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CiCi Zhang believes the best gift money can buy is, well, money itself. As a kid, her father attempted to buy her presents, but he so often missed the mark that he transitioned to giving her money by the time she was a teen, Zhang, 30, says.  At the start of their relationship, her husband wasn’t much better. A few of his greatest gift misses included a massage gun and a food scale. They couldn’t return the massage gun, Zhang says, so she kept it. As for the scale, the couple took it back and shopped for a replacement together. Despite his gifting shortcomings, Zhang’s husband refuses to give money as a gift, she says. As a compromise, she maintains a comprehensive wish list from which he can select items that are sure to please. Zhang grew up in China, where giving monetary gifts during holidays and special events is customary. “During Father’s Day, I probably will give my dad money,” says Zhang, who is now based outside of Seattle. “With money, it’s guaranteed that you can use it. Probably you want it, you can spend it, or you can save it.” Who wants to put a dollar amount on a priceless relationship?  Despite the fact that giving cash as a present is not only normative but preferred in other countries like Korea and Japan, in the US and other Western cultures, the exchange is sometimes seen as gauche. Cash is easy, quick, and, most of all, practical since almost everyone could use a little more of it. But for those same reasons, money can be seen as thoughtless, or worse, an implication the gift recipient really, really needs it — more than the candle warmer or the novelty socks you picked out in a panic on Christmas Eve. After all, who wants to put a dollar amount on a priceless relationship?  But if you were to ask recipients what they actually want for the holidays, the answer is clear: Cash is king. A December 2023 YouGov survey found 38 percent of global respondents said they’d prefer to get cash for the holidays — the largest share of potential presents. Another 10 percent said they wanted gift cards. The MassMutual Consumer Spending & Saving Index from 2022 found similar results: 31 percent of Americans said their ideal gift was cash; 16 percent said their dream present was a gift card.  The chasm between what people really want — money — and what givers feel comfortable gifting — pretty much anything else — has led gift-givers to waste millions of dollars on unwanted or lackluster presents. But you shouldn’t feel weird bestowing cash to your nearest and dearest, experts say. There are tactful ways to do it.  Americans have never liked giving cash gifts Americans have long been leery of giving money to their loved ones for the holidays. In the 1993 book The Modern Christmas in America: A Cultural History of Gift Giving, William Waits writes that even though some magazines offered advice on how to thoughtfully give money in the early 20th century, the public found the practice “impersonal” and cold. “As a gift item,” Waits wrote, “[money] ascribed a certain numerical value to relationships but did not define the quality of the relationships.” Gift certificates posed the same problem.  During that time, rural Americans gifted their friends and family food and small handmade wooden or sewn presents. Those in cities swapped figurines, wall hangings, and other crafts.  Throughout the 20th century, however, consumption and consumerism took root in the American psyche. Businesses and department stores began to heavily advertise their products during the holiday season, encouraging shoppers to find the perfect present behind their doors.  These days, the holiday shopping season seems to creep earlier and earlier with the goal of getting consumers to spend more and more, often on tangible, unwanted items — a good portion of which end up in the trash. Nearly half of holiday shoppers begin their purchasing as early as August, per a Bankrate survey. This year, Americans each plan to spend over $900 on holiday gifts, up from about $800 last year, according to NerdWallet’s annual holiday spending report. Why giving cash is so uncomfortable While Americans might be spending more on holiday gifts, or at least urged to, they aren’t necessarily choosing presents that are sure to delight the recipient.  When shopping, givers often choose an item that says more about themselves than it does the recipient, says Ernest Baskin, an associate professor of food, pharma, and health care at Saint Joseph’s University. Givers are preoccupied with the “wow” factor, research shows, a present that says, “Look how well I know you to have selected this thoughtful, meaningful item.”  “Most of the time, we’re not right about this, to be honest,” Baskin says. “Most of the time, [recipients] can tell you very well what their desire is, or they’d rather you just give them money so they can pick what their desire is.” Cash is practical — almost too practical — and givers tend to underestimate how much recipients appreciate useful, ordinary presents, research suggests. Indeed, handing someone a card with a check inside is less exciting than watching their face light up at the sight of a puppy in a box. However, after the initial excitement fades, the pragmatic, boring gift gets the most use. Cash is also seen as thoughtless and low-effort, says Julian Givi, associate professor of marketing at West Virginia University. Writing a check or hitting the ATM requires very little creative energy. “It’s really in no way personalized to you,” Givi says. “[Giving] 100 bucks to someone shows nothing about your knowledge of their hobbies, their interests, their passions, and so on.” Handing someone a card with a check inside is less exciting than watching their face light up at the sight of a puppy in a box. The relationship between the giver and the receiver is also paramount in cash-giving scenarios. A grandparent tucking a $5 bill into a card for a kid is kosher, “but going up the age ladder is a little awkward,” Givi says. Think about it: How would grandma feel if you gave her $25 in cash?   Cash gifts between friends is also tricky, says Lizzie Post, etiquette expert and co-president at the Emily Post Institute. That same $5 your aunt gives you every year is odd coming from a friend. There’s the implication that the receiver is in dire straits and perhaps needs the cash more than, say, a cashmere sweater. “We don’t often just hand our friends money,” Post says. “Instead, we go do something enriching with them.” Even if the recipient explicitly requests cash, Americans still find it taboo to comply. Instead, givers have found ways to creatively disguise the act of bestowing money, especially through registries. To make the exchange more thoughtful, wedding or baby shower guests will often contribute to a honeymoon or diaper fund. Platforms like Honeyfund and Babylist have facilitated these touchless cash gifts, eliminating the potential awkwardness of handing over a supposedly inconsiderate present. “At the end of the day, that’s still just cash that you’re giving,” Baskin says, “but now you can say that I’m actually giving something that the couple needs.” Gift cards, too, are simply cash by another name, only restricted to specific stores. Giving cash doesn’t have to be awkward Despite popular convention that cash presents are gauche, tacky, or uninspired, Post says the annals of etiquette wisdom permit monetary gifts. (Though she does find the practice of Venmoing money as a wedding gift a little crass.) The key is to make it thoughtful. Definitely include a card, Post says, and write a short note about how you hope they spend the dough: “Use this to buy those Taylor Swift concert tickets” or “Treat yourself to a massage.” As for the amount, consider your relationship with the recipient, but only give what is within your budget, Post says.   Remember how awkward it would be to give grandma $25? Giving her a gift card to a grocery store is likely to go over better, Givi says, even if the dollar amount is the same. “You’re putting in some thoughtfulness to select something related to her and who she is,” Givi says. “Then also, you had to go out and buy this thing.”  Definitely include a card, Post says, and write a short note about how you hope they spend the dough. If you feel so inclined as to ask for cash, offer the givers a few other options, Post says: “Someone asks you, ‘What do you want for Hanukkah?’ You could absolutely say to them, ‘I’m into these books. I’m into this sport. Anything to do with them is great. And of course, I’m always a fan of cash. Whatever is easiest for you to do.’” Should you still lack gifting inspiration, ask yourself what gift you’d like to receive, Baskin, the Saint Joseph’s researcher, says. Is it embroidered socks or is it cold hard cash?  When Baskin poses that same question to study participants, “the answer [that] often comes up,” he says, is “money.”

