Firstly, adorable and absolutely lovely.

Secondly, what a masterclass in geometry! 

When I was little, and then not-so-little, my preferred method of doodling in the back of notebooks when I was bored was creating endless intricate 3D cubes and objects. That particular corner of my brain lights up when I see his process videos,which show the level of schematic work that goes into this view-from-the-top thing he has going on. 

Pls appreciate my artistic masterpiece (one of my first ever Instagram posts back in 2012) and compare it to the cool stuffs this bro is doing.

This account covers art + architecture + decor + the cute li’l cuddly lives of families around the world. It gives me all sorts of warm fuzzies.

If you ever commission one of his pieces, you gotta tell me and show me how it turns out.

Them’s the rules.

Divya
Part-time marketing consultant, full-time worrier
Instagram

The Suez Canal is a particularly difficult place to navigate bulky vehicles through. But I'm sure you would've done a better job than the captain of the Ever Given, right? Well, today's Thing allows you to prove it.

An interactive experiment launched by CNN that asks you to navigate a ship through the very place the Ever Given got stuck at. Sure, the physics doesn't entirely replicate real-world conditions, but it is a fun little experiment nevertheless. And no, I haven't yet managed to take a ship the whole way through.

But you go full steam ahead. I have faith in you.

Baaa.

Dolly

But like rules, there are exceptions. And the exception in this case are words. You know, those made up things that help us communicate or obfuscate and only manage to convey maybe 5% of what we really mean to say?

(I’m a writer going through a block; forgive me if this veers into weird territory).

Despite our love-hate relationship, I will never turn away from an opportunity to understand where words come from and where they go. For instance, why are there two main sounds associated with the word for tea/cha? Or why the word for mother universally contains an 'm' sound.

Etymology Nerd has the answers to all these burning questions, and he delivers them with infectious enthusiasm. 

So next time someone brings up why the fuck Chai Tea or Naan Bread exist, you can tell them exactly why (besides, you know, colonisers) and have the dubious honour of introducing them to desert desert (Sahara) and river river (Mississippi).

Analina

Never lose a trivia night again with Just One Thing in your arsenal – share it with someone who loves words and learning about them. 

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A flyover in my neighbourhood is due to be reconstructed. So, while that happens, we have to find alternate ways to get around. It isn’t very complicated, though. For most people, one simple diversion would do the trick.

But, hey. We live in India. Why take the straightforward path when we can go out of our way to fuck shit up? The people in charge in Pune have come up with a traffic plan so absurd that Satan is eyeing them with envy at their ability to make something as simple as being on the streets a living hell.

Need to cross the road to get to the grocery store? Risk getting hit by a vehicle. Need to go to your gym 2 km away? Take a diversion that doubles that distance. Meeting your friends for dinner? Leave at least an hour in advance, lest you only get to the restaurant in time for dessert.

Pardon my French, but at the moment, there’s nothing to call my city other than a clusterfuck.

Thankfully, the internet still exists. And on the internet, I’ve found the most wonderful group of intellectuals, urban planners, or “imagination experts” that I could have asked for.

They share their intricate visions of what a perfect city would look like, and they get so many things right. Their dream cities are aesthetic, green, communal, pet-inclusive, car-free, pollution-free, and have lots of space for play – something we could all use more of.

I’m tempted to invite these experts to my city to help make it a bit more liveable. Maybe you want to, too? They’re called The Little Big Think Tank. I think you’ll like them.

Ria

But today's Thing, City Roads, does precisely that. Enter your city and instantly see a map (via OpenStreetMap) of all the roads in your city. You can then print it out onto a mug or save it as a PNG or SVG file for use elsewhere.

This here is what my city looks like.

And this is what beautifully laid out Barcelona looks like.

Go ahead and download yours.

Baaa.

Dolly

I followed Loryn forever and ever ago because she used to draw cute li’l webcomics of ditzy women I identified with. See…

When she popped up on my feed again, it was some babies and one transformation into Shel-Silverstein-as-a-new-mom later. Her poems are ridiculous and real and adorable. The parents in her comments seem to find these very relatable; all I can say is…. I can picture an alternate-universe version of me with kids also finding them very relatable.

Go scroll through them, and hang on to your ovaries; those f*ckers are gonna twinge.

Divya
Part-time marketing consultant, full-time worrier
Instagram

A boy is leaning against a coconut tree with a few goats. I wonder what his story is. If he’s bored, at peace, or ambivalent.

