A great app for journalists, researchers or general podcast enthusiasts: Listen Notes allows you to find podcasts with specific people in it or covering certain topics. You can also set alerts that notify you when new shows include a certain name or phrase. Or create lists and short clips of podcasts you’d like to save for later.

I use a Photoshop ‘droplet’ to downsize images for DD and then compress them with ImageOptim, but I’m curious to see if Squash makes this process easier and more fun. A simple but powerful (macOS only) tool to batch-process images. Friends of DD enjoy a 10% discount. Become a Friend to access specials like this.

I recently installed this free macOS app to hide some of the lesser used icons in my menu bar. (Took me while to figure out how to move them behind the ‘hidden line’: press Command while dragging icons.)

What an interesting idea: the Human Library is a non-profit that creates a safe space for dialogue between people with different experiences. “We host events where readers can borrow human beings serving as open books and have conversations they would not normally have access to. Every human book from our bookshelf, represent a group in our society that is often subjected to prejudice, stigmatization or discrimination because of their lifestyle, diagnosis, belief, disability, social status, ethnic origin etc.”

Hot Mess →

Climate change – no laughing matter?

Can writing about the climate emergency be useful and funny? Dr Matt Winning certainly thinks so. He is a stand-up comedian and environmental economist with a PHD in climate change policy, “which means he’s the sort of doctor who will rush to your side if you fall ill on a plane, but only to berate you for flying. ... Hot Mess aims to both lighten the mood and enlighten readers on climate change. This is a book for people who care about climate change but aren’t doing much about it, helping readers understand what the main causes of climate change are, what changes are needed, and what they can (and cannot) do about it.”

What Tech Calls Thinking →

Silicon Valley’s intellectual origins

For decades, Silicon Valley represented not just tech innovation but a unique way of thinking about the future. In this book, Adrian Daub, a professor of comparative literature, looks at the origins of SV thinking and moves beyond the platitudes and hype. “Equally important to Silicon Valley's world-altering innovation are the language and ideas it uses to explain and justify itself. And often, those fancy new ideas are simply old motifs playing dress-up in a hoodie.”

If you haven’t read Burkeman’s book Four Thousand Weeks, his last column for The Guardian offers a good, short summary of some of the most important lessons he’s learned. “I’m indebted to the Jungian therapist James Hollis for the insight that major personal decisions should be made not by asking, ‘Will this make me happy?’, but ‘Will this choice enlarge me or diminish me?’ We’re terrible at predicting what will make us happy: the question swiftly gets bogged down in our narrow preferences for security and control. But the enlargement question elicits a deeper, intuitive response. You tend to just know whether, say, leaving or remaining in a relationship or a job, though it might bring short-term comfort, would mean cheating yourself of growth.”

An interesting collection of studies and research about the impact of wealth on our sense of empathy, moral judgement, addiction, happiness and love. “A UC Berkeley study found that in San Francisco – where the law requires that cars stop at crosswalks for pedestrians to pass – drivers of luxury cars were four times less likely than those in less expensive vehicles to stop and allow pedestrians the right of way. They were also more likely to cut off other drivers.”

When over 15,000 Etsy sellers went on strike over the introduction of new fees earlier this year, it raised new questions about our relationship with digital platforms. If we’re not their employees but our work is making them money, what exactly are we? “Without sellers listing items, Etsy has no inventory – nothing to sell. Just like if no one shows up to the assembly line, Ford has no Mustangs to sell. Once you start to think about the actual product of any platform, you begin to see how every platform is taking our free labor for granted.”