An interesting new app that tries to make complex note-taking and researching more visually approachable. With Scrintal you can grab excerpts from documents and connect them or group them with other notes. Of course, collaborative features are built in too, so you can work on large pools of notes with others in real time.

I featured Buttondown in DD before but I’m happy to promote it again: it’s a joy to see developer Justin Duke build a successful indie alternative to the big, corporate newsletter platforms. If you run a small-to-medium-sized newsletter, Buttowndown deserves your serious consideration. Friends of DD enjoy a 20% discount for two years. Become a Friend to access specials like this.

Created by a Czech meteorological company that focuses on weather prediction and meteorological data visualisation, these detailed weather maps are beautiful and quite mesmerising to watch. Also available as apps for mobile.

For those that like working from home but also miss having other people around, turn up The Sound of Colleagues to emulate office vibes. Can’t work with them, can’t work without them.

How the World Really Works →

The basic facts that got us here

Perhaps in contrast to my intro, here’s a more conventional, science-based approach that tries to explain how we ended up here: author Vaclav Smil wants to establish a few ground rules – a set of base facts – that help explain our current moment, our predicament and our opportunities. “This book explains seven of the most fundamental realities governing our survival and prosperity. From energy and food production, through our material world and its globalization, to risks, our environment and its future, How the World Really Works offers a much-needed reality check – because before we can tackle problems effectively, we must understand the facts.”

Design Emergency →

Designing a better future

I’ve become sceptical of writing that paints design in broad strokes, highlighting only its potential for good. From the sound of it, this book falls into this category but I’d be keen to hear (in the comments?) from anyone who read it. Does it offer a balanced critique of design in action? “Design Emergency tells the stories of the remarkable designers, architects, engineers, artists, scientists, and activists, who are at the forefront of positive change worldwide. Focusing on four themes – Technology, Society, Communication, and Ecology – Alice Rawsthorn and Paola Antonelli present a unique portrait of how our great creative minds are developing new design solutions to the major challenges of our time, while helping us to benefit from advances in science and technology.”

It seems that our modern lives are all about experiencing joy now but feeling crappy later. This piece taught me a great new phrase to describe our addiction to insta-gratification: ‘evolutionary mismatch’. “In many areas of our lives, things that are not as satisfying now tend to be more satisfying and leave us better off later. If living a good life in ancient times of scarcity was about seeking fast-reward, lower-effort goods, then living a good life in modern times of abundance is about seeking slow-reward, higher-effort goods. Scientists call this the evolutionary mismatch – when strategies that were once adaptive to a species become harmful. ... Once you become aware of the evolutionary mismatch, you start to see it everywhere. Overcoming it is key to being grounded in an increasingly frantic and frenetic world.”

Our work culture is so deeply ingrained in us by now that we apply the productivity mindset to our leisure time. Free time is increasingly viewed through the ‘getting things done’ lens: “The way we chase top-notch leisure experiences has made recreation more stressful than ever. High expectations may clash with our experienced reality, making it feel anti-climactic, while trying to concoct the best vacation or leisure experience ever can fuel performativity. In her 2011 research paper, Keinan first posited that some consumers work to acquire collectable experiences that are unusual, novel or extreme because it helps us reframe our leisure as being productive. By working through our experiential checklist instead of seeking simply to enjoy the moment, she writes, we build our ‘experiential CV’.”

As I write in my intro, this essay by adrienne maree brown about the important internal work we all have to do deeply resonated with me. “Given the time on the clock of the world, how do we need to transform ourselves to transform the world? How do we need to be? How do we need to grow ourselves in order to both spark and cultivate the kinds of species’ evolutions we want to see? What do we need to practice? This, to me, is the work of internal accountability. We are cultivating within ourselves a transformative practice that helps us heal from what the world has been, while generating what the world will be.”