Switchboard provides a collaboration space in which all of your existing web apps – from Notion to Figma and Gmail to Trello – can be made visible and interactive to other team members, removing the need for constant, awkward tab switching.

This website offers a variety of tools, surveys and mini-courses meant to help you “change your habits, make better decisions, and achieve your goals”. It’s all built around increasing rationality in human behaviour, although I’m not entirely convinced rational decision-making works in our favour as much as we’d like to believe it does.

Mumu X (for macOS) lets you find emojis by entering not just descriptive text but symbols and characters that are somewhat related to the icon. The tool uses the GPT-3 language model to learn associations between emojis and whatever people enter to find them. Pretty smart, but also pretty expensive.

If you have a few minutes to spare, this map of note-worthy people is a fun way to spend it: “The map is showing birthplaces of the most ‘notable people’ around the world.” Zoom into your childhood hometown to see if you recognise the local ‘celebrity’.

Whistling Vivaldi →

How stereotypes affect us

A book offering insights into how we form our sense of identity and how we can mitigate the negative effects of the ‘stereotype threat’. The author Claude M. Steele runs through plenty of experiments and studies that “show, again and again, that exposing subjects to stereotypes – merely reminding a group of female math majors about to take a math test, for example, that women are considered naturally inferior to men at math – impairs their performance in the area affected by the stereotype.”

Where the Leaves Fall →

Humankind’s connection with nature

I love that there is a wave of new independent magazines untangling our complicated relationship with the rest of the natural world. WtLF is one of those, compiled by two editors – one from the global north and one from the global south. Expect stories at the intersection of social justice and the environment, art, science, culture, philosophy and food. “We are a part of nature, existing in reciprocity with the Earth, but as many of us are born into an environment that is mainly brick and concrete, it only becomes harder to reconnect with the sense of awe and wonder that the natural world presents to us.” Friends of DD enjoy a 15% discount. Become a Friend to access specials like this.

The idea of viewing taxes in a positive light seems pretty radical or stupid – depending on who you ask – but, as Anne Helen Petersen argues here, somebody’s gotta pay for the essentials that hold a society together. “When I told [my financial advisor] I was down with paying taxes, it was difficult to tell if he was just surprised or just thought I was stupid – which presupposes the idea that smart people pay less taxes. I’m not dumb, and I take deductions like everyone else. But I’ve also made a conscious decision to think of paying taxes not as a burden to get out of, but as a willingly performed obligation, a way of being a citizen in my community.”

In this 90-seconds-long clip, Maria Koijck shows how much waste was produced by just a single medical procedure – her surgical breast reconstruction. It’s staggering to think of the waste produced daily by the millions of hospitals around the world. Maria raises awareness of this and asks: ‘Is there a better way?’

This piece is on the ranty side and I’m not convinced that all millennials are this despondent, but Tim Kreider touches on a general sense of distress about the future that many of us feel. “People aren’t trying to sell busyness as a virtue anymore, not even to themselves. A new generation has grown to adulthood that’s never known capitalism as a functioning economic system. My generation, X, was the first postwar cohort to be downwardly mobile, but millennials were the first to know it going in. Our country’s oligarchs forgot to maintain the crucial Horatio Alger fiction that anyone can get ahead with hard work – or maybe they just dropped it, figuring we no longer had any choice.” (Possible soft paywall)