5 Cool & Creative Websites to Poke Around During Your Free Time

EXTRAORDINARY ROUTINES

"How we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives." — Annie Dillard, The Writing Life Maintaining a healthy routine might just be the most difficult yet stunningly ordinary aspects of our daily lives, but it’s precisely in these insignificant trivia and imperfections we find something extraordinary. Extraordinary Routines is an interview project that probes the everyday habits of creatives. Not aiming to brag about efficiency, the blog presents the lives of people we look up to with authenticity and a humanistic touch. The daily routine which takes up so much our lives, in many ways, is the most exact reflection of who we are.

THE PUDDING

Created with the belief that some ideas are too complex to discuss with prose alone, The Pudding is a blog of visual essays, or creative storytelling that combines code, animation, and data visualisation. Prepare to be bombarded by incredible interactive iconography upon clicking open this site! With topics ranging from culture, sports, music to politics, The Pudding delivers insights and knowledge in a revolutionised fashion. Instead of the dense prose that one might easily get lost in, The Pudding combines depth and passion to present the topic in splendid form with innovative visual storytelling techniques. The experience of reading becomes a reader-driven exploration of various embedded structures on the selected topic.

BRAIN PICKINGS

Reading too many depressing news stories and long for something with more of a human touch? Make Brain Pickings your go-to, as it’s an ad-free blog about a wide variety of cultural topics, and prides itself as an “interestingness digest”. Indulge your inner bookworm, discover a neglected good read, or simply let yourself be inspired by the the wisdom of the most renowned writers of our time. Eclectic and full of richness and depth, Brain Pickings is actually a one-woman labor of love. Maria Popova, an avid reader who chronicles her own becoming of a person, weaves her thoughts on how to live a meaningful life through this carefully-manicured blog. Whether the piece is about art, science, psychology, design, philosophy, history, politics or anthropology, they all explore the essential question of not only how to live a life, but how to live a good one.

LITERARY HUB

Still think that everything literary has to be paper-bound and old-school? Then Literary Hub will change and blow your mind. A place where you’ll be able to find the full spectrum of literary content online, Literary Hub is the best showcase of news, ideas, and richness of contemporary literary life. Interviews, book excerpts, bookstores - this cluster of literary paraphernalia is the place to let your mind be free and wonder.  

LONGREADS

Just as the name suggests, Longreads is all about long form stories. Defiantly positioning itself against the fragmented and visually-driven trend of social media, Longreads is dedicated to rendering the best reading experience with carefully mapped-out stories from all walks of life, and features some of the finest non-fiction writings on the web. Let yourself sit back, take a sip of coffee, and immerse yourself in the lives and stories of people you’ve never thought to be relevant before, but will undoubtedly come to care about. Taking a mindful journey across time and space while resting in a comfortable chair - that’s what we call quality relaxation.