It’s a question that has bedeviled all too many of us: how to deal with loved ones who just keep giving us bad gifts.  The National Retail Federation estimates that last winter, about $966 billion worth of merchandise was sold over the holiday period — and about $148 billion of that likely returned. A survey from consumer research firm CivicScience showed that 28 percent of people had returned or exchanged a gift last year. According to Statista, the most wanted Christmas gift among US consumers is cold hard cash. The second most popular? Gift cards. The message seems to be: Thanks for the thought, but let me just choose what I want. Over a single year, let alone an entire lifetime, you might amass a pile of stuff you won’t ever use, taking up valuable space in your home. Do you harden your heart and simply give all of it away? Do you attempt to return every unwanted item as soon as you receive it? What about the things that don’t spark joy, per se, but do have some sentimental value? Standard etiquette advises us to remain gracious even in the face of laughably bad gifts, but research in the social psychology of gift-giving suggests we might be granting bad gift-givers too much benefit of the doubt. Sometimes, an ill-fitting gift is ill-fitting on purpose; it’s not mere miscommunication, but negative, even resentful communication. At the heart of solving this perennial problem is taking a good hard look at what motivates us to confer gifts unto others in the first place.  How to politely deal with well-meaning – but unwanted – gifts The question of what to do with gifts you won’t use is a popular etiquette question “in a world of more and more consumer goods,” according to Daniel Post Senning, an etiquette expert at The Emily Post Institute. Generally, “gifts should be received in the same spirit of generosity that they’re given in,” says Senning. “If you don’t particularly appreciate the gift itself, the expectation is that you thank [them] for the effort or thought that went into it.” With that in mind, Senning says that it’s not an etiquette cardinal sin to regift something if you know you can’t use it – for example, if you already happen to have the item. But you should avoid regifting anything handmade or personalized. “Beyond that, it’s about being upfront, ethical, honest” with the original gifter, if they ask, and the new recipient, Senning tells Vox. After all, a gift should be freely given with no obligations, and that includes the recipient having some choice in what they decide to do with the gift. (This is also a reminder to include a gift receipt whenever possible.)  “One of my core beliefs is that everything comes into your life for a reason but that doesn’t mean you need to keep it forever.” Even after the etiquette issue is resolved, it can be tricky figuring out which gifts you’ll no longer keep. “It’s usually easier to begin with items that have less sentimental value,” Juliet Landau-Pope, a productivity coach who has written about decluttering your home of unwanted gifts, tells Vox in an email. Larger items that take up a lot of space might be prime candidates for the initial decluttering, whether they’re going to be regifted or donated.  If there’s someone in your life who would appreciate a regift, you should ideally let them know that you were given something you can’t use for insert-reason-here but would love to give them. Clothes — a common but often miscalculated gift — jewelry, and household goods can all go to a Goodwill location or a local family shelter. Furniture, appliances, and other household items can also be donated to Habitat for Humanity’s ReStore program.    “One of my core beliefs is that everything comes into your life for a reason but that doesn’t mean you need to keep it forever,” Landau-Pope says. Take the example of greeting and holiday cards, which may be piling up in your drawer or taking over your fridge. Landau-Pope’s personal policy is to keep handmade cards from her children, while displaying the others for a set period of time, taking a picture of the display, and then recycling them.  Why so many of us get bad gifts In the ideal gift exchange scenario, we probably want to grace the people in our lives with gifts that will be met with undeniable enthusiasm. So why is it that we so often end up saddled with bad ones?  It might be an expectations mismatch: As Julian Givi, a marketing professor at West Virginia University, explains, “Whenever we’re gift-givers, we really focus on making people happy the moment that they’re opening the gift.” In order words, we prioritize the drama of a big reveal, as opposed to whether the gift is useful and valuable years down the road.  Then there are all the other unintentional ways we might give a bad gift. We might overestimate how passionate someone is about a hobby, sports team, or something else they once mentioned offhand. We might miss the mark simply because we don’t know enough about the other person; we wouldn’t guess in a million years that they have a bad childhood association with receiving hand-knit sweaters, for example.  We prioritize the drama of a big reveal, as opposed to whether the gift is useful and valuable years down the road.  Unfortunately, research shows that there are more sinister motives for giving subpar gifts than we’d like to think. For one, some people know exactly what a recipient wants — maybe they have a gift registry — but they buy something else anyway because the options presented are boring to them personally, says Givi. Another selfish motivation his research has discovered: people resist choosing gifts (like, say, a nice pair of sunglasses) that are better than the versions they own, likely to avoid feeling envious. Deborah Cohn, a marketing professor at the New York Institute of Technology, has identified five broad patterns for how lousy gifts happen. On the more innocuous side is due to ritual and obligation. “You’re going to be at a party, you have to bring somebody something,” Cohn tells Vox. But you don’t know enough about them or just don’t want to expend the mental effort of figuring out what they’d really want, so you grab something perfunctory. A more aggressive (but all too common) type of bad gift-giving is when the gift is intended to impose a certain identity on the recipient. We’ve all heard stories about parents who only give dolls and dresses to their daughters, and Legos and video games to their sons. It’s not that these givers don’t understand what their individual children’s real preferences are. It’s that they want to foist their own desire upon the recipient. “This actually happened to me,” says Cohn. “Somebody gave me a book about a religion that I don’t ascribe to.” Other typical bad gift-giving habits stem from pure self-centeredness, like picking out headphones for your spouse that you intend to use or wanting bragging rights for presenting the splashiest (read: most expensive) gift at the party. These kinds of gift-giving behaviors aren’t mistakes, and they aren’t innocent, Cohn contends. “It’s selfish,” she says. “It’s thinking more about yourself than the recipient, and people can see right through it.” Right now, Cohn is working on further research on whether there’s a correlation between habitually bad gift-giving and narcissism. How to be a better gift-giver Individual tastes in gifts can vary greatly, but there are some broad strokes of what people tend to appreciate. According to Givi, sentimental gifts — for example, something handmade or connected to a memory that the two of you share — are often underrated by gift-givers. Another finding in Givi’s research was that people tend to appreciate gifts that are given “out of the blue, as opposed to gifts that we receive on our birthday or any other special occasion.” The fact that it’s not being presented out of any social obligation may emphasize that the thought behind a gift really does count. Being a good gift-giver also involves imagining ourselves in another’s shoes. It takes conscious effort. You genuinely need to ask yourself what this particular person would want, not what you or some other abstract of a person would want in the same situation. It probably doesn’t help, then, that there’s still some social awkwardness around being explicit about what you want to be gifted and what you’d hate to receive. Maybe to some people, maintaining a regularly updated gift registry is gauche, but if you’re concerned about your pile of unused gifts gathering dust in the closet, taking the surprise out of gift-giving does seem like the preferable option. (According to Senning, it’s perfectly all right for gifters to ask for some direction on what gifts someone would like.) Cohn recalls the memory of a bad gift she got in childhood: a prank played on her by her father in which every gift box just contained a smaller one, with nothing inside the last. It motivated her to study what gifts mean and how people communicate through them. She told her mother how the prank had made her feel; when Cohn finished her dissertation, her mother gave her another set of nested boxes, this time full of chocolates. “I think that was the best gift I ever got because she wanted to take away my pain. That’s what that gift was meant to do,” she says. 

