Cron promises a calendar app that does away with all the extensions and workarounds you currently use to schedule, manage and attend meetings. With an intuitive UI, better tools for collaboration and deeper third party integration, Cron hopes to become the new go-to for professionals with a busy schedule.

This non-intrusive little Mac app will count how often you visit certain websites and track the time you spend on them to give you a better picture of where your screen time goes. You can set quotas for each site and get notified when you reach them.

For those of you that have (re)discovered the craft of bread making during COVID: Bread on Earth is a geeky library of recipes, essays, pictures and links, all about the art of the loaf.

This mesmerising interactive map uses positioning data of cargo vessels to replay shipping routes around the world. Disable the map (in the options settings) and see how the position of ships trace the outline of continents!

Why We Love Dogs, Eat Pigs and Wear Cows →

The struggle for animal welfare

Social psychologist Melanie Joy’s work in the space of animal welfare led to her coining of the term carnism, “the invisible belief system that conditions us to eat certain animals when we would never dream of eating others”, and a book that’s widely seen as one of the most impactful reads on the path towards a plant-based diet.

Post Growth →

A manifesto for the economies of tomorrow

As I discuss in my intro, the post-growth movement is trying to imagine what a good life looks like once we decouple prosperity from endless economic growth. In his new book, ecological economist Tim Jackson offers “a manifesto for system change and an invitation to rekindle a deeper conversation about the nature of the human condition.”

When we talk about imagining ‘better futures’, the idea of a ‘Department of Care’ is very much part of my utopia wishlist. I love this concept of deeply integrating the notion of ‘care’ into every aspect of designing and maintaining spaces and services. “Once people see it, the need for care is hard to unsee. In an architectural context, care links the labor of cleaning with the design of the surfaces to be cleaned, physical infrastructure with social services for its users, landscape with mental health. Care can be demonstrated through org charts and through organizing, through serving food and setting aside land to grow food, through creating public space and training people to take care of it.”

YouTube star, Instagram influencer, thoughtleader – for many (young) people, fame is the ultimate career goal. But it’s about as healthy for our inner well-being as sugar is for our teeth. “Seeking out fame is a glitch in the happiness matrix: an urge that promises contentment and delivers the opposite. To defeat it, we need to be aware of our impulses and committed to countering them.” (Possible soft paywall)

Another piece on human-centric urban design and the phenomenon that is Tokyo. There are many interesting observations about this city of cities – one of the world’s largest urban developments that seems chaotic from above but on the ground is surprisingly livable, accessible, clean, safe and efficient. “‘This city can be known only by an activity of an ethnographic kind,’ says Barthes in Empire of Signs. ‘You must orient yourself in it not by book, by address, but by walking, by sight, by habit, by experience.’ This is true for anyone who has experienced Tokyo. Places aren’t known by their address, they are known by their proximity to other landmarks which are discovered by experiencing the city itself.”