A project that brings together hundreds of ‘best of’ lists to create an ever-evolving guide to the most celebrated books ever written. The rankings are based on how often books appear across trusted lists, with more weight given to the most credible sources. You can get personalised recommendations by creating an account and adding books you liked to your favourites.

Miss the days of Tinyletter? Rumicat is a simple, personal platform for publishing newsletters without the clutter of marketing tools. It’s a quiet space that celebrates small audiences, meaningful expression and the joy of writing for its own sake.

MapScroll combines mapping and AI. You can plot things on feature-rich maps with just a prompt. For example, you can ask it to show you the highest-rated cafés in a particular city that also have good vegan food and MapScroll assembles the locations, images, and captions automatically. It’s one of those AI use cases I would find genuinely useful. (Alas, looks like the site got hit by too much traffic and had to put a waitlist filter up.)

Monotype simulates an old-school typewriter on your Mac. With its retro feel and simple constraints, it brings back the pleasure of being fully present with your words. It’s free fun.

The friction-free, globetrotting life that many of us chase (or have chased in the past, like myself) looks tempting on Instagram but often feels empty. I agree with Rosie Spinks, who argues that technology and privilege make it easy to avoid typical life obligations, but ultimately also remove most of the things from our lives that make it meaningful. “The richness and meaning arises in part from choosing it at the expense of all other places you could be and things you could be doing. Accepting a place’s shortcomings, the things it lacks, and its imperfections is essential to appreciating everything it does have to offer.”

Wow. One of the more deeply curious and beautiful pieces I’ve read in a while: Shani Zhang paints and observes people at weddings, and quietly interprets what’s behind their exterior. She has a true gift for seeing people’s internal architecture through tiny external details. So many wonderful observations, like: “There is happy, and there is polite, and they look very different. Polite has a mechanical quality to it, like carrying out all the right movements to replace batteries in a remote. Happy has a boundless quality: unpredictable, even when it is at a low level. There is an openness, allowing another person to surprise and delight them. The easiest way to say this: there is no script for happy. It tumbles out of the body. Polite comes from the mind – it is restrained and calculated – measured lines and pauses. There are reinforcing loops in a polite person and a happy person. A person closed to the possibility of delight finds less of it. A person open to it finds more.”

This is tough but important reading: Mike Brock on how the US is facing a slow collapse of its democratic system and why many people cannot emotionally accept this reality. Psychological defenses, attention deficits and misleading media coverage make the crisis seem ‘normal’. “Fascism doesn’t arrive announcing itself with swastikas and goose-stepping troops. It comes draped in familiar symbols, speaking the language of tradition, order, and national renewal. It maintains the forms of democratic governance while hollowing out their substance. It works through existing institutions rather than immediately abolishing them.”