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Welcome to The Atlantic’s 2024 gift guide. With the help of an eclectic group of writers and editors, we offer 65 ideas for bringing more merriment, adventure, and wonder to the ones you love. Some items may be available at a holiday discount.The Person Who Has EverythingA Map of City Movement Courtesy of Traintrackr Do you need the current status of cars running on the Boston T or London Underground? Or perhaps you’re curious whether the Washington Metro, or the New York or Chicago or San Francisco rapid transit systems, are running smoothly. You need to know all this, don’t you? Of course you don’t. But it would be cool to have that information flashing at you in twinkling lights. Traintrackr—which gets real-time information from these urban transit systems—is a great gift for someone who has everything, especially if they’ve lived in a city, used to live in a city, wish they did—or are glad they don’t. (“Oh, look, the Red Line to South Station is all jammed up again. Bummer.”) — Tom Nichols, Staff Writer$129–$315 on TraintrackrLos Alamos Staff Mug Courtesy of Cafe Press When my husband came home from a visit to Los Alamos a few years back, he bore a mug that featured a bewildering collage of grainy, black-and-white headshots. Only after close inspection did I realize: These were the identification badges of the scientists who worked on the Manhattan Project. If you’re a physics nerd or history buff, many of the faces are recognizable—Enrico Fermi, Richard Feynman, Luis Alvarez, John von Neumann, and of course, J. Robert Oppenheimer. The mug has been discontinued at Los Alamos History Museum, but an enterprising science historian and blogger, Alex Wellerstein, sells one online. It’s a mesmerizing object, visually stimulating yet intensely sobering, which seems appropriate for morning coffee. — Jennifer Senior, Staff Writer$10.49–$13.49 on Cafe PressSwiss Army Knife Courtesy of Victorinox No one needs another scarf or another sweater (even a great sweater), and we all have enough socks to last us from now until Armageddon. Don’t even talk to me about steak knives. Knives are all the same. Except for the Swiss Army knife, which is an entire tool chest contained in one beautifully designed red cover. You’ve got your blades, you’ve got your magnifying glass, you’ve got a fork that can be a spoon, a spoon that can be a fork, a hammer, tweezers, a toothpick, a corkscrew. I believe there’s even a fishing pole somewhere in there. What a gift! It looks beautiful just sitting there on the counter. It fits nicely in a drawer. And it gives you confidence in your pocket. Stepping on it could be a problem, but that’s true for any knife. It really is the perfect gift. — Henry Winkler, Actor$115 on VictorinoxA Future Classic Courtesy of Lorca Watch Company Watch collecting can be a brutal, unforgiving hobby, but not if you start out right with the Lorca Model No. 2. The musician and watch lover Jesse Marchant designed this future classic. It’s got 100 meters of water-resistance (go for a swim!), can time events with a chronograph, and even has a second time zone on the bezel for travel. Most important, it will make you look smart and attractive. Spend $2,650 for a watch way cooler than a Rolex. Tell them Gary sent you. — Gary Shteyngart, Author $2,650 on Lorca WatchesHandcrafted Copper Grater Courtesy of Tenzo No one you know needs to own a beautiful handcrafted grater in the shape of an animal. Everyone you know would be thrilled to receive one. These are made by the chef-adored Japanese brand Ooya Seisakusho using centuries-old techniques and can be used to grate lemon, ginger, garlic, cheese, or anything else. This is the rare kitchen tool that requires no technique and very little storage space but makes everything feel special. — Ellen Cushing, Staff Writer$44 on TenzoA Christmas Miracle Courtesy of Rogaine This holiday season my gift recommendation is the product known as Rogaine. Is this a gift? I believe it is a gift to the world, because it actually works. When I started taking it many years ago, I had a rapidly growing bald spot and receding hairline. Now I am proud to say that that bald spot is the exact same size. What product keeps its promises? I am just as bald as I was seven years ago. It’s a Christmas miracle that must be respected and honored. — Judd Apatow, Writer, Comedian, and Director$31.84–$80.00 on AmazonA Speaker Built to Last Courtesy of Tivoli Audio The perfect portable speaker is an essential item in any house, especially if more is less. And the Tivoli PAL BT radio is definitely giving both. It’s audio ambidextrous, doubling as both an analog radio and a Bluetooth speaker, with a crisp sound. And it’s fun! The retro-radio look comes in customizable popping colors. It’s also a sturdy workhorse that is weather-resistant and holds a charge for what seems like forever (okay, I think technically 12 hours). Reliable, stylish, functional, the PAL BT is a gift built to last in a time when our world is full of disposables. — Claudine Ebeid, Executive Producer, Audio$179.99–$219.99 on AmazonA Subscription for the Soul Courtesy of Whitefish Review A subscription may be a small thing to unwrap; it is a wonderful thing to receive for the rest of the year. Pick a small literary journal from your mom’s hometown, or from where your father-in-law attended college. The muted response on Christmas morning will turn into a year’s worth of calls or texts as each issue delivers unexpected stories, poems, essays, and art that feel as though you picked them out personally. — Evan McMurry, Senior Editor$35 one-year subscription with auto renew on Whitefish ReviewPassword Peace of Mind Courtesy of 1Password It won’t get you any points for romance or sentimentality, but a gift card to 1Password or another password manager can reduce the stress of being a human being online in 2024—and that’s perhaps the nicest thing you can do for a friend or loved one. These services are widely (and rightly) recommended for the security they can bring to your online accounts, but for me, the real benefit has been the relief of having to remember just one single password. I appreciate this every time I have to log in to order takeout, see my bank statement, or view a message sent to me by a doctor via some arcane medical portal. And it’s also taken the pain out of signing up for any other new service or site—no need to create a new password and keep track of it, ever again. — Rebecca J. Rosen, Senior Editor$25–$100 on 1PasswordTwo Tickets to a Show Getty Images For people who covet physical objects—to the point where they either cannot or should not keep collecting them—I like to go in the opposite direction, with something more experiential: two tickets to a show (ideally for the both of us to go together). Either I pick the show to surprise them, or I hand them my credit card and let them decide. Not only does this gift come with the built-in promise of making a memory; it also leaves no tangible trace behind—that is, unless they can’t help but swing by the merch stand. — Allegra Frank, Senior EditorOne Good Scraper Courtesy of August Thomsen Corp. A nice, sturdy bench scraper: Sure, you can (and will) use this for its intended purposes—scooping up chopped vegetables, slicing up bread dough, etc. But you’ll find yourself using it for so much more (in my case: scraping up the inevitable post-dinner mess from the splat mat under my kid’s high chair). — Dan Fallon, Senior Editor$18.35 on AmazonA Dollop of Luxury Courtesy of La Mer I take my six-step beauty routine very seriously. My favorite part is always, always applying La Mer’s Moisturizing Soft Cream. I love using the tiny spatula to spread the cream all over my face, watching it melt into my skin. And honestly, when I apply these luxurious products, I feel like I’m the ultimate beauty snob. — Jenisha Watts, Senior Editor$100–$1,440 on Saks Fifth AvenueCeramic Sun Bowls Courtesy of the Nationlal Nordic Museum My husband and I received four of these bowls as a wedding gift last year, and they haven’t seen the inside of a cabinet yet: They’re in such constant rotation in our household, and so nice to look at, that as soon as we take them out of the dishwasher we just put them right back in a (very pretty) stack on the counter to be used again the next day. The handmade ceramic dishes come in dozens of colors and patterns—I recommend mixing and matching—and are the perfect size for your morning bowl of cereal or yogurt. — Amy Weiss-Meyer, Senior Editor$38 on National Nordic MuseumA Morning Ritual Courtesy of De’Longhi The coffee lovers in your life might swear by their French press or daily Starbucks, but that’s only because they haven’t experienced the sweet, sweet satisfaction of making themselves that perfect cappuccino in the morning. This gift isn’t just about better coffee (although trust me, it’s so much better). It’s about introducing a ritual of slowness, simplicity, and concerted attention in a world that too often pulls us toward the very opposite. Think: all the benefits of meditation but infinitely more delicious (and at a fraction of the price of most espresso machines!). — Rogé Karma, Staff Writer$119.95 on De’LonghiAdventurersShibumi Shade Courtesy of Shibumi Shade Visit almost any beach in North Carolina, where I live, and you’ll see what looks like a Christo and Jeanne-Claude installation of two-tone blue flags stretching down the sand. They’re called Shibumi Shades, and they are the state’s best export since Rhiannon Giddens. Real talk: I found them dumb and gimmicky and doubted that they worked right up until we received one as a gift. They’re really light, much simpler to put up than any other beach shelter, and produce a surprisingly large shade area in even gentle breeze. — David A. Graham, Staff Writer$250 on AmazonA Speaker Fit for a Music Critic Courtesy of Bose In a world of junky wireless boom boxes with pointless flashing lights and walkie-talkie-level sound quality, this