A Now You Know Digital Christmas Stocking

Enrich someone's Christmas and New Year with these cultural essentials--most of them free, that's right, f-r-double e.

Three days before Christmas provides plenty of time to complete holiday shopping with a digital stocking. Fill an email with introductions to sites and delights your family member or friend will enjoy for hours, days or years.

Twenty-first century phenomenon Ali Abdaal continues to thrive while sharing his instructions on how to lead a more productive and satisfying life. The British medical doctor continues to build a worldwide audience on his YouTube channel (now at 5 million subscribers) and, more recently, with a podcast. His self-improving nature fits with our American tradition. Introduce someone to Ali—and buy his book, Feel-Good Productivity, to be published Tuesday.

Let Marques Brownlee guide your technology decisions through the year. With 18 million subscribers to his YouTube channel, Marques is a force—and a cheerful presence.

The BBC offers the most variety in English-language radio programming. It now includes podcasts and playlists. The BBC’s Radio 4 includes comedy, drama, game shows and the singular In Our Time. It’s free and collected on BBC Sounds. Send a link to the app to someone with a curious mind and prepare for the recipient’s perpetual thank you.

Now You Know readers were taken with guest Katie Kramer’s favorite work of art, Chop Suey. You need not be a Christie’s habitué to see art in the flesh. Give a museum membership or introduce a budding artist to museum classes. Connecticut museums are busy places in person and online. The Metropolitan Museum of Art offers a dizzying array of programs for all ages. And don’t forget the Museum of Fine Art in Boston, one of the world’s treasures.

Erick Russell, Connecticut’s State Treasurer, was Now You Know’s first guest and included a story of running into Bill and Hillary Clinton at the final performance of The Color Purple. Theaters remain the home to magical events—though usually on the stage. Give tickets to a performance with Today Tix. It includes many bargains. Hartford Stage, one of the nation’s outstanding regional theaters, offers classes, including adult acting classes.

Acclaimed writer and director Abe Burrows observed that everyone in America has two businesses, their own—and show business. Introduce someone you care about to the wisest observer of Hollywood’s ways, Rob Long. His weekly Martini Shot podcast episodes are jewels of tight writing about how it all works, delivered with the insight of a veteran who has witnessed show business’s warm embrace and cold brushoff.

There’s also Sonny Bunch’s The Bulwark Goes to Hollywood. The Bulwark show business editor’s podcast features a variety of guests that will keep a listener who loves the movies returning episode after episode. Sonny by name and sonny by nature, Mr. Bunch is a deft hand at making box office fascinating. Every discerning moviegoer ought to be reading the venerable Rex Reed.

Representative Jim Himes was a Now You Know revelation with his guiltiest cultural pleasure, Cocaine Bear. Who would not be delighted to see anything with Margo Martindale in their digital stocking?

Rejoice at the birth of the Baby Jesus in December and rejoice again in January as the Queen of Comedy, the Empress of Standup, Sommore, returns to Connecticut. That’s right. She will be at the Funny Bone in Manchester on January 26th and 27th for four unforgettable performances.

Help someone navigate another year of disorienting politics and law ahead. Send a subscription to Josh Barro and Ken White’s Serious Trouble podcast. Everyone who reads Chris Cillizza’s So What Substack newsletter will profit from a subscription.

Turn the temperature down by sharing Mona Charen’s Beg to Differ podcast. It’s a weekly civil conversation from the center right to the center left, with a guest on each episode.

The most memorable podcast interview of the year came when Kara Swisher interviewed Liz Cheney, who was promoting her book and measuring her political prospects. Swisher’s tone is always even and confident. When she asked Cheney a standard question about access to abortion, the usually fearless Republican produced a string of discordant ums and ahs. It was astonishing and something that is more likely to happen in the long form interview that podcasts provide. Introduce someone to On with Kara Swisher and they will thank you the whole year through.

Other essential podcasts: Call Me Back with Dan Señor, one of freedom’s friends; The Bulwark with Charlie Sykes (if you don’t mind his potty mouth), Nilay Patel’s Decoder, The Good Fight with Yascha Mounk, The Lawfare Podcast, Politicology with Ron Steslow, a veteran of Linda McMahon’s 2010 campaign for the U.S. Senate and one of the founders of The Lincoln Project.

The Telegraph’s Ukraine: The Latest has never faltered in its clear-eyed coverage of the frontline of the battle between freedom and servitude—and neither must be. Share it.

Three you and someone you care about will need to sustain through a tumultuous year: Hacks on Tap with David Axelrod, irrepressible Mike Murphy and Robert Gibbs. The supreme podcast for book lovers, Backlisted. A reminder what those who came before us caused and endured, the unsurpassed The Rest is History.

The Apple Book store features sales on ebooks and audiobooks through the year. It’s no longer on sale but the audiobook of Everybody Knows is a sensation for a reason. Writer Jordan Harper is a star. Everybody loves a tale of a fixer. Put it in someone’s digital stocking.

If you face the British National Treasure Joanna Lumley’s challenge of finding a gift for someone who does not want one, take The Spectator’s Agony Aunt, Mary Killen’s, advice: every civilized person needs a sheet of stamps. There is nothing she does not know.

Confirm this is the most wonderful time of the year by introducing someone to the late Barry Humphries’ two most extraordinary creations, Sir Les Patterson and global gigastar Dame Edna Everage.