Open Library page — or any review that names one film or book — and Athenana recognises the work: poster or cover, year, who made it, and a trailer when there is one, played only when you press it. Everything already imported from Letterboxd and Goodreads got the same treatment. Two saves of the same film are now one film.

Shelves. Discover has Watch and Read tabs: a shelf of what you've marked to watch or read. Add a title by name — "watch Heat" in quick add does it. Marking one watched or read keeps the save and offers a note. No counts, no streaks, nothing turns red.

Where to watch. A saved film shows the services it streams on, a way to rent or buy it when nothing does, and — if it's old enough to be in the public domain — plays right on its page.

Picks. Each shelf has a few picks, made from the directors, authors and genres of what you saved and finished, and from books that two or more of your saved articles mention. The list they're made from sits beside them: remove anything, add "more westerns" by hand. "Robert Caro has a new book" is the kind of pick it's for. A pick you ignore is gone at the next refresh.

Lists you saved, unpacked. A saved "25 best westerns" page shows the works it names, each confirmed against TMDB, Open Library, MusicBrainz or Apple's podcast directory, with Save, Follow and buy links. Nothing enters your library until you press Save.

Your Kindle highlights come home. Upload a Kindle's My Clippings.txt and every highlight lands on its book, as a private, searchable item. The file is deleted once it's read.

Now. Press Watching now, Reading now or Listening now and it appears at the top of your blog and on its /now page. Finish it and it comes off by itself.

A shelf on your blog. Your blog has a shelf: the films, books and music among what you've already published, each linking to its post. It shows nothing your blog doesn't already show.

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Interesting

The Pioneer Woman

10 Best Grilled Cheese Recipes That Are Ooey, Gooey Perfection

A Pioneer Woman roundup of ten grilled cheese variations, from an air fryer version and Ree Drummond's crispy double-cheese method (cheese on the outside of the bread too) to a loaded one with potato chips, bacon, and raspberry jam. It also stretches the category to cousins like the patty melt, croque monsieur, Monte Cristo, and a caprese panini, plus an Irish version with Irish cheddar and mustard. Each entry is a short blurb linking to a full recipe, so it's useful as a menu of ideas rather than as instructions.

Permalink recipescookingcheesesandwiches

A Food Lover's Kitchen

10 Make-Ahead Thanksgiving Appetizers That Free Up Your Kitchen

A roundup of ten Thanksgiving appetizers that can be prepped a day or more ahead, so the host isn't stuck in the kitchen while the turkey and sides cook. The lineup leans on bacon, cream cheese, and holiday flavors: two cheeseball variations (bacon, and pumpkin-shaped), sausage-and-stuffing meatballs with cranberry dip, pumpkin-rosemary puff pastry bites, turkey-cranberry roll-ups, sage-seasoned deviled eggs piped like pumpkins, caramelized French onion dip, baked brie with fig jam and candied walnuts, bacon-stuffed celery, and mushroom crescent roll bites. Each entry is a short blurb linking out to a full recipe.

Permalink recipesthanksgivingappetizersentertaining

euronews

Digital nomad visas: How to live, work and travel in Europe

A country-by-country comparison of European digital nomad and remote-work visas, framed around how governments use them to fill tourism low seasons and offset brain drain and ageing populations. For roughly twenty countries, from Albania to Türkiye, it lists visa length, application fee, income threshold and quirks such as tax breaks, bans on working for local employers, and whether the scheme is live or still pending (Latvia, Montenegro). Useful as a reference for comparing thresholds, which range from about €1,200 a month in Finland to over €7,000 in Iceland, and for spotting which visas are newly adapted existing permits rather than purpose-built schemes.

Permalink remote worktraveleuropedigital

Food & Wine

The Secret to These Golden, Crispy-Edged Biscuits Is a Pool of Melted Butter

This is a Food & Wine recipe for "butter swim" biscuits, which skip the rolling, folding, and cutting. You grate a little cold butter into a wet one-bowl dough, spread it into a baking dish of melted butter, and cut it into squares in the pan. The butter pooling around the dough gives crisp, deeply golden edges and soft, fluffy centers, and a spoonful of sugar balances the buttermilk tang and helps browning. It also covers freezing (up to three months), a whole-milk-plus-lemon-juice substitute for buttermilk, and test kitchen tips: chill the butter before grating, keep the buttermilk cold, and don't add flour to the intentionally sticky dough.

Permalink recipesbakingbreakfast

Eating Bird Food

These Roasted White Sweet Potatoes Deserve a Spot on Your Dinner Plate

A recipe for oven-roasted white-fleshed sweet potatoes (Hannah, O'Henry, Murasaki) cut into 1-inch cubes, tossed with olive oil and a savory blend of paprika, garlic, onion, cumin, and oregano, then roasted at 425°F for about 25-30 minutes until crisp-edged and tender. It explains how white varieties differ from orange ones (firmer, drier, milder and nuttier) and how to spot them at the store, and it covers the keys to browning: even cuts, dry potatoes, and an uncrowded pan. Also included are serving ideas like breakfast and lunch bowls, fridge storage for 4-5 days with oven reheating, and the option to substitute orange sweet potatoes.