unassuming, palm-sized pellet is a quiet—but loud—miracle. For years, I’ve brought one along on beach trips, bike rides, and various other occasions that I suspected might suffer from a dearth of Charli XCX. Waterproof, sand-resistant, and capable of producing a rich roar of sound, the speaker has only one bit of filigree—a stretchy strap for fastening to tree branches. The durability is part of the fun: I love knowing that a potential party is always bumping around at the bottom of my backpack. — Spencer Kornhaber, Staff Writer$119 on BoseRound Mini Shoulder Bag Courtesy of Uniqlo Spend time walking around any city and you’ll likely see one of these so-called Millennial Birkin slung across the body of someone Out and About Doing Stuff. The Uniqlo round mini shoulder bag—reasonably priced, modestly designed, solidly constructed—is a handy gift for a person of any generation, a reminder that “fashion can be affordable without being disposable,” Gillian B. White wrote in 2019. Uniqlo made its founder, Tadashi Yanai, the richest man in Japan; its parent company is one of the largest apparel retailers in the world. Yet in the United States, the brick-and-mortars mostly exist in coastal cities. You may just have to order online. — Shan Wang, Programming Director$19.90 on Uniqlo Protein Bars You’ll Crave Courtesy of Hakan Chocolatier Going to the grocery store and looking at the protein-added products is the equivalent of having a closet full of clothes and absolutely nothing to wear. Yes, there are about a million options, but at best, they don’t want to make you throw up, and at worst, well. I’d given up until a restaurateur I respect shared that he'd found a gem: Håkan Chocolatier protein bars, made by a chocolate company in upstate New York. At $73 for a box of 12, the bars do not come cheap. When I tried one of the biscoff-flavored ones, I was astonished. It truly did taste like a regular, craveable, eat-when-high chocolate; loaded with quinoa, it had the effect of a fancy Crunch Bar. They don’t feel “healthy,” per se, but they’re what I want to pack the next time I go on a hiking excursion. — Serena Dai, Senior Editor$73 on Hakan ChocolatierA Travel Companion Courtesy of Roadtrippers Okay, yes, I’m recommending an app. But I’m really recommending the gift of adventurous whimsy. Road-trippers, whether you give the standard app or a gift-friendly premium version, will delight any road-trip enthusiast in your life. Much more detailed and user-friendly than a standard map service (with routes and stops customizable by budget, vehicle type, and much more), the app is great for trip planning. But its real magic is its on-the-road serendipity. As you travel, route maps update with all of the attractions that beckon nearby, whether arts venues or natural wonders or quirky cultural spots. Wax museums? Waterfalls? A house made of newspapers? The app will keep finding new proof that, in road-tripping as in so much else, the journey is the destination. — Megan Garber, Staff WriterFree, $35.99–$59.99 a year for the annual plans on RoadtrippersOsprey Skimmer Courtesy of Osprey Packs Traditionally, people think of the water-bladder backpack for long hikes and cycling rides. I think of my Osprey when I think of a road trip—quality time on an extended drive with my partner, my bestie, my ride-or-dies. Going on a road trip, enclosed with nothing to do but yap, is an underrated way to spend leisure time. The only issue is refreshing on water, which the backpack solves. The water reservoir holds more than double what the classic Stanley cup fits, and the long straw means even the driver can sip without much trouble. And maybe this is gauche, but I could also see hydration-obsessed Americans carrying one around their travels in European cities. Hiking backpacks: not just for hikers! — Serena Dai, Senior Editor$110 on OspreyA Wondrous Train Ride Courtesy of Alaska Railroad If you’re hoping to see North America’s tallest mountain, there’s a roughly 70 percent chance you won’t; Denali is often shrouded in cloud cover partially or fully obfuscating the mammoth mountain. But even if you don’t join the “30 percent club,” as locals call it, you have a 100 percent surefire way to make the trip to the far-flung destination worth the journey. Alaska Railroad’s Denali Star Train runs daily in the summer, from Anchorage to Fairbanks, with a stop at Denali National Park. The glass-domed ceilings in parts of the train allow for panoramic views of the Alaskan countryside, and even an opportunity to glimpse the elusive peak. — Andrea Valdez, Managing EditorPrice varies, on Alaska RailroadSwinging in the Rain Courtesy of Eagles Nest Outfitters I love backpacking but hate sleeping in a tent because I'm almost always too warm. A few years ago, I started experimenting with hammock camping but woke up to a midnight thunderstorm and had to duck into a tent where two other people were already sleeping. Never again! ENO sells a rain tarp and a bug net that both fit around its hammocks. I use them with my favorite old hammock to sleep outside while staying dry, itch-free, and, most important, cool. — Rachel Gutman-Wei, Supervisory Senior Associate Editor$84.95 on Eagles Nest OutfittersArt LoversBrandon Bird Artwork Courtesy of Brandon Bird We live in a time of rich and varied mass-market decorative goods. They’re delightful but stamped out, assembly-line style. Generative AI is making things even weirder. All of that means now is a great time to give original art—pieces created uniquely by a human and sold as singular works or small editions. You can find these in local galleries, but you can also buy them online—on Etsy, on eBay, or directly from the artists. An example: Brandon Bird was one of the earliest painters creating fine-art mash-ups of pop-culture figures. He sells signed prints and original drawings and oil paintings of Law & Order characters, Transformers, the exteriors of Sears stores, and more at extremely affordable prices. — Ian Bogost, Contributing Writer$3–$550 on Brandon BirdThe Story of Art Without Men Courtesy of W. W. Norton & Company If, like me, you love museums, love coffee-table books, and loathe the systemic erasure of women from the Western cultural canon, then this gift is for you. In 2015, Katy Hessel went to an art fair, only to slowly realize that, “out of the thousands of artworks before me, not a single one was by a woman.” This was by no means unusual, given that approximately 87 percent of artworks in American museums were made by men, and most of us struggle to name even three female artists off the top of our head. And yet all this time, women have been making work quietly in the shadows. The Story of Art Without Men is Hessel’s attempt to give them their due, documenting the pioneers, Renaissance women, portraitists, and photographers whose work is only now starting to get the attention it’s long deserved. — Sophie Gilbert, Staff Writer$42 on BookshopMuseum-Quality Prints Courtesy of Aperture These prints from Aperture are perfect for someone with an interest in art and photography, a hobbyist, or a friend starting an art collection. Aperture’s limited-edition-print program offers museum-quality pieces from incredible photographers including Michael Wolf, Nico Krijno, and An-My Lê—ready to hang and impress fellow art lovers. Proceeds support both the artists and Aperture’s educational initiatives, exhibitions, and public programming. Whether your friend is into abstract or fashion-focused or documentary photography, you’ll find something for them here. — Lucy Murray Willis, Photo Editor$150–$20,000 on ApertureDreamy Artwork by Kim Mintz Courtesy of Kim Mintz A recommendation from my own personal wish list: Kim Mintz is one of my favorite working artists; her paintings remind me of fantasies I had as a little girl, delicate sweetness and magic. But there’s a striking, eerie edge to Mintz’s work that lends it an otherworldly aura (you’ll dream of celestial goddesses weeping starlight). If your style is dreamy and unabashedly feminine, you’ll appreciate her oeuvre. — Elizabeth Bruenig, Staff WriterPrice varies, on Kim Mintz ArtTiny, Whimsical Artwork Courtesy of Tiny Framed Artwork As the saying goes, sometimes good things come in small packages. Such is the case with Elisa Wikey’s Tiny Framed Things, a series of whimsical art prints that will, as promised, “woo and delight even the curmudgeoniest of mudgeons.” On offer are dozens of diminutive illustrations, such as a teeny tardigrade and an elfin elephant. — Andrea Valdez, Managing Editor$15–$25 on Elisa WikeyAkari Light Sculptures Courtesy of Akari at Noguchi I’ve been trying to incorporate more functional art and objects into my home recently, and one thing that has really made a world of difference in my home office is my new Akari light-sculpture fixture, which immediately transformed the space. These lamps and fixtures are originally designed by the artist and architect Isamu Noguchi using Japanese Gifu lanterns as inspiration. — Vann R. Newkirk II, Senior Editor$175.00, $157.50 for members on Noguchi ShopComfortA Raincoat Courtesy of Stutterheim Cold rain is unpleasant. Cold rain on vacation is more unpleasant. Cold rain on vacation when you don’t have rain gear: more unpleasant still. Under these conditions, I convinced myself that spending a few hundred dollars on a Stutterheim raincoat was actually rational. And, actually, I