NextDNS is a personal DNS filter that helps you eliminate malicious domains and block ads and trackers on websites and in apps. It also gives you a range of tools to limit your kids’ access to the internet.

Jam is a minimal, free, open-source alternative to Clubhouse. Launch a new room with a single click (no sign-up required), then invite others to start group-chatting.

I’m intrigued by this online conference happening on Juneteenth (June 19th). I wonder whether it’s actually possible to make money as a business without enabling oppression somewhere along the way.

“Navigating the Suez Canal is a high-stress, complicated feat that requires master piloting skills. To demonstrate, [CNN] worked with Master Mariner Andy Winbow and Captain Yash Gupta to produce this simulated passage. Try your hand at traversing one of the most highly trafficked nautical thoroughfares in the world.”

The Tangled Web We Weave →

X-raying the bones of the internet

A deep dive into the infrastructure of technology, power, and people that make the internet spin. Journalist James Ball investigates “how the seemingly abstract and pervasive phenomenon is built on a very real set of materials and rules that are owned, financed, designed and regulated by very real people” showing that “the internet is not a neutral force but a massive infrastructure that reflects the society that created it”.

Youth to Power →

Changemaking guide for young people

The global climate strike phenomenon is a result of the fact that old (mostly white, mostly male) folks decide over the livability of the world younger generations inherit – decisions they have no democratic say in. In Youth to Power, teenage activist Jamie Margolin “walks readers through every step of what effective, healthy, intersectional activism looks like.” If I had teenage kids, this is a book I’d encourage them to read.

This is a fantastic interview with an environmental scientist and policy analyst that makes clear that a greener form of the same consumerism cannot solve our many sustainability crises. “There is no ‘economy’ – there is only energy conversion. Your car, your heated houses, your flights to Europe – all must take a big hit. Unless we invent some miraculous type of energy technology, seriously stemming climate change means we would have to deliberately decrease our standards of living. It’s impossible for everyone on the planet to live like people in Santa Clara County and still have a perfect environment. Just impossible.”

In this podcast interview neurosurgeon Henry Marsh looks back on 40 years of intimate contact with the human brain. His insights, not just on his delicate life-or-death work, but on the human conscience, fear, religion and many other topics are fascinating and funny.

Another strong piece that looks critically at our relationship with work: “It’s not just romantic relationships that have suffered under neoliberalism. Friendship, too, is a casualty of the way our working lives are organized. A 2014 study found that one in 10 people in the United Kingdom did not have a close friend; in a 2019 poll in the United States, one in five of the millennials surveyed reported being friendless.”