It's time you learned the truth about geese

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Think about all the instances of geese you know and love from popular culture: Mother Goose, the Drake-approved OVO x Canada Goose collab, Grey Goose (got you feelin' real loose). Take all of these warm, happy thoughts from your mind and throw them in the trash, where they belong. Because what I'm about to show you is going to change everything you know about geese.

Last weekend I went to Central Park and saw something peculiar:

goose

I've never known geese to be violent, but this goose was mad. You can barely make out its tiny gaping mouth in this photo, but that goose is mid-hiss at the crowd that had formed around it and its goslings. You also can't see the two other goslings just out of frame in this photo, clearly left for dead by the mother goose.

And then I saw this tweet and everything just clicked for me:

geese have serrated tongues http://pic.twitter.com/GM0e0bFsKN
— Aaron Meyers (@aarontweets) May 27, 2016

Oh my G(oose), what?! Let's take a closer look at these horrible, walking vuvuzelas:

Who allowed this to happen?

Why has God forsaken us?

geese

I can't.

And as if this wasn't enough nightmare-fodder, our managing editor T.C. mentioned that leatherback turtle mouths are more or less also one-way portals to hell:

turtle

Everything is awful.

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Why Forrest Gump Would Buy This Expensive Data Center REIT

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Here's Proof That The US Dollar Is Insanely Overvalued

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Submitted by Simon Black via SovereignMan.com,

Shocking. Astonishing. Jaw dropping.

There’s just no other way to describe how cheap South Africa is right now.

Between the worldwide decline in commodities prices, and a major crisis of confidence in the national government here, the local currency (South African rand) remains at the lowest level it’s been… ever.

And that’s made nearly EVERYTHING here dirt cheap if you’re spending foreign currency… especially US dollars.

Just doing something simple like eating out at a restaurant or going to the grocery store can be startling.

Once you do the math and convert the prices back to US dollars, it almost seems like you’re missing a zero.

This also carries over into many asset prices, including certain areas in the property market.

Here in Johannesburg, I saw an amazing home for sale in one of the nicest, upscale neighborhoods with an asking price of about $515,000 US dollars.

Now, half a million bucks might not sound terribly cheap– until you find out what you’re getting for the money.

The house is an enormous seven-bedroom compound of nearly 13,000 square feet.

Pool. Courtyard. Fountains. Private chef’s kitchen. Parking for eight. Separate home for live-in staff. Wonderful neighborhood with top schools, shops, and restaurants.

Something like this would go for at least 20 times that price in Los Angeles, and 40 times the price in London.

Much of this price mismatch is due to the currency anomaly– that the South African rand is so undervalued, AND that the US dollar is so overvalued.

Perhaps this is most obvious when looking at the travel package I just bought.

Longtime readers know that I’m a big fan of special “round the world” fares that major airline alliances offer.

I’ve written about this before— all three of the major global airline alliances offer special fares for passengers when you travel completely around the world.

A typical journey might be, for example, Los Angeles to London to Singapore to Sydney and back to Los Angeles again.

That itinerary takes you all the way around the world, and you’ll pay one simple fare that’s usually quite attractive.

Typically the round-the-world fare is calculated based on the country where you depart.

So if your journey starts and stops from London, your fare will be quoted and priced in British pounds.

But if your journey starts and stops in Los Angeles, your fare will be quoted and priced in US dollars.

The strange thing is that when you convert the currencies, the amounts won’t match even though the journey is essentially the same.

In other words, LA-London-Singapore-Sydney-LA costs $11,400, while Sydney-LA-London-Singapore-Sydney costs AUD 13,600, or about $9,875 USD.

That’s more than a $1500 difference.

This doesn’t make any sense since both itineraries are comprised of the exact same flights, i.e. Sydney to LA, LA to London, London to Singapore, Singapore to Sydney.

The flights are simply in a different order. That’s all. The price should be more or less the same.

