Beloveds, we’re another week in and looking at our first full month of lockdown. Let’s share some weekend reading or links in the comments and enjoy one another’s company a bit, eh? The weather in London is (annoyingly) beautiful, so we’ll be throwing a picnic in our living room and tidying our house with the windows open. Keep well, kittens.

As more than one Twitter commentator has noted, for all of the Mad Max (aka hyper masculine) versions of catastrophe, it turns out that the skills we need are more in the (traditionally female) realm of food organization, emotional management, and providing care. The “apocalypse” is not what people expected. Good. May we learn some lessons from this.

This is both a fabulous illustrated travel essay and insightful. The line that got me, however: “Our situation is shit, but this is the fertilizer of the future.”

Water water, everywhere…but not enough for all of us to drink.

Bill Gates revisits his highly prescient TED Talk in a longform interview.

His single saving grace may be his breathtaking ability to just say the quiet parts out loud for us.

They CAN edit or deplatform bad actors, but they largely choose not to. When all this is over, we’ll see if those policies or practices stand.

I suspect there are a lot of empty hotel rooms right now. Meaning that this isn’t responsible, it’s despicable.

On the side of the goats.

“But disasters and emergencies do not just throw light on the world as it is. They also rip open the fabric of normality. Through the hole that opens up, we glimpse possibilities of other worlds. Some thinkers who study disasters focus more on all that might go wrong. Others are more optimistic, framing crises not just in terms of what is lost but also what might be gained. Every disaster is different, of course, and it’s never just one or the other: loss and gain always coexist. Only in hindsight will the contours of the new world we’re entering become clear.”

Basic math.

Amazon is not the only option. Support independent book businesses.

…yeah…sounds right…

Count me among the many victims of this quiz. And hot damn, I’ll take this result!