Permalink recipescookingvegetable

www.amazon.com

Amazon.com: Roam 7 BE3600 Wi-Fi 7 Portable Travel Router Dual-Band, 2.5G Port, USB 3.0 | Multi-Modes in One, OpenVPN, WireGuard®, Public WiFi Sharing for Hotel/Cruise/RV/Plane, No 6 GHz Supported (TL-WR3602BE) : Electronics

This is a product page for TP-Link's Roam 7 BE3600, a pocket-sized Wi-Fi 7 travel router with a 2.5Gbps WAN port, a 1Gbps LAN port, USB 3.0, and USB-C power. Its selling point is flexibility: it can turn Ethernet, phone tethering, a cellular USB modem, or a hotel's public Wi-Fi into a private network, or work as an access point, range extender, or client bridge. It also supports OpenVPN and WireGuard, file sharing from a plugged-in drive, and the Tether app's HomeShield, whose free tier covers QoS, site blocking, and URL filtering.

Permalink privacytravelelectronicsgadgets

www.nytimes.com

They Each Own 50 Credit Cards. Should You? (Published 2025)

Profiles of "churners," people who open dozens of credit cards to collect sign-up bonuses, with several claiming $15,000 to $40,000+ in gains, plus manufactured-spending tricks like gift cards and gold bars, buying groups, and 0% intro-rate borrowing. Former Discover CEO Roger Hochschild explains why issuers struggle to stop it: they budget on the assumption that customers will keep using the card and pay interest and swipe fees, so those who do the bare minimum cost them money, and public offers can't legally be targeted away from particular people. It also notes the risks (it's only for those with firm finances) and a Fed study estimating that savvy rewards users gain $15 billion a year at the expense of those who carry balances.

Permalink credit cardspersonal finance

Food & Wine

Chefs Agree on This One Rule for Next-Level Mac and Cheese

Chefs interviewed for this Food & Wine piece agree that great mac and cheese needs a blend: a smooth, mild melter as the base (young cheddar, Monterey Jack, young Mahón or Gouda, mozzarella, Gruyère) accented with something sharper or more aged like sharp cheddar, Idiazábal, or Parmesan. Aged extra-sharp cheddars are warned against because they melt poorly, and each chef's ratio is given, such as Reed's 2:1:½ of sharp cheddar, Gruyère, and Parmesan or blue cheese, and Schumaker's Parmesan-heavy base. It closes with practical tips: grate your own cheese, undercook the pasta by a minute, try sauce-catching shapes like lumaconi, and add extras like gochujang, pesto, or smoked proteins.

Permalink foodrecipescookingcheese

Camille Styles

41 Gifts She’ll Love, Wear, and Probably Text You About

A holiday gift guide for women, written in a first-person, recommendation-from-a-friend voice, mixing the author's own tried-and-true favorites with new finds. Picks are sorted into three price tiers (under $50, under $150, and $150 and up), and a "start here" section highlights the Sacred Santal Set (a gift the author received last year and loved), a Rare Beauty lip duo, and a cozy Funky Fleece. The product listings themselves didn't come through in the saved text, so what remains is the framing and the standouts, plus links to sibling guides for brothers and sisters, men, and under-$50 gifts for people with good taste.

Permalink fashionshoppinggiftsgift guide

Allrecipes

The 21 Recipes We Can’t Wait To Make This November

A November recipe roundup from Allrecipes that deliberately skips Thanksgiving centerpieces to cover the other 29 days of the month, with about twenty easy ideas for busy, dark-evening cooking. It mixes weeknight dinners (baked Dijon salmon in under 30 minutes, skillet French onion chicken, Turkish turkey chili pasta, slow cooker busy day soup), sides (honey balsamic carrots, Parmesan sweet potatoes, smashed Brussels sprouts, big-batch slow cooker mac and cheese), and fall treats like pumpkin cream cheese bread, no-bake pretzel bars, cardamom-espresso cookies, and an apple cider spritz. It also includes a few leftover-minded ideas, such as cranberry sauce muffins, for after the holiday.

Permalink recipescookingbaking

Curtis Wright Maps

Texoma-Land Playground of the Southwest - Curtis Wright Maps

This is a dealer listing for a 1949 pictorial aerial-view map of Lake Texoma, the reservoir on the Texas–Oklahoma border created by Denison Dam, published as a promotional brochure by the Lake Texoma Sportsmen's Club under the name "Texoma-Land, Playground of the Southwest." The map sells the region as a vacation destination, with its lake, ranches, oil fields, caves and towns linked by labeled highways and railroads, and with distant cities like Oklahoma City, Kansas City and Chicago drawn in at the horizon. It was lithographed in color by MWM Color Press of Aurora, Missouri, and has a simple fishing guide for local anglers on the back. The copy is rated B-, with fold wear, toning and some image loss near Denton, and high-resolution scans are available for purchase.

