With Felt you can create highly customised maps. Use a marker, highlighter and notes to treat a map like a pad of paper. Smart, map-aware tools make drawing along roads and boundaries easy. You can also add photos, links and videos.

This is a lovely one-pager (+ FAQ) to send to people feeling climate despair. It’s a simple reminder that no matter how bad things will get, it’s never too late to become more educated and engaged in the issue. 2C of warming is bad, but 2.01C of warming is worse.

With this little macOS and iOS app, you can monitor the current battery status of all your Apple devices (and that of your friends or family if you/they so desire).

I love the fact that the internet constantly churns out more ways for finding new books to read. “Enter a book you like and the site will analyse our huge database of real readers’ favorite books to provide book recommendations and suggestions for what to read next.”

Essential Labor →

Mothering as social change

When I first saw this title, I thought of Jenny Odell’s book How To Do Nothing in which she highlights how care and maintenance are under-appreciated, but ever so essential for our society. And sure enough, Jenny and this book’s author, Angela Garbes, have been in conversation.) “In Essential Labor, Garbes explores assumptions about care, work, and deservedness, offering a deeply personal and rigorously reported look at what mothering is, and can be. A first-generation Filipina American, Garbes shares the perspective of her family’s complicated relationship to care work, placing mothering in a global context – the invisible economic engine that has been historically demanded of women of colour.”

The Art of Repair →

Mindful mending

Molly Martin wrote a lovingly illustrated book about how mending broken things can be an antidote to our increasingly disposable lifestyle. The book “explores the humble origins of repair and how the act of mending a cherished item carefully by hand offers not just a practical solution but nourishment for the soul. Using her own beautiful illustrations, she guides us through the basics of the craft – from piecing and patching to the ancient Japanese art of Sashiko.”

Charlie Warzel with a fantastic opinion piece about an executive management style that relies on constant news-making, social media fandom and culture warring. “When you cut through the bravado and ego, and the tweets and blog posts, very little remains. The Musk School of Management doesn’t just model bad leadership; it props up leaders who cling to past successes and who substitute vision with bluster. It is the hallmark of an ideas man who is, in the end, out of good ideas.”

This story highlights the complicated relationship between NIMBYs, developers and city officials. On the one hand, NIMBYs are often active participants in local placemaking, helping to create a sense of community. On the other hand, they’re also a main reason for why progress in local politics is so frustratingly slow and why housing affordability keeps getting worse. “How does a place that prides itself on progressive politics have so many policies that exacerbate inequality? How do homeowners whose window signs say they welcome every oppressed group rationalize a housing system that has caused their own children to flee?” (Possible soft paywall)

There is a growing movement of urbanists, city planners and local residents pushing for a rethink of car-dependent urban planning. As usual, European cities are leading the way in the Western world, showing that – unsurprisingly – early resistance to anti-car policies is strong and sometimes vicious, yet the long-term changes are profoundly positive. “Traffic-reduction programmes also have impacts beyond reducing air pollution and carbon emissions. In cities like Oslo and Helsinki, thanks to car-reduction policies, entire years have passed without a single road traffic death. It’s even been suggested that needing less parking could free up space to help ease the chronic housing shortage felt in so many cities.” (Possible soft paywall)