Reedsy is an interesting gathering place for people who write, edit, design, and publish books. The site includes a directory of freelancers who offer help with anything publishing-related. The Reedsy Editor app makes it easy to write and edit collaboratively in real time. It even automates the steps involved in creating ePub files.

This little tool (built on the Google Books API) creates a custom RSS feed that notifies you whenever your favourite authors publish a new book.

With this Chrome and Firefox extension you can disable the tracking pixels in emails from a growing list of email marketing services. (FYI: DD also tracks basic open/click rates. It’s actually a meaningful form of feedback for me.)

Lovely gimmicks like this is what the internet was made for! Create your own music box song and share it with a friend. (Or pick and customise one from the library, like this GoT theme song.)

Life is in the Transitions →

Getting ready for the nonlinear life

With discontinuity a major theme of the coming decades, being able to prepare for and navigate the many changes will be an important life skill. Life is in the Transitions “introduces the fresh, pressing vision of the nonlinear life, in which personal disruptions and lifequakes are becoming more plentiful, and nontraditional life shapes are becoming the norm.”

Entitled →

A new framework for understanding misogyny

A bold new book that explores privileged men’s sense entitlement in the age of Harvey Weinstein and Brett Kavanaugh: “In clear, lucid prose, Manne argues that male entitlement can explain a wide array of phenomena, from mansplaining and the undertreatment of women’s pain to mass shootings by incels and the seemingly intractable notion that women are ‘unelectable’. Moreover, Manne implicates each of us in toxic masculinity: It’s not just a product of a few bad actors; it’s something we all perpetuate, conditioned as we are by the social and cultural mores of our time.”

What a read. So, so much of our exhausting, inequitable modern lives has been strategically created by greedy, power-hungry lobbying groups. “By the late 1920s, America’s business and political elite had found a way to defuse the dual threat of stagnating economic growth and a radicalized working class in what one industrial consultant called ‘the gospel of consumption’ – the notion that people could be convinced that however much they have, it isn’t enough.”

A short, important read on why we need to find simplicity in our messaging that allows room for the acknowledgement of complexity. “Resisting such simple explanations for a complicated problem demands much more from us. It would force us to stop, zoom out of a situation, consider the level of complexity, and acknowledge the limits of our understanding – that’s scary. Accepting something as complicated is an act of humility in the recognition of the unknown.”

This piece looks at the overlapping fields of maintenance and degrowth, and how both will become increasingly important disciplines in a furture of limited growth. “What will become of architecture and urban design after the world’s population, production, and GDP have plateaued, when consumption is stagnant and we are ‘forced to divert funds toward repair and adaptation in the face of climate breakdown’? ... Whether we reach such a turning point preemptively, by choice; or by necessity – because the economy and the environment demand it – architects and urbanists, like curators and librarians before them, will have to face the nature of their work outside the growth machine.”