Filed under ‘could have been a web app’, this mobile app makes it easier to find movies and TV shows based on your preferences – across streaming services. The search lets you filter by things like IMDb rating, release year and genre, and supports regional streaming services of over 40 countries.

When I occasionally listen to audio books (usually on long walks), having to sign up to a monthly Audible subscription always feels like a bother. Chirp offers subscription-free audio book sales with regular discount deals. The only caveat is that many deals aren’t available outside the US.

This website is essentially just a play button for a YouTube video that continuously streams relaxing music which is great for studying or working.

I’m quite conservative when it comes to my money and usually treat the stock market with a fair amount of scepticism, if not outright disdain. So when I come across investment advice online I usually don’t pay much attention, but this popular Bogleheads Wiki seems like a rich resource that can help a lot of people increase their financial literacy. And while I’m no admirer of billionaire investors, I can get behind the community’s philosophy: “Bogleheads emphasise starting early, living below one’s means, regular saving, broad diversification, and sticking to one’s investment plan.”

The Power of Regret →

A better way to think about regret

All of us have them, few of us like to talk about them. Our culture has developed various regret avoidance tactics. In his new book, author Daniel H. Pink uses the largest sampling of American attitudes about regret ever conducted as well as his own ‘World Regret Survey’ – based on experiences by 15,000 people in 105 countries – “to offer compelling insights into how we live and how we can find a better path forward”.

The New Walden →

An illustrated hardcover of Walden

Walden is a book about the simple life and reconnecting with nature, written by American transcendentalist Henry David Thoreau in the 1800s. During his time in a cabin near Walden Pond, he mixed scientific and poetic observations about humankind’s place in the natural world. My internet friend Matt Steel is now publishing a newly annotated and illustrated hardcover edition of the classic. Help make it a success and pre-order your own beautiful copy. Friends of DD enjoy a $10 discount. Become a Friend to access specials like this.

Striving for only happiness makes for a bland life. It’s the hard times that make us appreciate the good times. “Pursuing happiness to the exclusion of other goals – known as psychological hedonism – is not only an exercise in futility. It may also give you a life that you find you don’t want, one in which you don’t reach your full potential, you’re reluctant to take risks, and you choose fleeting pleasures over challenging experiences that give life meaning.”

This piece reminds us that countries are just fictional constructs and that the way we talk about the people and organisations inhabiting and controlling them is important. “‘Russia has invaded Ukraine.’ Countries cannot invade each other. Invasion is an action in pursuit of a goal, and places on a map lack the capacity for either. What is actually going on is that ‘the organisation that rules Russia is challenging the sovereignty of the organisation that rules Ukraine’. This is not ‘just semantics’. The two statements have quite different connotations. If we can’t tell them apart we will end up foolishly blaming things that happen to come from Russia (like university students) or are merely associated with Russia (like vodka brands) for the terrible things now happening in Ukraine. This will fail to do anything about the real cause of the problem: the organisation controlled by Vladimir Putin.”

A great investigative piece on the illegal, violent groups logging the remaining parts of Romania’s old-growth forest to supply the world’s largest furniture maker with cheap timber. “According to a 2018 report, initially suppressed by the Romanian government and leaked later that year, the country saw 38.6 million cubic meters of wood exit its forests annually during the preceding four-year period; the government had licensed just 18.5 million cubic meters. In other words, without even accounting for possible violations based on method of extraction, more than half of the country’s timber is illegally harvested. ... Since roughly the date of Romania’s accession to the EU, between half and two-thirds of the country’s virgin forest has been lost.”