don’t regret my purchase. It’s designed by Swedes, who I suppose have no choice but to know a thing or two about dressing for the weather. In this raincoat, precipitation means nothing to me. It’s long; it’s actually waterproof rather than merely water resistant; it makes me look and feel like a fisherman. Does someone in your life want to look and feel like a fisherman? This coat’s for them. — Juliet Lapidos, Senior Editor$380 on StutterheimPillow Slippers Courtesy of Joomra I recently had a child, which means that my life is joyous and meaningful in one big way but inconvenient and painful in a million other ways. One thing that has helped: these pillowy slippers I bought off of Amazon. The brand I have is Joomra, but you can buy any of the similar ones that sound like someone threw some Scrabble tiles in the air. These puppies cradle your soles and massage your arches. They cushion your footfalls as you run up and down the stairs at 3 a.m. to get the other kind of bottle, because the baby doesn’t like that one kind. They will probably fall apart after a few months, just like your sleep-training plans, but they’re cheap, so it doesn’t really matter. Treat your feet and get these. — Olga Khazan, Staff Writer$23.99 - $24.99 on AmazonMarshmallow Pants Courtesy of Old Navy Apparently they are called “joggers.” I’ve jogged in them only once—down the driveway to get the Sunday paper. They are Sunday-paper sweatpants. You are not allowed to wear them anywhere but in your room. You are absolutely not allowed to take them off. They are not multipurpose; they do not belong on casual Fridays or work-from-home Tuesdays. If you try to work in them, they will disappear. They are skinny jeans made out of marshmallows. Their elastic is sourced from space materials and they will live forever, just like the avocado stain from your nine-month-old that has been firmly emblazoned on the butt. — Walt Hunter, Contributing Editor$39.99 on Old NavyA Level-Up for Travelers Courtesy of Antler Packing efficiently makes travel so much less stressful. Although packing cubes might not be the most glamorous present, they certainly are one of the most useful. (For maximum compression, buy the kind with double zips.) If your gift recipient travels a lot for work, then a travel steamer will stop them from having to rely on hotel irons to remove creases from businesswear. — Helen Lewis, Staff Writer$65 on AmazonStovetop Fryer Courtesy of Yoshikawa When my in-laws first gave my husband and me this pot, we thought it was silly. Then we used it to fry pork chops and spring rolls and sufganiyot and became true believers. This little workhorse is great for small spaces because it’s easy to store and easy to clean, and because it keeps oil from splattering all over undersize kitchens. — Rachel Gutman-Wei, Supervisory Senior Associate Editor$39 on AmazonOofos Sandals Courtesy of Oofos Do their knees hurt? Healing someone’s achy feet or knees is a high form of care. Please give your loved ones these Oofos sandals to wear around the house, or in public if their commitment to style is weaker than their commitment to comfort. Perhaps they look like they could spring someone into orbit, but bouncing around space isn’t hard on your knees, I bet. They’re called “recovery sandals” and are effective if you need to recover from things like walking or standing (but also useful after feats of fitness!). I recommend sizing down instead of sizing up. — Bhumika Tharoor, Managing Editor$79.95 on OofosDelicious Prints Courtesy of Tom Hovey This is for the Great British Bake Off lover in your life, and if there isn’t one, get some friends who know how to eat treats and relax! Tom Hovey, the illustrator who cooks up the darling little illustrations that pop up on the show to whet your appetite, is selling them. Who doesn’t want to gaze at a hand-raised pie or a “kneadapolitan” sculpture forever? Import the show’s deliciously calm vibes onto your walls! — Hanna Rosin, Senior Editor $18.95-$37.90 on Tom HoveyHow Italians Make Pasta Courtesy of Bialetti Industries My mother, born and raised in Italy, bought me one of these while I was in college, and I’ve been using it ever since. The pot’s oval size can hold longer pasta shapes in their entirety, and the lid saves you the cabinet space needed to store a colander. Just remember to save some cooking water! — Matteo Wong, Staff Writer$31.99 on AmazonSocks Courtesy of Le Bon Shoppe The purpose of a gift, in my view, is to give someone something they actually want. And everybody—everybody—always needs socks. Pick high-quality wool or even cashmere socks in sensible earth tones; maybe knee socks for women. Laugh all you want at this banal idea, but remember: No one will ever secretly take them back to the store or stuff them in the back of a closet. — Anne Applebaum, Staff Writer$10–$28 on Le Bon ShoppeBridging a Generation GapA Child’s Book of Art: Great Pictures, First Words Courtesy of Dorling Kindersley Publishing For me, a great way to bridge a generation gap when gift giving is to hunt down a used book, now out of print, that I’ve loved. I’m doubly happy if it’s one that I loved reading with my kids—a present for both young and old. In our family, we pored over A Child’s Book of Art: Great Pictures, First Words. Selected by Lucy Micklethwait, the art from museums around the world is stunning, and arranged with alluring beauty and wit. My kids still recall their delight over the 17th-century Dutch painting titled The Sense of Smell (one of several depictions of the “Five Senses”), showing a toddler’s bare rear end being wiped. And yes, looking at paintings still gives them real pleasure. — Ann Hulbert, Literary Editor$24.99 on AmazonLa Mer Advent Calendar Courtesy of La Mer “Skin-care, if you’re doing it right, means claiming a moment of tenderness in an abrasive world,” Paris Hilton wrote in her memoir last year. I’m constantly torn between my cynicism about the beauty-industrial complex and everything it does to women, and my gullible hope that a product out there will make me look and feel somehow … better. In the spirit of the season, I’m leaning toward the tenderness argument with this recommendation. Plus, if there’s one thing that brings even Zoomers and Boomers together right now, it’s the promise of overpriced face cream in an aesthetically pleasing box. This La Mer advent calendar has 12 days of antiaging gifts for either the seasoned beauty veteran in your life or the TikTok-tutored teenager with ludicrously expensive taste—or both. — Sophie Gilbert, Staff Writer$600 on Saks Fifth AvenueA Fresh Squeeze Courtesy of SMEG Here’s what you want from your citrus juicer: easily produced juice, the simplest cleanup imaginable, and styling that doesn’t look like a clunky collab between a wood chipper and a kitchen appliance. Smeg has delivered—quite beautifully (and it takes just 36 seconds to clean—I timed it). Should you give this to anyone with a toddler (speaking again from experience), you’re actually giving them two presents: juice and occupied little hands, because it’s so easy to use. What better way to show your loved ones how much you care than by helping them keep scurvy at bay with elegant Italian design? — Bhumika Tharoor, Managing Editor$199.95 on AmazonThe Complete Calvin and Hobbes Courtesy of Andrew McMeel Publishing “The hard part for us avant-garde post-modern artists is deciding whether or not to embrace commercialism,” 6-year-old Calvin admits to his best friend (and stuffed tiger), Hobbes. As an adult, I laugh at the comic strip’s punch line: “Oh, what the heck. I’ll do it,” says the child artist who works mostly in snow sculpture and sidewalk chalk. As a kid, grabbing skinny Calvin and Hobbes compilations off my parents’ bookshelves, I laughed just as hard, probably because I had a firm grasp of only about two-thirds of the funny-sounding words in the panels. The marriage of high and low, young and old, is what makes Bill Watterson’s strip work. An elementary schooler and his imaginary friend protest unfair bedtimes, play outside, and try to avoid eating vegetables … by citing unfavorable poll numbers for the elected position of “Dad,” acting out noirish private-eye fantasies, and ranting verbosely about the contemporary art world. When it’s time for my kids to read these strips, they’ll be pulling these heftier versions off the shelf. — Emma Sarappo, Associate Editor$148.80 paperback or $209.25 hardcover on BookshopField of Dreams Bourbon Courtesy of Field of Dreams Whiskey Field of Dreams—it’s a movie about fathers and sons, men and their heroes, seeing ghosts, plowing under your corn and freaking everyone out. Now a bunch of current and former baseball players are selling whiskey that is supposedly made from that very corn. (Presumably this just means corn from that general area of Iowa.) The fun part is that opening each bottle is kind of like opening a pack of baseball cards—the wooden cap has a famous baseball player carved into it and which player it is will be a little surprise. The other fun part is that it’s whiskey. — Kaitlyn Tiffany, Staff Writer$54.99 on Field of DreamsIt Takes Two Courtesy of EA Games I’ve always had fun playing board games and video games with my kids over the years, but so-called couch co-op video games have given us some of our best experiences. One recent game really stands out as far as creativity, gameplay, cooperative puzzle