As a more playful, interactive alternative to classic maths education, Mathigon “is part interactive textbook and part virtual personal tutor. Using cutting-edge technology and an innovative new curriculum, we want to make learning mathematics more active, personalised and fun.”

If you’re on Gmail but don’t enjoy the laggy experience of Apple Mail, Mimestream offers a more zippy upgrade. The app has matured into an official v1 release since I last mentioned it. Developed with Gmail’s API and for Apple’s new silicon, it comes close to being the missing official Gmail app for Mac.

Select Green Hotels is a booking platform for ‘green’ hotel accommodation in Europe. Each hotel has gone through a sustainability assessment based on eight criteria, including community, water, energy, materials and food. Sustainability and travel are, in my view, largely contradictory concepts, so take the idea of ‘sustainable hotels’ with a grain of salt.

Another lovely mapping project visualising the question: ‘Where can you go by train in x hours?’ You can narrow your search from 8 down to 1 hour. As a great example of what high speed train travel enables: my otherwise rather dull German hometown of Saarbrücken has a direct connection to Paris, taking just under 2 hours.

There Are No Accidents →

The surprising history of ‘accidents’

We’re conditioned to see certain mishaps and their negative consequences as ‘accidents’. But as journalist Jessie Singer shows in this book, many such incidents are quite predictable and preventable, and have systemic shortcomings at their root. “Drawing connections between traffic accidents, accidental opioid overdoses, and accidental oil spills, Singer proves that what we call accidents are hardly random. Rather, who lives and dies by an accident in America is defined by money and power.”

Regenesis →

A new future for food and humanity

I talk about the author in my intro: a bold new book on the opportunities to transform not only our food system but our entire relationship to the living world. “Farming is the world’s greatest cause of environmental destruction – and the one we are least prepared to talk about. Drawing on astonishing advances in soil ecology, Monbiot reveals how our changing understanding of the world beneath our feet could allow us to grow more food with less farming.”

I learned a lot about food security and the potential of our soil in this hugely insightful interview of the author George Monbiot (his book further up). “‘What would happen if we did what the foodies tell us to do and switched from corn-fed beef, which is bad enough, to pasture-fed beef?’ They found that you would need to increase the area used for keeping cattle in the United States by 270%. That meant you’d have to fell all the forests, drain all the wetlands, demolish all the cities and you’d still be importing a lot of your beef from Brazil. The only reason some people can eat pasture-fed beef is because other people don’t.”

An in-depth essay about the carbon footprints of bicycles (production & use) and why modern bikes become increasingly unsustainable. To be clear, the author does not suggest we should stop transitioning away from cars to more cycling. However, with (e)bikes booming, it’s worth investigating their environmental impact. “The largest Chinese bike manufacturer, which builds one-fifth of the world’s bicycles, has 42 bicycle assembly lines making 55,000 bicycles a day – almost as much as the US in a year.”

An equally fun and insightful piece with a whole range of theories about why passing on lived experience to others and affecting their decision making is often such a futile exercise. “Unfortunately, when we want to transmit wisdom, words are often all we have. How else can you convince someone that, for example, it’s better to have loved and lost, than never loved at all? An interpretive dance? A sculpture made out of chewing gum? A breakup-themed escape room? If you’re sitting there with a broken heart, what are you going to believe: a string of phonemes, or the ache in your chest?”