And yet, due to these major anomalies in the currency markets, there are major differences in the fares.

Here in South Africa, I’ve just booked a business class ticket that goes from Johannesburg to Asia, then the US, Chile, Madrid, London, and back to Johannesburg.

The price I paid was 70,000 South African rand.

But due to the rand being near it’s all-time low, that’s the equivalent of just $4,500.

To put this in perspective, the same itinerary starting and stopping in the US costs about $12,500 in business, and over $6,600 in economy class.

Crazy. I paid 30% less to fly in business class for the exact same flights that someone would pay in US dollars to fly in economy class.

Clearly this makes no sense (but I’m happy to take the deal).

The reason is obvious: the rand is undervalued relative to the US dollar.

Ten years ago it was the opposite: the US dollar was deeply undervalued relative to other currencies.

Oil was expensive, and major commodities exporters from Brazil to Australia, and even here in South Africa, had overvalued currencies.

Now the pendulum has swung in the other direction.

Commodities prices have plunged, and those same exporters are experiencing major economic slowdowns. Their currencies have all been punished.

Undoubtedly the right equilibrium is somewhere in the middle.

But markets rarely find the equilibrium. They almost always overcorrect.

So now the rand has plummeted and become absurdly weak, while it’s the US dollar that has become extremely expensive.

Sure, it’s possible that the dollar becomes even stronger (and the rand weaker).

But these things routinely go in cycles, and there will be a correction. There always is.

So anyone who owns US dollars has an opportunity right now to trade overvalued pieces of paper for undervalued real assets… as long as you look abroad.

Part of being a Sovereign Man is having a global view– expanding one’s thinking to the entire world.

I’ve written before about how our company is acquiring or has already purchased productive farmland in central Chile, deeply undervalued, profitable businesses in Australia, and real estate in Colombia.

These are all REAL assets. And as long as central bankers continue to print paper money without restraint or regard for the consequences, it’s critical to own something real.

Gold and silver are also real assets, and both are historically inexpensive relative to the US dollar.

Bottom line: take advantage of this opportunity to trade your paper for something of value. It won’t last.

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Why You Will Marry the Wrong Person

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Why You Will Marry the Wrong Person - The New York Times

Photo Credit Marion Fayolle

IT’S one of the things we are most afraid might happen to us. We go to great lengths to avoid it. And yet we do it all the same: We marry the wrong person.

Partly, it’s because we have a bewildering array of problems that emerge when we try to get close to others. We seem normal only to those who don’t know us very well. In a wiser, more self-aware society than our own, a standard question on any early dinner date would be: “And how are you crazy?”

Perhaps we have a latent tendency to get furious when someone disagrees with us or can relax only when we are working; perhaps we’re tricky about intimacy after sex or clam up in response to humiliation. Nobody’s perfect. The problem is that before marriage, we rarely delve into our complexities. Whenever casual relationships threaten to reveal our flaws, we blame our partners and call it a day. As for our friends, they don’t care enough to do the hard work of enlightening us. One of the privileges of being on our own is therefore the sincere impression that we are really quite easy to live with.

Our partners are no more self-aware. Naturally, we make a stab at trying to understand them. We visit their families. We look at their photos, we meet their college friends. All this contributes to a sense that we’ve done our homework. We haven’t. Marriage ends up as a hopeful, generous, infinitely kind gamble taken by two people who don’t know yet who they are or who the other might be, binding themselves to a future they cannot conceive of and have carefully avoided investigating.

For most of recorded history, people married for logical sorts of reasons: because her parcel of land adjoined yours, his family had a flourishing business, her father was the magistrate in town, there was a castle to keep up, or both sets of parents subscribed to the same interpretation of a holy text. And from such reasonable marriages, there flowed loneliness, infidelity, abuse, hardness of heart and screams heard through the nursery doors. The marriage of reason was not, in hindsight, reasonable at all; it was often expedient, narrow-minded, snobbish and exploitative. That is why what has replaced it — the marriage of feeling — has largely been spared the need to account for itself.

