Dollar Street has been one of my favourite internet projects ever since first discovering it. I just realised that I never included it in DD before. The site is a data analysis and photography project to understand and illustrate how people on different income levels from around the world live. “Imagine the world as a street ordered by income. Everyone lives somewhere on the street. The poorest lives to the left and the richest to the right. Everybody else live somewhere in between.”

You can probably tell by the lack of inclusion in DD that I’m still sceptical about the wave of new AI tools. If Artemis really works as promised, it is one of the nicer use cases of the GenAI hype: an iOS app that generates customisable bedtime stories that help children develop emotional intelligence by promoting empathy, understanding, and emotional awareness. Friends of DD enjoy three free story tokens. Become a Friend to access specials like this.

What a neat idea: macOS app Dropover creates a temporary ‘shelf’ where you can park and collect files that you want to use later. “Just shake your cursor and drop whatever you are dragging onto the shelf. Then simply navigate stress-free to your destination and move all items at once when ready.”

Another weird and wonderful internet project: a giant database of labyrinths from around the world. “Labyrinths occur in many forms, shapes, and sizes, and the Locator contains both historic and modern examples. At the current time the Worldwide Labyrinth Locator database contains more than 6250 labyrinths (including a few mazes) in more than 90 different countries around the world.”

The Psychology of Money →

Lessons on wealth, greed and happiness

A book that promises to make you feel different about money. It acknowledges that we are complicated creatures who make financial decisions based not so much on rational thinking but on a complex psychological drivers. “Money – investing, personal finance, and business decisions – is typically taught as a math-based field, where data and formulas tell us exactly what to do. But in the real world people don’t make financial decisions on a spreadsheet. They make them at the dinner table, or in a meeting room, where personal history, your own unique view of the world, ego, pride, marketing, and odd incentives are scrambled together.”

Emergent Strategy →

Shaping change, changing worlds

This is adrienne maree brown’s first solo book, and a bestseller since its release in 2017. It is a guidebook for getting in the right relationship with change, using our own nature and that of non-humans as our teachers. “Inspired by Octavia Butler’s explorations of our human relationship to change, Emergent Strategy is radical self-help, society-help, and planet-help designed to shape the futures we want to live.”

A fascinating look at how consumer culture was ‘engineered’ and refined by (mostly US) industrialists, CEOs and the government throughout the twentieth century. “The prospect of ever-extendable consumer desire, characterized as ‘progress’, promised a new way forward for modern manufacture, a means to perpetuate economic growth. Progress was about the endless replacement of old needs with new, old products with new. Notions of meeting everyone’s needs with an adequate level of production did not feature. ... The commodification of reality and the manufacture of demand have had serious implications for the construction of human beings in the late 20th century, where, to quote philosopher Herbert Marcuse, ‘people recognize themselves in their commodities’.”

I have a lot of time for Anil Dash’s opinion pieces. Dash believes that many Big Tech billionaires have been radicalised within their cultural and social bubble that play to their insecurity and desire for acknowledgement of their exceptionalism. “If it weren’t for the deep harm they were doing to so many with these radical ideas, I’d have a lot of pity and empathy for the fact that they’re clearly acting out due to social isolation and the existential emptiness that must come from pursuing wealth and power to such an extreme degree that there’s no room left in life for someone to call them on their bullshit.”

This short, beautiful contemplation on gratitude is an excerpt from David Whyte’s book Consolations. “Gratitude is not a passive response to something we have been given, gratitude arises from paying attention, from being awake in the presence of everything that lives within and without us. Gratitude is not necessarily something that is shown after the event, it is the deep, a priori state of attention that shows we understand and are equal to the gifted nature of life.”