📖 Book of the Month

Who’s your role model? Maybe it’s a recent Nobel laureate, a friend you admire, or a university professor whose research rekindles your passion for life. Or maybe you don’t have a role model. In any case, inspiring oneself from other beings, organisms, and existences in the world is a fully necessary, and useful, part of learning how to live - and not only human ones. A great gift from our friends at Caja Negra Editora, we’ve been reading Let’s Become Fungal by Yasmine Ostendorf-Rodríguez - it’s a book which explores the many ways in which mushrooms can inspire our lives. A kind of thinking that, according to this 1991 theory, Vladimir Lenin himself might’ve taken too seriously. Confused? Read here.

🎮 Game of the Month

We must confess: we’re quite lucky. Here in Barcelona, it’s very easy for us to go to beautiful nature spots - from nearby Collserola, to monasteries in La Mola and Montserrat, or the spectacular Vall de Núria, to name a few. But sometimes, it’s not that easy -  and, although it does not measure up in any way to the real thing, we really liked this online (and fellow Webby Award-winner!) game Way to Go, which accurately depicts, in a virtual format, the serendipitous simplicity of just wandering around through the woods. As the game creators say - “maybe it lasts six minutes, maybe it lasts forever” - a sentiment which applies to a lot of things in life :)

📖 Data viz of the Month

OK, let’s talk data. How do we actually feel about nature? In this beautiful data visualization by the MIT Senseable City Lab, “Feeling Nature”, you can explore how people perceive and value nature worldwide, in comparison to its presence, across eight cities worldwide (including Barcelona!) The key idea: a visual mapping of biophilia as the benefits that contact with nature brings to humans.

🏛️ Exhibit of the month

Like in Ostendorf-Rodriguez’s book, mushrooms represent an alternative modality of life - a kind of organism that relates to its environment in a way so completely different from ours, it can easily be a source of creative inspiration. In this exhibit at the Nieuwe Institut in Rotterdam, “FUNGI: Anarchist Designers”, curators Anna Tsing and Feifei Zhou call “anti-design” this strange, reimagined way in which fungi manifest themselves in the world, almost acting as co-designers - but through a kind of anarchy of decay. Food for thought? Make sure to double-check before.

🎙️ Podcast of the month

Above all, forests and woods are sacred places, full of life, insights, imagination and stories - and places we must protect at all costs. This includes forests close and far, like the endangered Wabanaki-Acadian forest in Eastern Canada - with only 1 % left remaining, it is a precious ecosystem, whose unique biodiversity and cultural significance are beautifully expressed in this podcast episode in Ideas, from the CBC.

And now, the moment has arrived for us to share our Christmas photo with you - a little holiday parcel, wrapped in mystery and mycelium. See you in the new year-

From those who seek to map meaning in networks unseen…

Because data, like mushrooms, thrives in what lies between.