Hello lovely email friends. Well, what a week. Just as things started to seem irretrievably gloomy, some shards of hope have permeated the public consciousness. Assuming, that is, you choose to believe.

🏭 Steel Is A Climate Nightmare. Sweden Has A Plan To Make It Green: A pilot plant making steel from green energy and hydrogen instead of coal could have big consequences for an industry with one of the worst environmental footprints. See also: Greta Thunberg Hears Your Excuses. She Is Not Impressed.

👀 Learning to Love the Spy in Your Living Room: I’m slightly obsessed with TV detector vans as a predecessor of surveillance capitalism, and here Matt Locke’s done the legwork researching them. It might seem that devices listening to us in our domestic spaces is a new idea, but it’s being going on for a while and is set to continue.

🎣 The Rich List “Codfathers” dominating the UK’s fishing industry: Given it accounts for just 0.1% of the UK’s GDP, we sure here a lot about the fishing industry. Surprisingly, or perhaps not, a minority of wealthy families control huge swathes of fishing rights to the detriment of local, low-impact, fishermen.

🎨 The power of unfinished: How to get more done: a really interesting exploration how a sense of the unfinished can be beneficial to design, both in process and output.

📞 Working on a suicide helpline changed how I talk to everyone: conversations with anonymous strangers led to the realisation that talking to those you know well is still unfamiliar territory.

🖨 It’s 2020. Why Do Printers Still Suck? Decades of dealing with paper jams and overpriced ink cartridges are an effective recipe for high blood pressure.

🎶 Brian Eno’s Music for Anxious Times: Eno on making functional art, his most ubiquitous composition and why he dislikes wearing headphones on the street.

Can we be divisive and united?

Our political views are subject to considerable cognitive biases, not least the tendency to interpret new information in a way that supports what we already believe. Combine this with the relentless firehosing of online media, and it can seem as if societies are being stretched thin between evermore polarised positions.

But what even is society in this context, besides ourselves? Amazingly, political polarisation manifests as observably divergent neural responses in our brains. Researchers scanned the brains of liberal and conservative adults as they were shown videos involving divisive policies. Their findings show left- and right-leaning participants responded differently to the same content, particularly when it contains vocabulary used in political campaigns.

So if we get different things out of the same content, societal polarisation might seem insurmountable. But that doesn’t mean we need to pull apart. Conversations even on polarising subjects are still possible, if we’re willing.