Ready (for Google Calendars on Mac) is a new calendar app specifically designed for teams. Each event comes with a shared workspace that can be pre-filled by a template, ready to work on a shared agenda, meeting notes, to-dos and other embeddable media. It’s a bit unclear as to how one can get early access. The sign-up form ends in an ambiguous ‘Be in touch’.

What a lovely idea: Happy Medium is a place to learn more about art, find other artists and participate in workshops – all for those who consider themselves ‘casual artists’. “There’s a lot of stuff out there for kids and capital ‘A’ Artists, but there isn’t much for those that fall somewhere in between. We are on a mission to fill the gap.”

Choosy gives you the option to pick a specific browser when opening a new link. You can also set behaviour rules, so that all email address links automatically open Gmail in Safari, for instance.

An interactive visualisation tool showing how the board of directors of US America’s biggest companies are connected. “It shows that 87 of the top 100 US companies in 2021 were connected through shared directors on their boards. ... A few companies control much of the economy and oligopolies exert control in nearly every sector of the economy. The people who oversee these companies swap on and off the boards from one company to another, and in and out of government positions. These people run the most powerful institutions on the planet, and we have almost no say in who they are.”

Psych →

A guide to modern psychology

Released just a couple of weeks back, Psych is a compelling, funny and accessible guide on the modern science of psychology and the most intimate aspects of human nature. Author Paul Bloom “reveals what psychology can tell us about the most pressing moral and political issues of our time – including belief in conspiracy theories, the role of genes in explaining human differences, and the nature of prejudice and hatred.”

Deliberate Intervention →

Policy and design to blunt the harms of new tech

When design and tech ethicist Cennydd Bowles recommends a book, I happily add it to my DD book list. From the foreword: “Deliberate Intervention brings you to a place of reckoning that questions how technology adds value to our volatile society. It is an invitation to reflect on how social context, culture, and variable time horizons transform the world and how those transformations, activated by technology, can drift to dark places.”

All of us have read at least one self-help post on how to achieve the perfect ‘work-life balance’ – a novel idea that presents us with an oversimplified, almost binary attempt at creating a fulfilling life. In this piece, two psychologists provide a more holistic, research-based approach, using six fundamental psychological needs. “The good news is that neither work nor leisure time must satisfy all your psychological needs. Instead, each role in life you have (eg, experienced foreman, loving husband, caring son, dedicated Red Cross volunteer and avid chess player) plays an important part in an orchestra. Coordination of these different roles, and satisfaction of needs via active engagement in these roles, results in what we call ‘life domain harmony’ – the symphony of your life.”

As the signal-to-noise ratio gets ever more diluted by mis/disinformation (and soon AI-generated fluff), it’ll be increasingly important to learn how we can reclaim some cognitive space. As part of digital literacy training, we could teach ‘critical ignoring’ strategies to help safeguard our attention. “Online, looks can be deceiving. Unless one has extensive background knowledge it is often very difficult to figure out that a site, filled with the trappings of serious research, peddles falsehoods about climate change or vaccinations or any variety of historical topics, such as the Holocaust. Instead of getting entangled in the site’s reports and professional design, fact checkers exercise critical ignoring. They evaluate the site by leaving it and engage in lateral reading instead.”

I’d love to read more, and so I’m always open to new reading strategies. One of the tips in this piece is something I only started to fully embraced during the pandemic lockdowns: don’t be afraid to break up with a book if it doesn’t spark joy, no matter how little or much you’ve already read. “I quit three or four books for every book I read to the end. I do the ‘first five pages test’ before I buy any book (checking for tone, pace, and language) and then let myself off the hook if I need to stop halfway through.”