What matters in the marriage of feeling is that two people are drawn to each other by an overwhelming instinct and know in their hearts that it is right. Indeed, the more imprudent a marriage appears (perhaps it’s been only six months since they met; one of them has no job or both are barely out of their teens), the safer it can feel. Recklessness is taken as a counterweight to all the errors of reason, that catalyst of misery, that accountant’s demand. The prestige of instinct is the traumatized reaction against too many centuries of unreasonable reason.

But though we believe ourselves to be seeking happiness in marriage, it isn’t that simple. What we really seek is familiarity — which may well complicate any plans we might have had for happiness. We are looking to recreate, within our adult relationships, the feelings we knew so well in childhood. The love most of us will have tasted early on was often confused with other, more destructive dynamics: feelings of wanting to help an adult who was out of control, of being deprived of a parent’s warmth or scared of his anger, of not feeling secure enough to communicate our wishes. How logical, then, that we should as grown-ups find ourselves rejecting certain candidates for marriage not because they are wrong but because they are too right — too balanced, mature, understanding and reliable — given that in our hearts, such rightness feels foreign. We marry the wrong people because we don’t associate being loved with feeling happy.

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Grokking Algorithms Is Out

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Grokking Algorithms Is Out

Written May 25, 2016

Grokking Algorithms is on Amazon!

Why write another algorithms book?

Grokking algorithms is easier to read:

That’s the section on hash functions in both Introduction to Algorithms and Grokking Algorithms. I’m a visual learner, so my book has 400+ illustrations. Grokking Algorithms is also example-driven, so I give plenty of real-world examples in the book. Here’s how my chapter on breadth-first search starts out:

Suppose you’re in San Francisco, and you want to go from Twin Peaks to the Golden Gate bridge. You want to get there by bus, with the minimum number of transfers. Here are your options:

Here’s how the chapter on graphs in Introduction to Algorithms begins:

We can choose between two standard ways to represent a graph G = (V, E): as a collection of adjacency lists or as an adjacency matrix. Either way applies to both directed and undirected graphs.

Grokking algorithms is also a lot thinner:

It is thin enough that anyone can hope to read it cover-to-cover. It’s perfect for:

bootcamp grads who want to understand algorithms
high school students who enjoy programming
college students who find the standard textbooks hard to understand.
anyone who wants to know what algorithms are! It really is an easy read – my mom understood binary search after reading the first chapter.

Grokking algorithms was published by Manning Publications. They have been very knowledgeable and professional throughout this process. They even let me upload all the images from the book, and they are available for free for non-commercial use here.

Finally, here are some nice reader comments:

Very cool examples of divide and conquer! Should be included in every functional programming book.

The explanation of Big-O notation itself is worth the price of admission. Big-O usually trips up first-timers to the subject, but the author did an excellent job of explaining the subject lucidly.

I really love this book, and the new chapters and update diagrams really make it shine. Even though I consider myself an experienced developer, I found the updated sections on hashtables, graphs, and greedy algorithms refreshing.

The book reads really easy. You might just grab a book one afternoon and a few hours later realize you’ve read an entire math book in one go!

This is the most approachable book on Algorithms that every high school student taking AP Computer Science or any college student majoring in Computer Science should read.

This is the book I’ve been waiting for to share with both my kids who are interested in programming AND my adult learners attending the various introductory programming meetups I run.

I had a lot of fun writing this book, and I hope you have fun reading it!

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Lawsuit Says Detroit Cops Shot Confined Dog Through Bathroom Door

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Smoke, Debo, and Mama ||| Nikita Smith and Kevin Thomas A federal lawsuit filed last week says Detroit police officers serving a drug warrant gratuitously shot three dogs that were not threatening them in any way, including one that was confined in a bathroom, which they shot through the door. The lawsuit, first reported by the New York Daily News, says the cops "acted as [a] dog death squad and stormed through the house, executing Plaintiffs' dogs as they went."

