“What have they done to my library?” - Caitlin Moran

How To Organise Your Library

John expands on just one part of his superbly dense and entertaining dConstruct talk.

Welcome to Open Library! (Open Library)

One web page for every book. I love this project.

Emily F. Gorcenski: How I Read 40 Books and Extinguished the World on Fire

I’ve found that there’s way more good people than bad. There’s way more people willing to help than willing to hurt. Some things are really scary but there’s way more people out there willing to guide us through the darkness than we think. The cynic in me wants to say that the “powers that be” want us to be endlessly doomscrolling and losing hope and snuffing out optimism. We shouldn’t give them what they want. There’s a lot of beauty in the world still within our grasp. We’re better when we’re poets, when we’re learners and listeners, when we’re builders and not breakers.

The other side of egoism | A Working Library

Mandy takes a deep dive into the treatment of altruism in Ursula Le Guin’s The Dispossessed.

“Is This Helpful?” » Mike Industries

I like Mike’s “long zoom” view here where the glass is half full and half empty:

Several years from now, I want to be able to look back on this time the same way people look at other natural disasters. Without that terrible earthquake, we would have never improved our building codes. Without that terrible flood, we would have never built those levees. Without that terrible hurricane, we would have never rebuilt this amazing city. Without that terrible disease, we would have never developed antibodies against it.

It doesn’t require giving any credit to the disaster. The disaster will always be a complete fucking disaster. But it does involve using the disaster as an opportunity to take a hard look at what got us here and rededicate our energy towards things that will get us out.