Select your areas of interest, add your email address and The Sample will send you an example of a different newsletter every day – without automatically subscribing you to it. You can decide whether to subscribe through a link below each email.

The oddly named Newsletterss app provides a unique email address to read all of your newsletters in a dedicated interface, making organising subscriptions and avoiding spam traps easier.

Whether it’s altruistic organisations, research projects or lobbying groups, a lot of projects and people receive funding from Big Tech. This (sadly Chrome only) browser extension slaps a warning label on Twitter accounts that receive money from Google, Facebook, Amazon and Co. [Note: after publishing a reader pointed out that this app was created by some conservative American thinktank with questionable motives.]

A great example of how machine learning can aid us in acquiring new skills: turn your camera on and let this app teach you the spelling of words in American Sign Language.

This Is Your Mind on Plants →

The power of psychoactive plants

In his latest book, writer Michael Pollan dives deep into three plant drugs – opium, caffeine and mescaline – and “throws the fundamental strangeness, and arbitrariness, of our thinking about them into sharp relief. Exploring and participating in the cultures that have grown up around these drugs while consuming them, Pollan reckons with the powerful human attraction to psychoactive plants. Why do we go to such great lengths to seek these shifts in consciousness, and then why do we fence that universal desire with laws and customs and fraught feelings?”

Under a White Sky →

The nature of the future

Her previous book The Sixth Extinction explored the ways in which our capacity for destruction has reshaped the natural world. In her newest title, Elizabeth Kolbert looks at the many dystopian-sounding methods we’re developing in the hope to stop said extinction. Under a White Sky examines “how the very sorts of interventions that have imperiled our planet are increasingly seen as the only hope for its salvation. By turns inspiring, terrifying, and darkly comic, Under a White Sky is an utterly original examination of the challenges we face.”

In what is essentially a long pitch for his newsletter/podcast, futurist and sustainability advocate Alex Steffen predicts that there is only one constant on the road ahead: discontiniuty. “Folks who understand this crisis often describe the changes growing from it as massive and imminent. Even more, though, they’re immanent – like rising floodwaters in a flat riverside town, they flow through our societies in all directions, they suffuse all our decisions, they wash away boundary lines and landmarks; each of us finds ourselves a stranger now in a strange land, a xenotopia. You and I and all the people we know live in a moment when learning how to move through a landscape stripped of its familiar reference points is an essential life skill.”

I love reading stories like this: Kílian Jornet is more machine than runner, living a reclusive outdoor life in remote Norway. “He is the fastest man to have run up and down various big peaks, including Mont Blanc (normal time: two days; Jornet time: four hours, 57 minutes). ... At one point he went five days straight without consuming anything: running, sleeping, running, sleeping. At a party a couple of days later, he fainted drinking a glass of orange juice. ‘My body was still recovering’, he says. He never went to another party again.”

I heard about The Blue Zones of Happiness – research on the key ingredients for a good life – in a podcast a few years ago, but only now got around to watching the video presentation: “Dan Buettner, author of The Blue Zones of Happiness, explains how he researched exceptionally happy people and found common denominators among them – and compares the ingredients of happiness in Singapore, Costa Rica and Denmark.”