In their complaint, Nikita Smith and Kevin Thomas, who share a house on Sussex Street, say "a large number" of cops arrived there about 12:30 p.m. on January 14, demanding entry. Smith, who was home alone at the time, called out, "Let me put my dogs down in the basement." She put her two pit bulls, a male named Debo and a pregnant female named Mama, in the basement and blocked the door leading from it. She put the third dog, a female Rottweiler named Smoke, in a bathroom and closed the door.

After police "entered the residence without permission," Debo managed to get past the barrier across the doorway to the basement and sat down next to Smith. As she reached out to him, police opened fire and shot him several times, even though Smith was nearby. "You could have been killed," one officer later said, according to the lawsuit. After killing Debo, the cops then went down into the basement and shot Mama, who "was not barking or attacking the police at any time."

The door to the bathroom where Smoke died ||| Nikita Smith Next an officer opened the bathroom door, saw Smoke, and closed the door. "Should we do that one, too?" a cop asked. "Yes," another answered. Two cops "then fired multiple shots through the closed bathroom door, which killed Smoke." One of them reportedly exclaimed, "Did you see that? I got that one good!" The evidence introduced by Smith and Thomas includes pictures of the bloody aftermath and bullet holes in the bathroom door.

According to The Detroit News, a police report obtained by Chris Olson, the lawyer representing Smith and Thomas, claims the dogs were aggressive. The report says one officer "encountered a vicious gray pit bull at the front door, at which time he fired his department issued shotgun, striking the dog." But the lawsuit says "none of Plaintiffs' dogs attacked or threatened [any] Defendant in any way," and it is hard to see how a dog shut in a bathroom could have posed an imminent threat. Photography Is Not a Crime reports that "police claimed they had no audio or video of the incident."

The version of events described in the lawsuit is sadly plausible, given the past behavior of cops confronting dogs in Detroit and elsewhere. A month after police killed Debo, Mama, and Smoke, the Detroit City Council approved a $100,000 settlement with the owner of a chained Dogue de Bordeaux shot by police looking for a suspect who was not there. In that case the officer who killed the dog also claimed it posed a threat, saying "a brown dog charged towards me, attempting to bite me." But according to the owner's lawsuit, dashcam video of the incident shows the officer "walk towards Babycakes in her driveway to a position just beyond the reach of Babycakes' steel cable leash, pause, aim and shoot her twice with his department issued M&P 40 caliber handgun."

After the settlement, Olson, who also represented the dog owner in that case, expressed the hope that "police officers in Detroit will hear this story and be much more mindful of the magnitude of the rights that are involved here." The unnecessary killing of a dog can qualify as an unconsitutional seizure of property under the Fourth Amendment. Olson cites a 2005 decision in which the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 9th Circuit held that "defendant police's shooting of plaintiff's dogs was an unreasonable seizure in particular where defendant police officers had notice of the dog's presence and were not surprised by them and had no plan to deal with the dog other than by shooting it."

Smith says one of the officers who raided her home told her, "I should have killed you, too." Olson told The Daily News "she's terrified," since "those same cops drive through her neighborhood every day." Smith was initially charged with marijuana possession, but the case was dismissed after the cops failed to appear in court.

"They had a warrant to search the house," Olson said. "That we don't really quarrel with. But when you search the house, you can't go in the house and kill all the dogs."

