Parametric Press is a digital magazine that uses audio, visual and interactive elements to bring stories to life. The second issue focuses on climate change: try Your Personal Carbon History to find out how much of total global emissions were caused during your lifetime, or The Corporations Behind Climate Change with a great visualisation of emissions by the world’s biggest fossil fuel companies.

This is one of those websites that make you love the internet: dimensions.com is “an ongoing reference database of dimensioned drawings documenting the standard measurements and sizes of the everyday objects and spaces that make up our world.” Handy if you are ever in need of sizing a Pomeranian.

With TextSniper (macOS) you can take a screenshot and the app will automatically extract the text content of that screenshot and place it in your clipboard.

Stripe users in the US (for now) can enable ‘Stripe Climate’ and direct a fraction of the charge to support reputable carbon removal projects. If picked up by enough Stripe customers this could be a great example of how to scale small actions to create meaningful impact.

The New Corporation →

How ‘good’ corps are bad for democracy

A just-released book investigating the destructive force of corporate-driven systems and what alternatives are available to us: “Profit-driven privatisation subverting the public good, governments neglecting duties to protect the environment, the increasing alienation we experience as every aspect of life is economised, and how the Covid-19 pandemic lays bare the unjust fault lines of our corporate-led society.”

TYPEONE Magazine →

Type design & current affairs

You have a few days left to help fund the first issue of TYPEONE, a new bi-annual print magazine that “fuses type with topics such as business, technology, innovation, global issues, graphic design, 3D, animation and many more.” It’s also the first time I’ve come across the underlying funding platform In Perpetuum, apparently a new one-stop shop for indie publishers.

Important, short read: today, Americans will not just decide over the fate of their own democracy. They will decide whether we still have a fair shot at securing a liveable future for most of humanity. “As a ‘climate person’, I know that the future of the planet is, cruelly and inextricably, tied to the future of America. As a Black climate person, I know that ‘climate action’ does not necessarily mean climate justice. It can mean eco-fascism or climate apartheid. It can mean that there is, as the president puts it, ‘crystal clean water and air’ for some people, but none for me. Which means, as a Black American climate person in 2020, I’ve never been more afraid for my life.”

A biased media diet makes it easy to miss that some non-Western countries have successfully fought Covid-19, not because of luck but because they are good at it: “Recently the NYPost said: ‘Scientists can’t explain puzzling lack of coronavirus outbreaks in Africa.’ Well no, they can, it’s bog standard public health. They have excellent scientists in Africa, you know, if you would ever let them get a visa for conferences. This is just racism, and western coverage is almost all like this. They attribute agency to rich/white nations like Germany or New Zealand but luck to anyone poorer or dark. ... At a stretch, white people can also see money, so they might extend the world to South Korea, Japan, UAE. But that’s it. That’s the end of the world. People are either white, rich, or they don’t exist.”

It seems inconceivable at this point, but just imagine what a different place the internet would be if our shared digital spaces where publicly funded, well maintained, and not dictated by shareholder value. “Conflict and contestation are important parts of how healthy democracies progress, as long as there are structures that facilitate it. Functional public spaces are central to this work. They allow us to assemble, to share common experiences, and to demonstrate that what might have seemed like individual struggles are actually the result of unjust systems that demand correction.”

I’m really grateful for having access to the reporting of foreign correspondents by news outlets of other countries (for me it’s mainly the German and Australian national broadcaster). It’s so important to get a variety of perspectives of what’s unfolding in the US.