And though this monologue may lead you to believe that today’s thing is related to a treatise on the beauty of all things green, allow me to disabuse you of this notion.

I’m here to point you to another fascinating bit of nature – human beings. Specifically, this one guy on Instagram who has made geolocation into an art and a science and an unholy mix of the two.

That boy with the goats? He could find out the GPS coordinates with just a snapshot of a photo I took. Using the type of trees, species of goat, and god knows what else to extrapolate data. Fellow JOTter, Divya, has previously written about GeoGuessr which has invoked similar feels.

It's kind of brilliant and scary at the same time. It’s also a tidy reminder that while we’re reliant on supercomputers and smartphones, it was humans who put all that together in the place. And anything tech can do – humans did it first.

Analina

Just One Thing is the perfect source of all things human ingenue – share it with someone and give them a reminder today?

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Photography is never just about snapping pictures; it's like having a magic wand that turns reality into a fairy tale—except instead of a wand, it's a camera, and instead of Hogwarts, it can be your backyard. I can wander through the park and whip out my phone, and suddenly, it's like I am in a world where every leaf is a fairy, and every sunbeam is a wand.

Photography is never just about taking a photograph—it's about wielding a magic wand to turn reality into a fairytale.

To me, photographs aren't just the cupboard to Narnia; when taking a photo, you direct your own fairy tale. You choose angles, lighting, and the story you want to tell. Those who know me will tell you I love my vanity—I'm living my best fairy tale life, if only on my personal Instagram, one artfully presented photograph at a time. Have I told you I love Wes Anderson?

There's a website I'm quite into (this is their Instagram), a curated visual treat of Wes Andersonesque locales that could easily be plucked out of his cinematic fantasy league. world, another world of fantasy. It's got everything - symmetry, colour and a generous sprinkling of nostalgia.

In a world where reality is as bland as a soggy sandwich, perfectly framed photographs are just the magic you need.

Nikita

P.S. Our schedule has changed, and we'll be shipping Things three days a week starting Monday, Wednesday and Friday. Thank you, as always, for reading. ♥️

Whichever Big Brother is watching, they've noted that I'm learning Spanish. In fact, I've written about the thrills and pains of learning a new language before. And while Duolingo and Sabi hold their own, another competitor has jumped into the ring.

Dreaming Spanish posits that the only way to really learn a language (besides actually being in the country) is to hear it around you. To achieve this, they've compiled a list of videos, according to levels, for you to get used to actual Spanish speakers speaking about things you might actually encounter IRL, not just grammar rules and vocab words.

In a couple of months, it'll be a whole year since I started learning the language. To my great shame, I can still barely string along a sentence that is not "Yo no sé" ("I don't know", if you hadn't guessed).

I will test this new internet find and share the results with you. And who knows, by this time next year, you'll receive a Thing written entirely in Spanish (LOL).

Analina

I posit Just One Thing is the best source of all things internet - share it with a learner today!

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Most of these books seem to be in the 'self-help' and 'productivity' zone, with a suspiciously large number of authors posing as saffron-clad spiritual gurus doling out life-changing advice. Before this becomes another rant, I'll redirect my attention to today's Thing.

It's a really useful site called Littler Books that summarises non-fiction books in sufficient detail to help you decide whether or not to read the whole book. It's also an accessible way to discover new books. For example, I came across this book called Psycho-Cybernetics: A New Way to Get More Living Out of Life by Maxwell Maltz, which I will definitely not be reading.

Littler Books has no ads, and it is written and edited by humans, not AI. It also has an unwitting canine mascot. 

In this day and age, what else can you ask for?

Proiti

The EZZ Show is where I've found this happy couple.

These puzzles range from easy to tough to baffling. It's always great when social media engages your brain and doesn't just aggravate your carpal tunnel, so I've been quite happy with this find.     

I do have one little gripe with the puzzle in the first video I encountered, but I won't spoil it for you.   

I'll wait for you to watch it before I get my vindication.

Analina

Here's my attempt at one: ➖🖊️ 
Hint: Ask your friends to _________ to Just One Thing for more such quizzes! 

Once, in a bookstore, out of nowhere, my brain hit me with the emotional equivalent of a piano falling from the sky. Suddenly, I was knee-deep in a pit of existential dread, wondering if my socks matched and if the universe had a delete button for embarrassing memories. With those thoughts, I walked out of that store with a book I didn't pay for. I realized this only when a friend asked me to show them the book I bought.