Since the justification for the search was something (drug possession) that shouldn't be treated as a crime, and the resulting charge was so trivial that the cops could not be bothered to show up in court, we really should quarrel with the idea that police had a right to be in the house. Every confrontation prompted by the morally atrocious war on drugs is an invitation to violence, and all too frequently it's human blood that ends up on the floor.

from Hit & Run : Reason Magazine https://reason.com/blog
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Can you solve the control room riddle? - Dennis Shasha

View full lesson: http://ift.tt/1UryeYL As your country's top spy, you must infiltrate the headquarters of the evil syndicate, find the secret control panel, and deactivate their death ray. But your reconnaissance team is spotty, and you have only limited information about the control panel's whereabouts. Can you solve the control room riddle and deactivate their weapon in time? Dennis Shasha shows you how. Lesson by Dennis Shasha, animation by Zedem Media.

From: TED-Ed

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A Batman Memoir and 4 More Comics You Should Read in June

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Summer is almost here, which means it’s probably time to think about what you’ll be reading while you soak up the sun. With DC going through a superhero “Rebirth”—series are being relaunched all through the month, including Superman, Wonder Woman, and Batman—and Marvel going all-in on its comic book Civil War II, there’s a lot going on in the superhero side of the pool, but for everyone else, here are five titles that are definitely worth diving into this June.

Dark Night: A True Batman Story (DC/Vertigo)

Brave, tragic, and even a little funny, Paul Dini’s memoir Dark Night is the ultimate Batman tale, demonstrating both the ways in which the character could never exist in reality and the inspiration he provides as an idea—even to the people paid to create his stories. Focusing on Dini’s recovery after being mugged when he was working on the classic 1990s Batman animated series, the book is all about how he is simultaneously haunted and inspired by the characters he grew up reading. Artist Eduardo Risso brings all this to life with subtlety, making the book feel personal and yet like a classic comic that just happens to star real people, revealing something honest about fandom’s hidden secrets along the way.

Credit: DC/Vertigo

Brave, tragic, and even a little funny, Paul Dini's memoir Dark Night is the ultimate Batman tale, demonstrating both the ways in which the character could never exist in reality and the inspiration he provides as an idea—even to the people paid to create his stories. Focusing on Dini's recovery after being mugged when he was working on the classic 1990s Batman animated series, the book is all about how he is simultaneously haunted and inspired by the characters he grew up reading. Artist Eduardo Risso brings all this to life with subtlety, making the book feel personal and yet like a classic comic that just happens to star real people, revealing something honest about fandom's hidden secrets along the way.

Lumberjanes/Gotham Academy #1 (Boom! Studios/DC Entertainment)

If Dark Night reveals a wonderfully dark side to the Batman mythos, this mini-series that combines the gothic high school drama of Batman spin-off Gotham Academy with the effortlessly fun, GLAAD Award-nominated series Lumberjanes is certain to offer some whimsy, romance, and spooky mystery. In this installment, the students of Gotham Academy and attendees of Miss Quinzella Thiskwin Penniquiqul Thistle Crumpet’s Camp for Hardcore Lady Types set out to investigate strange goings-on at a cabin in the woods, little knowing what (or who) they’ll find in the process.

Credit: Boom! Studios/DC Entertainment

If Dark Night reveals a wonderfully dark side to the Batman mythos, this mini-series that combines the gothic high school drama of Batman spin-off Gotham Academy with the effortlessly fun, GLAAD Award-nominated series Lumberjanes is certain to offer some whimsy, romance, and spooky mystery. In this installment, the students of Gotham Academy and attendees of Miss Quinzella Thiskwin Penniquiqul Thistle Crumpet's Camp for Hardcore Lady Types set out to investigate strange goings-on at a cabin in the woods, little knowing what (or who) they'll find in the process.

Pop Gun War: Gift (Image Comics)

Farel Dalrymple, the amazing creator of The Wrenchies and illustrator of Jonathan Lethem’s Omega the Unknown, reissues one of his earliest works in this beautiful new edition from Image. Centering on a kid who finds a pair of “discarded” wings from an angel, it’s an exploration of urban life that’s at once beautiful, disturbing, and teeming with memorable characters as strange and unexpected as the wings the protagonist uses to travel through New York City. This is the book that made Dalrymple’s name, and it’s easy to see why: More than a decade after it was first published, there’s still nothing else out there quite like this.