solving, and just plain fun: It Takes Two, available on several consoles and PC. You play as a mother and father trapped in a surreal world, trying to escape and rescue their relationship with each other and with their daughter. It was a real hit during one of our last family get-togethers—fun to both play and watch. — Alan Taylor, Senior EditorPrice varies, on EA Games Subscription to the Criterion Channel Courtesy of The Criterion Channel The Criterion Channel is the best streaming service for movies that are not only suitable for everyone but also genuinely timeless. Easy cross-generational entry points: PlayTime, The 400 Blows, The Graduate, and A Hard Day’s Night. Or, if no kids are around, you can go a little more adult—Frances Ha or A Woman Under the Influence, or try something wacky, such as House (Hausu). — Allegra Frank, Senior Editor$10.99 monthly, $99.99 annually on Criterion ChannelReadersHardcover Versions of Beloved Books Courtesy of Penguin RandomHouse Not every book gets read more than once, but in my house, the ones that do begin to accumulate dog ears, marginalia, stains, and beaten corners until their spines finally crack and split. When a favorite title has earned that distinction, it’s worth purchasing in a beautiful, thoughtfully designed hardcover edition that can stand up to further wear—something like the Penguin Vitae series from Penguin Classics, or an omnibus from Library of America. This is an old-fashioned but flawless gift: More than a decade after I first ripped my paperback volume of Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials trilogy in half, its Everyman’s Library hardcover successor, with a ribbon bookmark sewn in, awaits my next visit. — Emma Sarappo, Associate Editor$79.05 on BookshopThe Warren Commission Report Courtesy of Burnside Rare Books Allen Dulles, the former CIA director who served on the Warren Commission to investigate the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, thought it would be pointless to release to the public the 26 volumes of hearings and exhibits the commission compiled. “Nobody reads,” he said. “Don’t believe people read in this country.” But the government put them out anyway, in a set that weighs 54 pounds and contains more than 16,000 pages. New copies were mostly purchased by libraries and colleges; reportedly fewer than 6,000 sets were ever made. That means they’re rare. If you know someone who would be offended by Dulles’s characterization of the dull American public … maybe they would like one! They make for wild reading, and 54 pounds is a hilarious weight for a present. — Kaitlyn Tiffany, Staff Writer$2,750 on AbeBooksVintage Letterpress Book Courtesy of Hanuman Books Although a vintage Hanuman book is sometimes hard to get your hands on, little is more inspiring than receiving one. It almost doesn’t matter whether the author was Patti Smith or Candy Darling—these letterpress books were the brainchild of the art critic Raymond Foye and the artist Francesco Clemente. Printed in India and distributed from the Chelsea Hotel for about $5 apiece in the ’80s, each volume was edited and designed by the pair. They are more than books; they are little objects of art that transport you back to the old world of analog, New York cool. — Xochitl Gonzalez, Staff Writer$75.96 on AbeBooksInternational Book Membership Courtesy of Archipelago Books This monthly membership is perfect for a friend who’s read everything, or a father-in-law who likes to talk with you about books. Archipelago Books publishes fiction, poetry, and other genres in translation, with a genuinely global outlook. One month you might get the Italian postmodernist Antonio Tabucchi’s little masterpiece For Isabel: A Mandala; the next month, a new translation of Aimé Césaire’s Return to My Native Land. And if the books start piling up, the gorgeous square covers will tempt you to take a mental-health day during a slow week in February to work through the backlog. — Walt Hunter, Contributing Editor$15 or $25 monthly/$150 or $250 annually on Archipelago BooksLittle Free Library Courtesy of Little Free Library Recently my block in Brooklyn wanted to honor the memory of one of our neighbors who died, and we got one of these little lending libraries. It’s been a wonderful addition to our street, and it would make a perfect gift for someone in your life who accumulates books and is looking to share. The libraries, which are available in different sizes and colors, come already built. You just need to stake them in the ground, which is not hard, and you have an instant focal point for your community—plus an endless source of free reading material. — Gal Beckerman, Staff Writer$189.95–$479.95 on Little Free Library The Little Book Light Courtesy of Glocusent I like to read before bed, often much later than my wife does. A few years ago, this presented itself as a problem. See, I had to keep the lights on. She wanted the lights off. This is not the stuff of serious marital strife, but still, I needed a solution. Enter this wonderful little book light. It bends to different angles. It has a few brightness modes. It’s perfect for the reader in your life who doesn’t want to annoy their partner. — Gal Beckerman, Staff Writer$14.99 on AmazonThe Essential Book Accessory Courtesy of HIGHTIDESTORE DTLA Everyone needs a book stand (though few know that they do). The High Tide book stand is beautiful, affordable, and impressively engineered to hold your books open so you can read hands-free (great for reading while you eat) or (and this is how I use mine) to sit your books upright, face-out on a shelf or bookcase, thereby transforming these books and their covers into artworks. — Peter Mendelsund, Creative Director$17.90 on AmazonDoomscrollersFlip Phone Courtesy of Caterpillar Buying a nice flip phone is a lot harder these days than most people might realize. The options at your local mall are likely to be flimsy, ugly, unsatisfying. The best flip phone you can buy right now for someone who might actually really enjoy (or be in dire need of) the throwback lifestyle is the CAT S22 Flip Phone, which was designed for construction workers and the like. It’s heavy in the hand; it has that satisfying “thwack” when you open it; you can drop it from six feet up; supposedly you can even drop it in bleach. And it looks cool—very “retro,” “Y2K,” etc. — Kaitlyn Tiffany, Staff Writer$79.00 on AmazonSay Cheese, Then Wait Courtesy of Fujifilm The rise of smartphones ushered in a new camera age, a visually heady era when everyone became their own personal photographer. Predictably, though, people became disillusioned with their overflowing, memory-hogging camera rolls, sparking a trendy, retro-inspired instant-camera comeback in the 2010s. But both digital and instant cameras serve our modern-day impulse for immediate gratification. People looking to dampen their digital desires should consider the power of the disposable camera. Buy a Fujifilm QuickSnap Flash 400, take care in framing the limited number of exposures, and wait patiently for a local photo lab to develop the images. — Andrea Valdez, Managing Editor$17.40 on AmazonA Complex Candle Courtesy of Flamingo Estate I know, I know. It really is harder to read books these days. My phone has done a number on my attention span, and there are always just countless distractions. But one thing I’ve found helpful in focusing and really making a pleasant reading experience is lighting candles. I love a unique candle, and one of my favorites these days is the Night Blooming Jasmine & Damask Rose candle from Flamingo Estate. It’s unique, it’s complex, it’s transportive—and, most important, it helps me relax into a good reading session. — Vann R. Newkirk II, Senior Editor $60 on Flamingo EstateIdeas to Go Courtesy of Moleskin After growing up immersed in my father’s stories of adventure, I’ve recently begun sifting through his old journals. Each page reveals delicate, hand-drawn maps and meticulous notes in fine ballpoint pen, capturing the beauty he witnessed. His ability to document the world with such care deeply influenced my own love for photography and storytelling. Today, I carry on that tradition, always traveling with a pen and notebook. For those who embrace exploration, it’s a way to document their journey—a notebook and pen are essential for capturing fleeting moments and reflections on the road. — Lucy Murray Willis, Photo Editor$15.75 on AmazonBlooming Bulbs Courtesy of PlantGem Present these beauties early in the gift-giving season to allow time for your lucky friends to plant them—because there’s nothing a hardcore scroller needs more than a trip outside. — Elizabeth Bruenig, Staff Writer

