Make sense of what’s happening, and imagine what could be.
Carefully curated recommendations on what to read, watch and listen to. For nerds and changemakers who love when something makes them go «Huh, I never thought of it this way!».Undecided? Learn more | Peek inside
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Hi, I'm David. A journalist, and a curious generalist.
I've been curating the best of the web for my newsletter since 2011. I'd love to be your diligent curator, too.
Recommendations in the Weekly Filet are things I want my friends to see.
Things that tickle and delight a curious mind.
Articles, books, podcasts, graphics, videos, photographs,...The form is never the limit.
I let these questions guide me:
1. Does it help understand a complex, important issue?
2. Does it foster empathy by making you see the world through others' eyes?
3. Does it inspire self-reflection?
If it's timely, that's good. If it's timeless, that's better.
If in doubt, I prefer nerdy, witty, ambiguous. Solutions-oriented and actionable. Candid.
Don't expect news. Expect new insights.
Expect to be surprised.
Immerse yourself in a particular topic, with some of the best links from around the web, handpicked.
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2657 recommended links since 2011
...or shuffle for a surprise
Some helpful tactical advice for saving meetings that have gone off the rails. «Take a deep breath and ask yourself: What’s really happening in this room right now? And then? Say it out loud.»
«I would like you to pause with me here for a moment, at least for the duration of this column, and allow those statistics to become tragedies. Each one of those deaths is a singular tragedy: a child robbed of a future, of a chance to find out who they are, to know the world, to be a person.»
Silicon Valley is in panic mode after a Chinese start-up has released a new large language model. It’s not better than what AI made in America is capable of. No, what shook the AI industry is that the Chinese model took waaaaaaay less money and resources to train. No idea what the fuss is about? 404 Media has you covered with.
Cutest story I’ve seen on the web in a while. An explainer of how cozy video games can be an antidote to stress and anxiety, told in the form of a cozy video game.
When we imagine different lives we could have lived, we tend to think about decisions we made, and roads not taken. What is far less appreciated, Morgan Housel elaborates in this podcast episode, are random events that could have changed everything. I’m fascinated by the experiment Housel describes – and cautiously curious about trying it myself: He wrote a detailed description of the life circumstances of his 20-year-old self. He then gave that description to ChatGPT and asked it to write 50 stories of how that 20-year-old’s life would likely continue. He got 50 versions of how his life could have been, including some shocking ones.
Some good news from Europe. Solar has, for the first time, overtaken coal as power source in the EU. And overall, renewables now generate way more power than fossil fuels. Sadly, all gains made by Europe will be dwarfed by the additional emissions Trump’s policies are expected to generate.
A new addition to my collection of in-depth profiles of the stuff our modern world runs on. If you own a website – be it the Weekly Filet, The New York Times or Wikipedia – a simple text file called robots.txt is your best option to tell the most powerful tech companies in the world what they can and cannot do with your content. Invented three decades ago, by people «who believed that the internet was a good place, filled with good people, who above all wanted the internet to be a good thing.»
Thought-provoking longread on how more and more people opt to spend more time alone, and how this is rewiring an entire society’s identity. Most changes are marginal. However, «the way we spend our minutes is the way we spend our decades.»
Only 207 more weeks to go. Trump’s inauguration – and the realisation of how normalised his outrageous words and actions have become – seems like a good time to spotlight Timothy Snyder’s twenty lessons on tyranny again. «Do not obey in advance.» is the big one, but the most empowering is probably this one: «The moment you set an example, the spell of the status quo is broken, and others will follow.» (as exhibited by Mariann Budde)
The rape kit, a standardised way to collect evidence of sexual assault, was a game changer when it was introduced in the 1970s. A man is often credited with inventing it – this is the story of the woman who actually invented it. «In a cruel irony, a woman who drove major social change failed to get her due as a result of politics and sexism.»