Credit: Image Comics

Farel Dalrymple, the amazing creator of The Wrenchies and illustrator of Jonathan Lethem's Omega the Unknown, reissues one of his earliest works in this beautiful new edition from Image. Centering on a kid who finds a pair of "discarded" wings from an angel, it's an exploration of urban life that's at once beautiful, disturbing, and teeming with memorable characters as strange and unexpected as the wings the protagonist uses to travel through New York City. This is the book that made Dalrymple's name, and it's easy to see why: More than a decade after it was first published, there's still nothing else out there quite like this.

Hot Dog Taste Test (Drawn & Quarterly)

Fans of BoJack Horseman and Lucky Peach magazine are likely already familiar with Lisa Hanawalt, the cartoonist (and BoJack producer/designer) who’s obsessed with horses, food, and pop culture. Everyone else needs to catch up. This second collection of her work—My Dirty Dumb Eyes, her first book, is also highly recommended—is both hilarious and at times breathtakingly inventive as it seeks to investigate the things other people don’t really think about: the dating life of birds, the horror of using public restrooms while traveling abroad, and which foods are earnest, versus which ones are sassy.

Credit: Drawn & Quarterly

Fans of BoJack Horseman and Lucky Peach magazine are likely already familiar with Lisa Hanawalt, the cartoonist (and BoJack producer/designer) who's obsessed with horses, food, and pop culture. Everyone else needs to catch up. This second collection of her work—My Dirty Dumb Eyes, her first book, is also highly recommended—is both hilarious and at times breathtakingly inventive as it seeks to investigate the things other people don't really think about: the dating life of birds, the horror of using public restrooms while traveling abroad, and which foods are earnest, versus which ones are sassy.

Wrinkles (Fantagraphics Books)

Already a hit in Europe, Paco Roca’s bittersweet comedy follows Emilio as he arrives at an assisted-living facility determined to hide the true extent of his Alzheimer’s from everyone who works there with the assistance of his roommate, a would-be ladies’ man who is far too confident in his own charms. Heartbreaking and hilarious, it’s a complex book that will stick with you (and make you contemplate aging) for a long time after you’ve finished reading it.

Credit: Fantagraphics Books

Already a hit in Europe, Paco Roca's bittersweet comedy follows Emilio as he arrives at an assisted-living facility determined to hide the true extent of his Alzheimer's from everyone who works there with the assistance of his roommate, a would-be ladies' man who is far too confident in his own charms. Heartbreaking and hilarious, it's a complex book that will stick with you (and make you contemplate aging) for a long time after you've finished reading it.

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William Gibson has written a comic, and you should read it

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Warning: this post contains minor plot spoilers.

IDW Publishing

The cover of Archangel issue #1.

IDW Publishing

The cover of Archangel issue #1.
IDW Publishing

Archangel's roots are in an unsuccessful pitch to a German TV company involving "Nazi flying saucers."
IDW Publishing

What will our heroes from 1945 make of the interlopers from the future?
IDW Publishing

This is Junior Henderson. He's not a nice man. Butch Guice's artwork is a treat, though.

We're in an exciting time for new comics right now, and I'm not talking about Captain America's reveal as a Hydra agent. No, ditch those superheroes. Authors like Greg Rucka (with Michael Lark and Eric Trautmann) and Brian K. Vaughan (with Fiona Staples) have been knocking it out of the sci-fi park with Lazarus and Saga, respectively. Now we can add one of Ars' favorite authors to that honor roll: William Gibson has made the leap from prose to picture books, collaborating with Michael St. John Smith and artist Bruce Guice to give us this week's first issue of new IDW series Archangel.

"It's an alternate-history/cross-worlds story," Gibson writes in the back matter. "And I wouldn’t want to spoil too much of the frame, because that’s an inherent part of our narrative. But I will say that one of the first verbal tags we had for the material was 'Band Of Brothers vs. Blackwater.'"

