I love this small “collection of thinking tools and frameworks to help you solve problems, make decisions and understand systems”. Systems Thinking is such an important concept for trying to make sense of the current state of the world.

It looks a bit like MacOS’ Spotlight but serves a different function: There gives easy access to everything you need to know about each member of your remote team: “Who’s asleep? Who’s on holidays? What’s the team doing right now? When will this coworker be back?”

Rigidity is often seen as a bad thing in software, but if you ever had to drudge your way through layers of Notion documents, you may appreciate this: Nuclino is “a lightweight and collaborative wiki for all your team's knowledge, docs, and notes.”

When I’m on the go and come across something interesting online, I often email myself the link so that I can revisit it in more detail later. For a while I used a little app called ‘Mail to Self’, but that app disappeared when GDPR rules came around. Now I just found a perfect replacement: all you need to do is open Apple’s Shortcuts app, search ‘Email Myself’ in the gallery, and add the shortcut. Now you have a new option on your Share Sheet. With one tap you can send links (or anything shareable) straight to your inbox.

Lo—TEK →

Design by Radical Indigenism

There is so much to learn from design techniques based on local, multigenerational knowledge of working with nature. A fascinating, timely topic: “In an era of high-tech and climate extremes, we are drowning in information while starving for wisdom. Enter Lo—TEK, a design movement building on indigenous philosophy and vernacular infrastructure to generate sustainable, resilient, nature-based technology. With a foreword by anthropologist Wade Davis and spanning 18 countries from Peru to the Philippines, Tanzania to Iran, this book explores millennia-old human ingenuity on how to live in symbiosis with nature.”

Art prints →

Drawn by machines

James Nolan Gandy builds a variety of drawing machines that create art. The artwork he sells on his website is all originally drawn by machines equipped with stock-standard pens in different colours, forming mesmerising shapes and patterns.

Courtney Ariel on how the privileged can be stronger allies to the marginalised: “Being a citizen of a society requires work from everyone within that society. It is up to you whether you choose to acknowledge the work that is yours to do. It is up to you whether you choose to pay this debt and how you choose to do so.”

Professor Ibram X. Kendi, author of How to Be an Antiracist, in a short interview on how COVID-19 contributes to the current moment and what he describes as The American Nightmare. “Every individual lives in a neighborhood. And chances are that neighborhood has racial disparities. Every individual operates in an institution, whether that’s their job, whether that’s their church, whether that’s a club. Chances are their job, their institution has racial disparities or is doing nothing in the face of racial disparities. And so I think every individual can look around their own neighborhood, their own institution, and ask the question, ‘Well, who here is challenging the policy that is leading to these racial disparities?’”

More than once I was autoplayed a video on Twitter that left a mental scar. I agree with Kemi Alemoru here: “Footage of brutality is a powerful weapon but as much as it brings publicity to a case it also brings a lot of pain. As such [it] should be handled with care.”