Permalink historytexasoutdoor

Bon Appétit

Japanese Sweet Potato Chaat

A recipe pairing from Rachel Gurjar: a cilantro-mint green chutney built on green chiles, lime, cumin, sugar, and chaat masala, which doubles as a pani puri base (add 1½ cups of water and strain) or becomes a creamy dip when mixed with yogurt or sour cream. The second dish is a chaat-inspired appetizer of Japanese sweet potatoes, slow-roasted flesh-side down until custard-soft with crisp, unpeeled skins, then topped with the chutney, tamarind concentrate (choose a brand without citric acid), onions, tomatoes, and cilantro.

Permalink foodrecipescookingvegetarian

Apple Music - Web Player

NYT Cooking

Senate Bean Soup Recipe

A recipe for navy bean and smoked ham hock soup, simmered for about an hour and a half with onion, garlic, carrots, smoked paprika and thyme. A mashed potato and a splash of cider vinegar at the end thicken and brighten it, and a shortcut version uses canned beans and chopped ham. The reader comments are the distinctive part: one gives detailed soaking instructions, another notes the dish's Senate Bean Soup lineage and Michigan navy beans, and a third argues the original two-pound, no-frills version is better and that soaking is unnecessary.

Permalink recipescooking

The Hideaways Club

Luxury holiday home co-ownership | Fractional ownership

This is the homepage for The Hideaways Club, a fractional holiday-home ownership scheme that pitches co-owning equity in a portfolio of 45 managed properties as a smarter alternative to buying a single second home. Members get real equity plus rotating access to villas, chalets and apartments across the Mediterranean, the Alps, Mauritius, South Africa, Thailand and Bali, and can also book 400+ partner homes in places like the Caribbean, Hawaii and the Maldives under their usage entitlement. The page leans on member testimonials and a brochure sign-up, with no pricing or share terms given, so it is a marketing pitch rather than a source for costs or conditions.

Permalink holidayreal estatetravelluxury

www.quince.com

Rolling Stone

The 200 Best Rock Songs of the 21st Century

Rolling Stone's ranked list of the 200 best rock songs of the 21st century so far, framed as a rebuttal to anyone claiming rock is dying and as a companion to its "Reasons to Love Rock" feature. It deliberately spreads across pop-punk, emo, metal, indie, garage revival, Latin rock, Tuareg desert blues, country-rock, and crossover acts like OutKast, Jay-Z, Taylor Swift, and Olivia Rodrigo. Each entry is a short blurb mixing backstory and artist quotes, and the rule of mostly one song per artist is bent only for a few legends (Radiohead, Muse, Foo Fighters, the Strokes, and others). It builds to a top ten that includes the White Stripes' "Seven Nation Army," the Killers' "Mr. Brightside," and Yeah Yeah Yeahs' "Maps." The argument throughout is that rock stays healthy because it keeps mutating, so the list works as a wide-ranging survey of the era rather than a narrow canon.

Permalink musicrecommendationsrock

Mental Floss

8 Expressions Our Grandparents Used That Are Disappearing

A tour of eight idioms common to our grandparents' generation that are fading from use, including "the bee's knees," "cooking with gas," "mind your P's and Q's," and "you make a better door than a window." Each gets a short origin story: 1920s animal slang, a 1930s gas-stove ad slogan, a Frank Robinson baseball quip, and a Jerry Lee Lewis song. The piece also argues that "peanut gallery" is better left behind, since it comes from the cheap vaudeville seats where Black Americans and other minorities were typically seated.

Permalink culturehistory

Apartment Therapy

An IKEA BEKVÄM Spice Rack Fixes a Bathroom’s Storage Issues | Apartment Therapy

Two small-space dwellers, Toronto's Katie Nielsen and Apartment Therapy contributor Trisha Sprouse, independently solved cramped bathroom storage by mounting IKEA's BEKVÄM spice rack on the wall. Katie, sharing 430 square feet with her fiancé, uses it to keep frequently used items like facial pads, tweezers, and nail trimmers within reach and easy for guests to find. Trisha had already used one as a kid's bookshelf, and the rail keeps products from slipping off. The piece also notes it can be installed on tiled walls, though the screws are sold separately.

Permalink diybathroomorganizationhome

The Independent

Carrie fever is gripping teenage girls – and exposing an uncomfortable truth about their lives | The Independent

Amazon's 2026 Carrie remake has become a hit with teenage girls, and this opinion piece reads that success as a response to current anxieties about female friendship, bullying, social media and powerlessness amid threats to women's rights. Drawing on a media lecturer who prefers the 1976 film (where the power belongs to Carrie, not to social media as villain), an author on teenage friendship, and quotes from 15-year-olds, the writer argues that girl-on-girl cruelty squanders power that would be better spent on alliances. She cites research linking close female bonds to better mental and physical health, and reads Carrie as showing that girls' power can be either destructive or positive depending on how they treat one another. The author runs The Respect Project, which works with adolescent relationships, and her piece ends as a plea for kindness over cruelty.

Permalink culturetelevisionhorrorentertainment