Sometimes, in all that mental gymnastics, I'll chance upon a nugget of wisdom. Like the realisation, it's okay to feel like a potato sometimes, so long as you remember that even potatoes have moments of glory. Golden fries. Delicious mash. Yum.

I even found an artist who has it all laid out, every damn thing I've ever felt but couldn't explain. 

It's good to know you're not alone in your misery.

Nikita

I suppose that’s why I enjoy cooking and gardening so much. Using my hands and senses to transform one thing into another in front of my eyes is a magnificent feeling. In fact, the first time I made compost after months of work, I was overwhelmed with the circular nature of life and had a spiritual “ashes to ashes, dust to dust, carrot peels to soil” moment. 

All this is just to say… I enjoy watching people create beautiful or functional things with their own hands and efforts, and the r/ArtisanVideos subreddit is a wonderful place to do just that. 

I spent a long time watching a woman with a hypnotic voice cut a piece of rose quartz into a 20-sided D&D die.

And a guy making a bag that looks like a Madeleine.

And this badass guy making a very badass wolf mask.

Go see, marvel at the cool things people make, and try to use your hands for something besides doomscrolling and clickety-click, perhaps. 

Godspeed.

Divya
Part-time marketing consultant, full-time worrier
Instagram

This week I resuscitated an old phone last used in 2018 and erased everything "irrelevant" (namely photos of notes exchanged in bulk before semester exams). During this adventurous quest, I found an illustrated GIF I had saved as my phone wallpaper. This has migrated from my old laptop to my old phone to my new laptop.

The person I was in 2018 is not exactly the same person I am in 2024, but some things about her have remained the same. 

Mainly that, for her, peace looks like this:

Created by the artist mochipanko, whose website I stalked the shit out of after the discovery on my phone. Their rainy series is still my favourite after six long years. 

No matter what my goals and priorities are at the moment, it's good to know that rain = being cosy indoors has stayed consistent.

For a change, my Thing for today is not a game, learning tool, or internet tool but a cool artist who might take you down memory lane.    

Analina

The biggest offender has to be the mobile ringtone, followed by audio replays of videos that weren't supposed to be shot in the first place. There are also toddlers crying, but people tend to show more mercy in those cases (God knows why). But perhaps the most frequent sound heard from the audience—one that cannot be prohibited because it's a bodily phenomenon—is coughing.

I'm not talking about muffled coughs to soothe a dehydrated throat. I'm talking about those loud, raspy, harrowing coughs that make people around the cougher wonder whether they should be in an emergency room instead of a concert hall. The number of such coughs coughed emitted during concerts seems to have gone up across the globe (trust me bro). I blame the miserable quality of our air. Maybe someone someday will conduct a study and correlate these things (definitely not me).

I wish someone had already done the study, and I could link it here to back up my claims. I can't do that, but I can introduce you to today's Thing: The Concert Cougher. It's an interactive experience where you can press a button to cough during a piano recital. It's wicked, it's cheeky and weirdly addictive.

Cough on.

And here's some further reading. 

Proiti

And yet, as a society, as claimants of civility and progress, we have failed miserably. Water is now a rapidly depleting resource. This depletion threatens our health, our peace, our security and the hopes of future generations. We are standing at the brink of collapse, of irreversible damage. The blue planet needs help, and our response is still laced with hesitation and trepidation.

But water still bears our stories as sincerely as it always did. 

…

The Museum of Water is a publicly donated collection of water and the stories it tells. From of a cup of afternoon tea to water from the sink of a young man’s first home in London, from a bit of swimming pool water to a few drops of water from a baby’s baptism, this collection, as someone described it, is a “mosaic of the universe”.

If I still had it, I would have donated my tiny jam jar filled with water from the Mediterranean Sea, which I filled in 2008 and kept in my cupboard for the next decade.

What would you donate?

Proiti

I need my subs—yes, even when I'm watching TV in languages that I'm fluent in. Subtitles and closed captions help a viewer understand what's happening on-screen—either by translating the dialogue to a different language or making the content accessible to the deaf or hard of hearing, which I am not. So why am I so insistent on my subtitles?

Oddly enough, I'm not the only one. Over the years, more and more people have reported needing subtitles to understand dialogue in films and TV. And oddly enough, we have technology and innovations in sound recording and mixing to blame for it. Today's Thing is this fantastic explainer by Vox which takes you on a journey through film and TV history to explain exactly why dialogue has become much more unintelligible over time.

