Open a series of tabs with articles/content you’d like to read later, then press the EpubPress browser plugin and it compiles all open tabs into an easily readable .epub booklet that you can download and read on your preferred device.

If you’re into architecture, interior design and place-making, Shelter might be up your alley: a dedicated streaming service with a growing catalogue of documentaries, TV shows, project showcases and more – all about architecture. Friends of DD enjoy 20% off for the first year. Become a Friend to access specials like this.

I’m generally not a big fan of quantifying every little detail of my life, but this very basic mood tracker is something I could see myself using: simply tap on a colour representing a scale of well-being once a day and keep track of how your emotional state changes over time.

A neat visualisation of Earth’s continental shifts over the past 750 million years. Use your arrow keys to see the changes over time. (The site is hosted on dinosaurpictures.org which is worth a visit in its own right: a huge database with dinosaur info and illustrations!)

Turn the Tide on Climate Anxiety →

Sustainable climate action

Climate anxiety comes up in more and more of my conversations with friends, especially those with kids. This new title may offer some consolation and hope: “Written by psychologists with extensive experience in treating people with eco-anxiety, this book shows you how to harness these emotions, validate them, and transform them into positive action. It enables you to assess and understand your psychological responses to the climate crisis and move away from unhealthy defence mechanisms, such as denial and avoidance.”

Misfits →

A call for honesty, empathy and inclusion

I loved watching actress Michaela Coel in Black Earth Rising and was delighted to see that she recently published a book that sounds as potent as her performance on screen: “With inspiring insight and wit, she tells of her reckoning with trauma and metamorphosis into a champion for herself, inclusivity and radical honesty, and in telling her journey invites us to reflect on our own. By embracing our differences, she says, we can transform our lives. An artist to her core, Coel holds up the path of the creative as an emblem of our need to regard one another with care and respect – and transparency.”

This personal account of a Microsoft engineer flying to Kazakhstan in order to bring Chevron’s oil production facilities into the Cloud is the perfect example of Big Tech pretending to care about the climate emergency. “The company runs various recycling programs, encourages employees to ‘skip the straw’ to reduce plastic consumption, and funds sustainability hackathons. (One hackathon project involved using AI/ML to detect trash in the ocean.) More broadly, Microsoft works hard to present an environmentally friendly public face. ... But in reality, these companies are doing just enough to keep their critics distracted while teaming up with the industry that is at the root of the climate crisis. Why go through the effort of using clean energy to power your data centers when those same data centers are being used by companies like Chevron to produce more oil?”

An in-depth piece on a phenomenon in ultrafast fashion that was completely off my radar: Shein (pronounced shee-in) is an online-only, discount fashion retailer from China with nearly 10,000 employees and offices in China, Singapore, and the US. The numbers (and associated environmental impacts) are truly staggering: “In recent years, many of the largest fashion companies have felt pressure to make small moves toward reform. Now, though, an emerging generation of ‘ultrafast-fashion’ companies has come along, and many are doing little, if anything, to adopt better practices. Among them, Shein is by far the biggest. ... in a recent 12-month period, the Gap listed roughly 12,000 different items on its website, H&M had about 25,000, and Zara had some 35,000. Shein, in that period, had 1.3 million.” (Possible soft paywall)

A short piece on the different ‘alone’ states we experience. Finding space for enough solitude without experiencing loneliness is one of the great challenges of leading an introspective, creative life. “We are taught from a young age that sociability is good, that the crowd is happiness, and that belonging and fulfillment comes from relationships. There is, of course, a lot of truth to this. But what being in company gives us in one area, it deprives us in another. When we take time to ourselves, we give ourselves space to imagine. When our mind is not constantly bombarded with content, it can create.”