I’ve been looking for a new recipe app after my old one changed to a subscription model. Crouton looks great: lovely design and all the basic features I’m looking for: recipe import from websites, recipe scanning, measurement conversion, built-in meal planner and more.

Non-profit Consumer Report offers this mobile app for US Americans to find out which companies store their private data and then lodge a deletion request in one click.

As a future dog owner (when the time is right) I really appreciate that someone put all the dog psych knowledge in a great app: lots of training tutorials from professional dog trainers, a direct chat line to pro dog handlers, and a ton of other educational content.

“A collection of 951 blogs about every topic.” Directories like this make me reminisce about early Yahoo! and how it was a big part of late ’90s search engine optimisation. But yes, blogs! I’m here for the renaissance of personal blogging!

Rutherford and Fry’s Complete Guide to Absolutely Everything →

The story of the universe

This book looks like a fun, insightful read for the holidays: “This comprehensive guidebook tells the complete story of the universe and absolutely everything in it – skipping over some of the boring parts. Drs Hannah Fry and Adam Rutherford will show you that reality is not what it seems, common sense is neither common nor sensible, and our minds have evolved to lie to us all the time.”

The Conservation Revolution →

Radical ideas for saving nature

Climate change, biodiversity loss, ocean acidification – the conservation movement is calling for a new awakening to save what’s left of nature. But the views of what comes next diverge sharply: do we need greener economies or a total overhaul of our capitalist systems? The Conservation Revolution argues for “convivial conservation as the way forward. This approach goes beyond protected areas and faith in markets to incorporate the needs of humans and nonhumans within integrated and just landscapes.”

A wonderful deep read on the role of friendships and how politics meddles with our need/search for closeness, understanding and... love. “When politics is understood as war, genuine friendship becomes difficult because friendship contributes nothing to the cause. What it is replaced with is ‘allyship’ or ‘comradeship’. And comrades are not, strictly speaking, friends. They are rather partners in a cause. ... if friendship is a virtue, this would explain why it is simultaneously so difficult and rewarding. The difficulty lies in the fact that virtues are innate capacities that can only be actualized through long practice. One cannot simply wish friendship into being or master it in a single act.”

People who read Jenny Odell’s How to Do Nothing would have opinions on this short read about finding true rest: “That’s why rest is ultimately about doing things that have nothing to do with the furthering of your place in society. Rest can take the form of reading a book, but only if that book serves no purpose to your professional or personal goals. ... Whenever there’s anything centered around how my sense of self-worth can be furthered, I am not in a state of rest.”

This is a VICE piece, so make of that what you will. Still, I find the idea that our belief systems shape our neurological frameworks pretty fascinating. “When we finally break up with religion, we rebound. Eventually, non-religious people who once had religious epiphanies get those same feelings from being in nature, or from seeing profound scientific ideas expressed, Anderson says. ‘The context changes but the experience doesn’t.’ Most non-religious people are ‘passionately committed to some ideology or other,’ explains Patrick McNamara, a neurology professor at Boston University School of Medicine. These passions function neurologically as ‘faux religions.’”