And on the flip side of that discussion, subtitles can actually add a whole new dimension to what you're watching. One of my classmates at film school made a short film where the subtitles themselves fall in love with the protagonist - essentially twisting the notion that subtitles have to be merely functional. And the best example of this in recent times? Stranger Things season 4 - even if you haven't seen the show, you've definitely seen the subtitles all across the memeverse. [Eleven pants], anyone? Here are two fantastic interviews with the subtitling team behind the show, wherein they explain the origins of gems such as [writhing wetly], [ferocious guitar riff] and many more. 

Pai

Despite all the good mindful movement can do for your brain, it just can’t do what caffeine can.

Earlier this year, I spent a couple of weeks at a yoga retreat in Goa. After a relaxed breakfast, I’d delay my midday nap with a cup of coffee. Not very good coffee, mind you. But I promise I wasn’t a bad carpenter; it was the tools. Broken French presses. Coffee that was ground too fine. A machine that produced burnt-tasting coffee.

A few days in, a new friend and I decided that enough was enough. Something had to change.

We are by no means coffee connoisseurs (the friend in question was briefly a barista a decade ago, though he claims that doesn’t count), but all we wanted was a decent cuppa.

A conversation about South Indian coffee filters and a trip to Mapusa market quickly yielded our solution. Finally! Coffee we could actually drink, even enjoy!

I'm still no coffee snob, but I’ve stopped taking decent coffee for granted. Making coffee is a whole art and science, and there’s no one better to tell you all about it than James Hoffman.

Honestly, the best thing about Hoffman is how big of a coffee nerd he is. His YouTube is amazing and super informative – that goes without saying. But did you know about Tens, Hundreds and Thousands, which he co-created to make coffee-related products (puzzles, ceramics, even ugly Christmas jumpers) that he couldn’t find anywhere? Or Coffee Jobs Board, a recruitment platform (which he's now sold) targeted solely towards coffee-related jobs?

I don’t think there’s a coffee-related endeavour he hasn’t tried his hand at. Blogs, magazines, podcasts, consulting, coffee sensory kits, competitions, books… he’s done it all. What might he come up with in the future? I don’t know, but I don’t think I would be surprised – the man is capable of doing anything (as long as it’s coffee-related, of course).

What is surprising to me, however, is that Dolly hasn’t shared this with you in all this time. Well, now you don’t need him to.

Go forth into the world of coffee. Haffun.

Ria

Musicstax takes the entire Spotify database and analyses its bpm, key, danceability, popularity, and so on.

I've been obsessed been Hozier's Too Sweet these past two weeks, and thanks to Musicstax, I know I am part of a whopping 82% who agree. I do have a bone to pick about the positiveness index, but hey, you can't have everything.

Although the data is fabulous, there is another allure: a list of songs similar in tempo, beat, and, most importantly, vibes.

I'm off to curate a playlist using these suggestions, and really make the song live up to that 74% danceability. Over to you.

Analina

Anyway, now that I know, I'm leaning into it fully. I live in Kolkata, and unless you're some superhuman entity that has meditated away their bodily sensations, you are definitely FEELING THE HEAT. At the time of writing, there's a heat wave ongoing, with no end in sight. Bengal has always had its hot summers, but its current avatar has been made possible by the one and only phenomenon known as Global Warming!

Is today's Thing just a long rant? Mostly yes. But there is an actual Thing at the end of this. Before I clue you in, I want to take this opportunity to list two things (I wanted to list at least three things, but I genuinely couldn't go beyond two) that I actually like about summer. At this point, this is a mental health exercise. Nevertheless, I would like you to be part of it:

1. Mangoes, allllll of them mangoes. Earlier, I was biased towards mangoes that grow in the rich and fertile soils of Bengal, but I have since decided to expand the horizons of my palate and open my heart to the possibility that mangoes from other parts of South Asia are also great. I want to taste as many different varieties of mangoes as possible.

2. Norwesters. We Bengalis have romanticized the hell out of Norwesters in our songs, poetry, novels and paintings - and of course, we have! Name a better feeling than the first draft of cool wind after a mind-numbingly humid day on your face, followed by the gradual appearance of grey clouds on the horizon, accompanied by the sound of rustling leaves and flapping window panes.

Apart from mangoes and northwestern, I don't know what else summer offers that doesn't crush your soul and kill your desire to live. And I'll tell you something right now. It's only going to get worse. So much worse.

Today's thing is the climate handbook from Probable Futures, a close look at the unprecedented situation we have created.

You can also check out their climate maps, which tell a damning story about where we're headed. 

Stay strong. 

Proiti