As an underdog alternative to Dropbox, Box or Google Drive, pCloud seems like a trusted and slightly more affordable way to backup your files online and keep them in sync across devices. (I find their business plans surprisingly cheap!)

Matt Wigham, musician and co-founder of artist-focused ecommerce app Big Cartel, is involved in a new app called Supertape that creates a one-stop-shop for musicians: “Link your Bandcamp, Spotify, Bandsintown, Shopify, and more, to create a beautiful website that syncs your latest music, merch, videos, and tour dates automatically.”

For those trying to improve their English language skills, Govar is a free video-based English speaking community. Install the app, choose your skill level, then join any of the live video classes with other non-native English speakers.

A great visualisation project that shows key historical events – according to Wikipedia – as an accumulation of dots. Use the categories on the left to filter events and the bar at the bottom to zoom in and out of the time span covered. The app self-updates daily with new recorded events. (No mobile support)

Streetfight →

Handbook for an urban revolution

Co-written by New York City’s former transportation commissioner, this book is part memoir, part treatise on why cities everywhere need to be focusing on making everything but the car as safe, comfortable and convenient as possible. “Real-life experience confirmed that if you know how to read the street, you can make it function better by not totally reconstructing it but by reallocating the space that’s already there.”

soлomiya →

Indie Ukrainian art magazine

soлomiya is an independent, artist-run magazine, created in response to Russia’s war against Ukraine. After the first issue sold out, issue two features art from Russian occupied Kherson, stories from Ukrainians experiencing the war zone twice, and conversations that explore the concept of the heroic and the language of witnessing. “Artists from Kyiv and Berlin collaborated to make this magazine, which aims to promote the visibility of common democratic and European values shared by people from Ukraine and other European countries. Being a platform of self-expression for the young generation of creatives from Ukraine, soлomiya is both an itinerant group exhibition and an art object in itself.”

An excellent piece by Tim Wu on how our fixation on making everything more convenient has removed too many friction points that are often critical in providing a sense of meaning in life. “As task after task becomes easier, the growing expectation of convenience exerts a pressure on everything else to be easy or get left behind. We are spoiled by immediacy and become annoyed by tasks that remain at the old level of effort and time. When you can skip the line and buy concert tickets on your phone, waiting in line to vote in an election is irritating. This is especially true for those who have never had to wait in lines (which may help explain the low rate at which young people vote).”

I’ve previously shared pieces on the importance of maintenance as underappreciated, system-critical work. This piece adds a great engineering perspective to this topic. Engineering is too often concerned with delivering flashy ‘megamissions’ – such as a new bridge or indeed a new app – yet thoughtful, accountable engineering is expressed in more humble, but flexible solutions that extend the life of existing infrastructure. “Engineering tends to valorize the lofty ideals of grand projects, but it is in the daily grind that the deeper pact between engineering and society plays out. Adapting any older system to a newer reality comes with a Gordian tangle of considerations. And it is in these tangles, where proper social accountability for the consequences of the work resides, that we can find an accurate and grounded view of engineering.”

This is not an easy read, but studying the increasingly frequent occurrence of so-called ‘mass mortality events’ is critical in understanding future impacts of climate change and how ecosystems collapse affects our chances of adapting. “News coverage of die-offs often focuses entirely on what’s disappeared, and how dramatically. But mass mortality can be as much about germination as about demise. These events ask us to consider the difference, if any, between what is overwhelming to an ecosystem and what is overwhelming to us. And they force us to confront how little we know about the world in crisis around us. Without understanding how life goes on with so much death around, we can’t begin to fathom what tomorrow’s climate-changed world may look like – to the planet’s and our own peril.”