Archangel begins in February 2016, but it's a very different 2016 to the one we know. The world is in ruins. The White House relocated to the ominous-sounding National Emergency Federal District in Montana. They have technology that far outstrips our own.

A father and son occupy the new White House as President and Vice President. We never meet dad, but his son—an evil jerk by the name of Junior Henderson—has been surgically altered to resemble his grandfather, because Junior is about travel to an alternate Earth in 1945 to take grandpa's place, with the intent of remaking that world more to his liking (and, presumably, to prevent whatever it was that laid waste to the one we start off in).

All is not lost, though. A pair of tattooed Marines go back in time to stop him, but things start to unravel when their stealth plane materializes in a formation of B-17s in the skies above Berlin. It's here that Archangel's genesis—an unsuccessful pitch to a German TV company involving foo fighters and ghost rockets—becomes clear.

The rest of the first issue plays out in 1945, in which British intelligence officer Naomi Givens is tasked with finding out what just fell out of the skies of Berlin. The Russians recover the wreckage, while the Americans nab the two Marines from the future. Even though the three nations were wartime allies, no one is keen on sharing any more than necessary in the aftermath of Germany's defeat.

Givens is a characteristically Gibsonian protagonist. Don't read Archangel expecting boring, anatomically-impossible ladies in revealing outfits. As with Rucka, his female characters hinge on strong wills and personalities, not looks. "I have a certain kind of over-the-top female character who just never gets killed," Gibson writes. "They may not be realistic, but I love them, and a lot of people evidently do."

Along with Forever Carlyle (Lazarus) and Velvet Templeton (Velvet), I have a feeling Givens is going to kick major ass in coming issues, although the first issue doesn't really give much more away. We know Junior is up to something, but we'll have to wait for future issues to find out just what his nefarious plan is—and whether or not anyone in 1945 or 2016 is capable of stopping him.

Now comes the frustrating part. Having to wait at least a month for the next 20-odd pages is going to seem like an eternity. Archangel evidently hit a chord, though. Publisher IDW sold out the initial run in just a few days before announcing it would print a second run. But seeing as we live in our non-dystopian 2016, Archangel is also available in PDF and ePub formats, which suffer no such restrictions. If you're fan of thought-provoking science fiction, of Gibson's oeuvre, or even World War II spy thrillers, you ought to check it out.

Listing image by IDW Publishing

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WriteWell Gives Students and Professionals Templates to Jumpstart Research Papers

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WriteWell Gives Students and Professionals Templates to Jumpstart Research Papers

If you’ve ever had to write a reference paper, essay, or lab report, you know what it means to struggle with an overwhelming amount of information to organize, or a blank page looking back at you. WriteWell helps you organize that information easily, and offers writing templates to help you get started with your paper.

The video above is a short demo of the service. It’s best feature by far are the wealth of templates built-in to give you a quick start on your writing project. They’re not perfect by any means, but they may serve as just enough scaffolding and framework to help you get away from a blank page and into the zone filling it in with your own voice, details, and research. WriteWell has templates for college research papers, specific types of essays (compare and contrast, argumentative, reference, and so on), news articles, scientific papers, and even cover letters and new job pitches.

To make the most writing with WriteWell, you’ll want to use it to create “sections” for your paper, and then jump into those sections—and a full text editor—to either do your writing, or to paste in your relevant text. From there, you can rearrange your sections quickly, build your citations or organize your reference data, or just use the natural way WriteWell breaks up you paper to get some writing done.

The service is free to start, and you can sign up with an email address, see all of the features and templates, and see if it’s something that would work for you. Free accounts are limited to three documents though, so if you want to keep using it, you’ll need to upgrade to a paid plan, for $6/mo, or $60/yr. Hit the link below to try it out or learn more.

WriteWell

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