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Giving to charity is great, not just for the recipients but for the givers, too. But it can be intimidating to know how to pick the best charity when there are thousands of worthy causes to choose from, and especially when so many are suffering around the world. Yet that suffering makes it all the more clear why giving, and why doing our best to give effectively, is so important. There’s a lot of need out there, and it matters not just whether we give, but how. Effective giving can translate into more lives saved and more lives improved. Even among charities that target the poorest people in developing countries — where charities can typically be most impactful because a dollar goes much further — the most effective charities produce a whopping 100 times more benefit than average charities, according to expert estimates. So this holiday season, we thought it might be helpful to update our annual guide to giving. Think of this as not only a rundown of charity recommendations, but also a broader guide to thinking about how to give. Here are a few simple tips for end-of-year giving that can help. 1) Check in with charity recommenders It’s of course possible to research charity options yourself, but you can save some time by outsourcing that labor to a careful, methodologically rigorous charity recommender like GiveWell. Charity Navigator has started following in GiveWell’s footsteps by evaluating charities based on their ability to do the most good at the lowest cost; GiveWell has a longer track record, but Charity Navigator’s impact scores are worth consulting, too. GiveWell, which functions somewhat like a grantmaker, currently lists four top charities. Its recommendation, if you find it hard to choose among the four, is to donate to the Top Charities Fund, which goes directly to those top charities based on GiveWell’s assessment of where the money is most helpful given the different groups’ funding needs. The top charities are: Malaria Consortium, which helps distribute preventive antimalarial medication to children (a program known as “seasonal malaria chemoprevention”) Against Malaria Foundation, which buys and distributes insecticidal bed nets, primarily in sub-Saharan Africa but also in Papua New Guinea Helen Keller Intl, which provides technical assistance to, advocates for, and funds vitamin A supplementation programs in sub-Saharan Africa, which reduce child mortality New Incentives, which increases uptake of routine immunizations by offering small cash incentives to families in Nigeria when they get their children vaccinated GiveWell chose those charities based on how much good each additional donation would do, not necessarily how good the groups are overall; in other words, these are organizations that can put new funding to use, rather than sitting on it. Other charities do great work, too, but if they’re already decently funded, they might not do the most good with your extra dollar. The Vox guide to giving The holiday season is giving season. This year, Vox is exploring every element of charitable giving — from making the case for donating 10 percent of your income, to recommending specific charities for specific causes, to explaining what you can do to make a difference beyond donations. You can find all of our giving guide stories here. GiveWell also supports novel interventions, but through its All Grants Fund, not its Top Charities Fund. That can mean giving an organization a grant to run a study in order to find out whether a hypothetical future program is feasible, like a January 2023 grant to a group in Rwanda to run a randomized evaluation of its program training farmers to grow trees for timber. It can also mean funding time-sensitive programs, like the rollout of a new malaria vaccine. Toward the end of 2021, GiveWell found itself in the position of having more funding available than extremely cost-effective opportunities to spend it on. So it made the (somewhat controversial) announcement that it would roll $110 million in funds into 2022, instead of distributing those funds to charities right away, in hopes of finding more high-impact opportunities later. The gambit paid off: Whereas in 2021 GiveWell had found $450 million worth of cost-effective opportunities, it was more like $900 million in 2022 — meaning the size of the pool roughly doubled. Instead of having too much money and too few great causes to spend it on, GiveWell had too many great causes and too little funding to support them all. Specifically, it found itself around $300 million short. “There’s this gap, and so we want to raise more, because there’s impact just being left on the table,” Elie Hassenfeld, GiveWell’s CEO, previously told Vox. It’s worth noting that GiveWell takes disconfirming research seriously. In 2017, it recommended Evidence Action’s No Lean Season, which offered no-interest loans to farmers in Bangladesh during the “lean season” between planting rice and harvesting it; the loans are conditional on a family member temporarily moving to a city or other area for short-term work. But a subsequent randomized evaluation found that the program didn’t actually spur people to migrate or increase their incomes, and GiveWell and Evidence Action then agreed that it should no longer be a top charity. Evidence Action stopped soliciting funds for it and later shut it down — an unusually scrupulous move for a charity. (Disclosure: Dylan has been donating to GiveWell since 2010. Because he writes about philanthropy frequently, outsourcing his giving to GiveWell prevents him from donating directly to specific top charities that he may cover in the future, not unlike investing in index funds to avoid conflicts of interest when writing about particular companies. GiveWell is also an advertiser on Vox podcasts.) 2) Pick charities with research-based strategies GiveWell’s recommendations rely heavily on both evaluations done by charitable organizations and existing research literature on the kind of intervention the charities are trying to conduct. For example, research from the Poverty Action Lab at MIT suggests that giving away insecticidal bed nets — as the Against Malaria Foundation does — is vastly more effective than charging even small amounts for them. Meanwhile, hundreds of studies have found largely positive effects for the kind of cash transfers that GiveDirectly, one of GiveWell’s grantees, distributes (even if cash has its limits). 3) If you want to maximize your donation’s impact, give to poorer countries It’s really hard to adequately express how much richer developed nations like the US are than developing ones like Kenya, Uganda, and other countries targeted by GiveWell’s most effective charities. The US still has extreme poverty, in the living-on-$2-a-day sense, but it’s comparatively pretty rare and hard to target effectively. The poorest Americans also have access to health care and education systems that, while obviously inferior compared to those enjoyed by rich Americans, are still superior to those of developing countries. Giving to charities domestically is a commendable thing to do, and many people feel it’s right to give first to the communities they live in. But if you want to get the most bang for your buck in terms of saving lives, reducing illness, or improving overall well-being, you’re going to want to give to the places with the greatest need and where your additional dollar will do the most good. That means outside the US. Years ago, GiveWell actually looked into a number of US charities, like the Nurse-Family Partnership program for infants, the KIPP chain of charter schools, and the HOPE job-training program. It found that all were highly effective, but were also far more cost-intensive than the best foreign charities. KIPP and the Nurse-Family Partnership cost more than $10,000 per child served, while a vaccination program like New Incentives in Nigeria costs around $17 per child served. The Covid-19 pandemic has also taxed health systems in low-income countries, putting pressure on programs designed to fend off other diseases like malaria. Donations to anti-malaria, (non-Covid) vaccination, and vitamin A supplementation programs like the ones recommended by GiveWell can help cushion that blow. 4) If you do give locally, you can still consider impact Although this guide is mostly meant to offer suggestions if you don’t have existing philanthropic interests and are curious for the most efficient ways to help, many people already do have specific causes: They want to give to their own communities, or to causes they’re passionate about for personal reasons (like curing a disease that killed a loved one, for instance). And they often want to use charity as a way to connect with broader trends in the news — by, say, donating to help refugees coming from Ukraine, Sudan, Gaza, and elsewhere. It is, of course, admirable to give to your own community and personal causes, and a lot has happened in recent years to make it easier to find effective ways to give domestically. The group Charity Navigator acquired a nonprofit called ImpactMatters in 2020 and began incorporating its estimates of the bang for the buck provided by charities in several different sectors. So you can specify that your goal is, say, to provide a night of shelter for a person experiencing homelessness, and Charity Navigator will provide you with a menu of nonprofits and their cost per night of housing. The Nazareth Housing shelter in New York City, for instance, is estimated to provide nightly shelter at less than 200 percent of fair market rent, which is Charity Navigator’s benchmark for reasonable spending on shelter. 