Add Quire to the giant list of available tools for project management. It comes with the usual set of features, such as nested to-do lists, Kanban boards, and progress trackers.

Shosho is a text editing tool that points out ineloquent parts of your writing to make you “sound better and confident”. The editor highlights things like wordiness, buzzwords, weak expressions, and complex words.

I’ve always been an admirer of Aeon. Not just for the writing – it’s one of the most beautiful digital publications around. Now it has a new sister site called Psyche that “illuminates the human condition through three prisms: mental health; the perennial question of ‘how to live’; and the artistic and transcendent facets of life”.

GIF Brewery lets you convert video files into GIFs with powerful editing tools such as resizing, cutting, cropping, frame rate adjustments, image filters, and more.

Big Friendship →

How we keep each other close

These past few months I’ve been thinking a lot more about friendships, and what it means to ‘be close’ to someone. I’m curious about this new book, co-authored by Ann Friedman, whose writing I really appreciate: “An inspiring and entertaining testament to the power of society’s most underappreciated relationship, Big Friendship will invite you to think about how your own bonds are formed, challenged, and preserved. It is a call to value your friendships in all of their complexity. Actively choose them. And, sometimes, fight for them.” (Release mid July)

Doughnut Economics →

Economics for the 21st-century

I keep hearing that now is the time to rethink our economic system – moving away from GDP and infinite growth. ‘Doughnut Economics’ frequently comes up in this discussion and it’s on my long list of to-read books: “Economics is the mother tongue of public policy. It dominates our decision-making for the future, guides multi-billion-dollar investments, and shapes our responses to climate change, inequality, and other environmental and social challenges that define our times. Pity then, or more like disaster, that its fundamental ideas are centuries out of date yet are still taught in college courses worldwide and still used to address critical issues in government and business alike.”

A fascinating look into how humans perceive time and how our thinking is influenced by language, culture, and more local circumstances. “In Pormpuraaw, an Aboriginal Australian community, past and future are determined by cardinal directions, with past times to the east and future times to the west. In Yupno [Papua New Guinea] (...) the future is uphill and the past downhill.”

Loved this commencement speech by Ibram Kendi in which he talks about what being an intellectual means and how anti-intellectualism is at the root of systemic racism: “I define an intellectual as someone with a tremendous desire to know. Intellectuals are open-minded. Intellectuals have a tremendous capacity to change their mind on matters, to self-reflect, to self-critique. Intellectuals are governed by only one special interest that is rarely self-serving – the special interest of finding and revealing the truth.”

Billionaires going into space is mostly about their furthering of their position of power. “In his 2009 book Capitalist Realism, the late writer Mark Fisher asserted that it’s easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism. As it stands, the visions of the future dominating media coverage and public conversation are still those by and for the billionaire class. (...) It’s imperative that we reject visions of the future designed for billionaires to extend their power and wealth for decades, if not centuries, to come. We need visions that bring us back down to Earth, and put the well-being of the many before the self-interest of the few.”