How Our Readers Made Wirecutter Better in June 2020

Thank you, as always, for your tweets, comments, and emails, which helped make Wirecutter better in June.

Last month, we asked you how Wirecutter could improve in our coverage of race and representation and what advice you’re looking for from us that we’re missing. We’re grateful for your thoughtful and patient feedback. Some of you said to keep doing what we’re doing. Many of you asked for more help in making ethical shopping decisions. You want to read more diverse voices and perspectives in our reviews, and you want more advice considering the specific needs of underserved audiences of many kinds—from low-income readers to older shoppers to those with disabilities to BIPOC readers. And you’re interested in seeing Wirecutter continue to work on racial justice within our own company and sharing more updates with you.

In true Wirecutter fashion, we’re thinking deeply through many next steps. We will show our work. Please keep the feedback coming.

Coverage you inspired

Sunscreen: We recently conducted additional testing and updated our guides to sunscreen, sunscreens for your face, and reef-safe sunscreen. Many of you have been letting us know you’d like to see us test more physical-only sunscreens, so that’s what we focused on this time around. We also reorganized and expanded our main sunscreen review with answers to the most common questions we’ve been getting. Now there are sections on what lab testing can (and cannot) reveal about sunscreen efficacy, how much sunscreen to use, and whether sunscreen expires (it does). Covering sunscreen is a challenge for many reasons, but it’s worth the effort, especially considering how many questions people have about the category. We appreciate your help in shaping our approach.

14 Antiracist Books for Kids and Teens Recommended by BIPOC Teachers and Librarians: Many of you told us we should be doing more to address institutional racism on many levels, including in our coverage. Senior staff writer Jackie Reeve interviewed BIPOC teachers, librarians, and book sellers on the books they recommend to help children and teens begin to understand and navigate these issues. It can be difficult to teach kids and teens about racism, but it’s critically important. Instead of linking to Amazon or another major retailer, we linked to Black-owned independent bookstores.

Cheap Essentials for Getting Back on Your Bike: We’ve been getting lots of questions lately related to dusting off old bicycles and getting back out on the road safely. In this post, we recommend some cheap essentials to help with that transition. From a helmet to front and rear lights to a pump and a multi-tool, we’ve got you covered.

Things we’re looking into thanks to you

A redesign of one of our favorite pillows: Commenter M. Senaccinni let us know that Nest Bedding has redesigned its Easy Breather pillow. M. Senaccinni owns and loves the older version of the pillow, but was disappointed by the changes after ordering the Easy Breather earlier this year. We’re investigating now.

Good questions

Will Wirecutter be testing portable UV-C lights or other UV-C–based disinfection tools? We’ve discussed this possibility several times since March, but we haven’t come to a conclusive decision yet. If we did try to take this on, we’d want to conduct the testing responsibly and rigorously. We don’t have access to our usual office testing spaces and equipment right now, which complicates things. We’ll keep pondering this, but we won’t move forward until we’re sure we could bring some genuine clarity to the category.

Excellent contributions

Shout-out to Sheila!—for sharing some great tips gleaned from extensive experience with one of our recommended ice pop molds, the Norpro Ice Pop Maker:

I have made hundreds and hundreds of pops with the Norpro mold. My unmolding tips:
Set the mold into a container of room temp or barely tepid water, not hot, so it’s not melting too fast. I use a shoebox-sized plastic tub so I don’t need to fill up the whole sink.
Secondly, make sure the water goes all the way up to the top of the mold. Otherwise, by the time the top part loosens enough to pull them out, the bottom has gotten too melty.
I keep checking them until I can pull one out, then remove the mold from the water, quickly pull out all the pops and place them on a parchment or waxed paper lined cookie sheet that I keep in the freezer. I put that back in the freezer for a bit to firm up the surface again before I wrap or bag them up.
Also, I don’t use the lid that comes with that plastic mold. If even 1 or 2 sticks get knocked askew and freeze like that then it’s a pain to remove the lid. I just set a timer for 30-45 min and put the sticks in at that point

Shout-out to SirWired!—for sharing thoughtful feedback on our sprinklers review in the form of an impassioned defense of impulse sprinklers (which we’ve previously tested but ultimately decided not to focus on), as well as a detailed rundown of personal recommendations that work even for the most oddly shaped portions of the lawn. SirWired consistently posts detailed, insightful comments on our site; this is only one recent example.

I think the decision to only review oscillating sprinklers is an oversight. There are simply a lot of lawns where they won’t do the trick. In addition, while impulse sprinklers do have a bunch of parts, they don’t have wear-prone gears at all, are likely to last longer, are inexpensive, don’t suffer from wind drift so much, and won’t clog, (because the single nozzle is much larger.) That said, some are better than others, and it would have been nice to see them reviewed. (I think evenness of watering might vary a bit.) The basic design of impulse sprinklers has been around for nearly a century, so there’s been plenty of time to get the kinks worked out.

Personally, I have a combination of oscillating and impulse sprinklers.

- One oscillating sprinkler (the Melnor 4500XT) for the one rectangular part of the yard
- Several metal impulse sprinklers (I think they were about $8 a piece.) I have several so I can leave them in-place and adjusted, and just move the hose around; at that price it’s no big deal.
- Two Gilmour Impulse PatternMaster sprinklers. (Melnor makes a clone of this one that appears to have come out of the same factory.) Those are *super* handy for weirdly-shaped sections of my lawn. It works by adjusting a ring around the base that divides your lawn up into 12 pie-shaped sections, and each section has it’s own range. For the short-range sections, it goes past them faster so they don’t get drenched in comparison to the longer ones. (And like all impulse sprinklers, it doesn’t have to go all the way around in a circle.)