5) Saving lives isn’t everything If you care mainly about reducing early mortality and giving people more years to live, then you should give all your donations to the Malaria Consortium, Helen Keller Intl, or the Against Malaria Foundation. Malaria is a frequently fatal disease, and cost-effective interventions to reduce malaria infection are a great way to save lives. Similarly, vitamin A supplementation, like Helen Keller does, is an effective way of reducing child mortality, as is vaccination (as promoted by New Incentives). But extending life isn’t the only thing that matters; improving quality of life matters, too. It’s extremely hard to weigh these interests against each other: Is it better to make a donation that can save one child’s life, or, with the same amount of money, to lift multiple families out of extreme poverty? There’s no one right answer to that question. How you answer it depends on your philosophical assumptions. “Philosophical factors can radically alter the cost-effectiveness of life-extending interventions,” writes the Happier Lives Institute, a research center that aims to find evidence-based ways to improve well-being worldwide, in a new report. To show this, the researchers crunched the numbers to compare the cost-effectiveness of three different charities in terms of how much they boost subjective well-being. Two were life-improving charities: GiveDirectly, which gives cash to poor people in countries like Kenya and Uganda to spend as they see fit, and StrongMinds, which treats depression in African women using group psychotherapy. The third charity, the Against Malaria Foundation, is mainly life-saving. Their findings? “On the assumptions most favorable to extending lives, AMF is about 30 percent more cost-effective than StrongMinds. On the assumptions least favorable to extending lives, StrongMinds is around 12 times more cost-effective than AMF.” So when you’re making your donations, it’s worth thinking not only about quantity of life, but also about quality of life. GiveWell asked recipients themselves how they weigh each of these, and you can read about the results here. 6) Maybe just give money directly to poor people For years, one of our primary charities has been GiveDirectly, which gives unconditional cash transfers. (Sigal donated to them in 2022, 2023, and 2024.) We’ve given to them partly because there’s a large body of research on the benefits of cash transfers, which we find quite compelling. But we’ve donated to GiveDirectly mostly because we didn’t trust ourselves to know what the world’s poorest people need most. We’ve been profoundly lucky to never experience the kind of extreme poverty that billions of people worldwide have to endure. We have no idea what we would spend a cash transfer from GiveDirectly on if we were living on less than $2 a day in Uganda. Would we buy a bednet? Maybe! Or maybe we’d buy an iron roof. Or school tuition for loved ones. Or cattle. But you know who does have a good sense of the needs of poor people in Uganda? Poor people in Uganda. They have a very good idea of what they need. Do they sometimes misjudge their spending priorities? Certainly; as do all of us. And bednets appear to be underpurchased relative to the actual need for them. But generally, you should only give something other than cash if you are confident you know the recipients’ needs better than they do. We weren’t confident of that, so we gave cash. As the World Bank’s Jishnu Das once put it, “‘Does giving cash work well?’ is a well-defined question only if you are willing to say that ‘well’ is something that WE, the donors, want to define for families whom we have never met and whose living circumstances we have probably never spent a day, let alone a lifetime, in.” If you’re not willing to say that, then you should strongly consider giving cash. 7) Don’t give to big charities … You’ll notice that all of the charities GiveWell recommends are reasonably small, and some big names are absent. That’s not an accident. In general, charity effectiveness evaluators are skeptical of large relief organizations, for a number of reasons. Large organizations tend to be less transparent about where their money goes and also likelier to direct money to disaster relief efforts, which are usually less cost-effective, in general, than public health programs. “Overall, our impression is that your donation to these organizations is very hard to trace, but will likely supplement an agenda of extremely diverse programming, driven largely by governments and other very large funders,” wrote GiveWell co-founder Holden Karnofsky in a 2011 blog post. Our colleague Kelsey Piper has explained that by the time a disaster has struck, it’s mostly too late to improve disaster relief work. The quality of the immediate response, which includes search-and-rescue and emergency medicine, is determined by choices before the disaster occurs. Investments in improving those capabilities are most effective either before a crisis or well after, during the recovery phase.  8) … But maybe consider meta-charities A different option is giving to groups like GiveWell, Innovations for Poverty Action, The Life You Can Save, and Giving What We Can that evaluate development approaches and charities, and encourage effective giving. Suppose that every dollar given to Giving What We Can — which encourages people to pledge to donate at least 10 percent of their income until retirement — results in $1.20 in donations to the Against Malaria Foundation. If that’s the case, then you should give to Giving What We Can until the marginal effect on donations to Against Malaria hits $1 or lower. “If they can turn a dollar of donations into substantially more than a dollar of increased donations to effective charities, isn’t that the best use of my money?” asks Jeff Kaufman, a software developer who, with his wife Julia Wise, gives about half his income to effective charities and meta-charities. 9) Consider giving to animals Alternatively, you could consider giving to non-humans. Animal charities, especially those engaged in corporate pressure campaigns to better the treatment of farm animals, chickens in particular, can be effective in improving animal welfare. The charity evaluations in this area are much younger and less methodologically rigorous than GiveWell’s, but Animal Charity Evaluators has named four animal groups that may be effective causes for donations: Sign up for the Meat/Less newsletter course Want to eat less meat but don’t know where to start? Sign up for Vox’s Meat/Less newsletter course. We’ll send you five emails — one per week — full of practical tips and food for thought to incorporate more plant-based food into your diet. Faunalytics is a research organization that provides reports on animal-related issues like corporate commitments to animal welfare improvements, public opinion regarding farmed animals, issues around animal testing in science, and animals kept as pets, etc. The Humane League specializes in corporate campaigns to improve farm standards. It has achieved big victories in eliminating the culling of baby chicks and getting food service companies like Kroger and Sodexo to only use cage-free eggs, and is now pushing for better standards for chickens raised for their meat. The Good Food Institute works to reduce the impact of animal agriculture by supporting the development of plant-based and cell-cultured alternatives to animal products. Wild Animal Initiative studies the lived experience of animals in the wild and researches ways to ease their suffering, which may be intense and widespread. 10) Give what you can (though if you can spare it, pledging to give 10 percent of your income would be fantastic) One of the hardest problems in philanthropy is deciding how much to donate. There are some people who argue the correct answer, unless you’re near the end of your life, is nothing. You should, in this view, not give to charity during your career, and instead save and invest your money, increasing it as much as possible over time. That way you can give more when you die than you would have if giving continuously over the course of your life. Another approach is to “earn to give”: take a high-paying job, typically in finance or tech, and give away a huge share of your earnings, like 40 to 50 percent. But frankly it’s not the best option for most people, especially if the “earn to give” job is in a morally dubious field. And there are a lot of amazing jobs — in scientific research, in the private sector, in direct charity or nonprofit or government employment — where the typical person can do more good through their work than they could by solely using their career as a mechanism through which to generate donation money. So we suggest a more moderate course: You can sign the Giving What We Can pledge, which commits members to donating 10 percent of their annual income to highly effective charities, or take a Trial Pledge, which commits members to donating a percentage of their choice — at least 1 percent — to such charities. Ten percent is a totally reasonable number, comparable to alms in many religions, that requires relatively minimal sacrifice. (Here’s an interview with Toby Ord, who started that pledge.) But even if 10 percent is too much for you, don’t despair. Giving 5 percent or 1 percent is better than giving 0 percent. Perhaps the most important thing is to just get into the groove of donating, to make it a habit. We use direct deposit on our paychecks to make the most of our charitable contributions, just so it’s extremely automatic and hard for us to avoid doing. Going from not giving to giving a little, regularly, is a huge positive step. Update, November 19, 2024: This story, originally published in 2020 and updated in 2021, 2022, and 2023, has been updated throughout for 2024.