Screvi helps you remember what you read by preserving your highlights from Kindle, Kobo, physical books, websites and even YouTube videos in one searchable collection. It then brings them back to you through thoughtful daily reviews, feeds and smart searching, turning scattered bits of reading into a personal knowledge base that grows more valuable over time. Friends of DD enjoy a 15% discount. Become a Friend to access specials like this.

Wikiwand is an AI-enhanced interface that transforms the Wikipedia experience, offering a sleeker, more navigable design with features like timelines, top questions and chat functionality with articles while maintaining Wikipedia’s core commitment to neutral, community-driven content. (Yes, it’s a commercialised copy, but it also donates a portion of its income to the Wikimedia Foundation.)

A simple macOS tool created by indie developers to bring clarity to your financial commitments: Subscription Day is a thoughtful menu bar app to help you keep track of all your recurring payments in a clean calendar view, offering reminders and multi-currency support without storing any data in the cloud.

Choosr is a social app that lets you pose questions and gather opinions from a global audience. I kinda miss the time when running fun social experiments like this was an integral part of the online experience. Now such platforms either turn toxic quickly or get abandoned because they don’t grow fast enough.

In this longread, Derek Thompson explores how Americans (but really, all of us) are spending increasingly more time alone – at home, on their phones and away from social gatherings – creating what researcher Enghin Atalay calls a ‘century of solitude’. This profound shift, accelerated by technology and changing home environments, is reshaping our happiness, communities, politics and even perception of reality, despite mountains of evidence suggesting that most people would actually be happier with more face-to-face interaction. “Instead of focusing their 30s and 40s on wedding bands and diapers, they were committed to working on their body, their bank account, and their meditation-sharpened minds. Taggart called these men ‘secular monks’ for their combination of old- fashioned austerity and modern solipsism. ‘Practitioners submit themselves to ever more rigorous, monitored forms of ascetic self-control,’ he wrote, ‘among them, cold showers, intermittent fasting, data-driven health optimization, and meditation boot camps.’” (Paywalled – free archived view)

Here’s another interesting observation about how a culture shift and design choice has made us more isolated: Tom Greene observes that, in the past, front porches fostered community interactions, but modern homes have moved social spaces to private backyards. This shift, along with new technology, has led to a loss of neighbourly bonds and communal living. “The doorbell is simply a metaphor for how we live our lives. We live behind closed doors, insulated from the outside world by layers and layers of technology. We barely know our neighbors.”

The always insightful danah boyd on the different attitudes towards climate change we’re witnessing today. While beliefs still range from denial to acceptance, there is now a lot more dark variety in the latter camp, specifically the one focused on accelerationism, viewing climate change as inevitable and pushing for a rapid expansion of capitalism (as seen in the current US administration). “To protect the species, we should speed up capitalism to extract and hoard as much wealth as possible. That money grab will cause significant financial harm to individual people, but the ‘smart’ ones will cope. The next move is to invest that capital into advanced technology. This can’t play out in a slow way - this must be a massive economic push, akin to the buildup of going to war. Along the way, we need to find the smartest and most fertile people. Cuz soon, we are going to need to send people to Mars.”