🗺️ Cartography of the Month

Spatial thinking usually conjures shapes and volumes: we think of rotating physical objects in our mind or, same thing, solving a Rubik’s Cube. But what if spatial thinking is also about playing with notions - ideas that are usually not visual, but conceptual? That’s we liked about Louise Drulhe’s Critical Atlas of Internet: a beautiful visual research project that maps, represents and interprets the Internet through the artistic, visual language of the atlas, with 15 different spatial hypotheses, each thinking about different aspects of our online world: cyberspace, but spatialised.

🗣️ Talk of the Month

Back in November, we got to witness this amazing talk by Dr. Ruha Benjamin, at the 2025 Mozilla Fest (taking place in Barcelona), in which she discusses the necessity and value of “unlearning” - unlearning the institutional, societal, racial, and technological patterns and myths that uphold, and enable, dominant power structures in today’s world. What is unlearning, then? Questioning dominant assumptions, unlearning false inevitabilities, imagining futures and building alternatives grounded in lived, social reality. This talk profoundly altered our brain chemistry - maybe it’ll alter yours too. Check it out here. 

📰 Headlines of the Month

At the end of the day, given that language is how we share and transmit ideas, it’s also how we create them — and form our own opinions. Language is anything but neutral: entire ideologies can seep into the words we use, conveying perspectives and positions through what might seem like subtle cues or incidental details. Critical thinking, then, is also about learning to read between the lines — the headlines, often. This is precisely what this website illustrates: for one real-world event or news story, it collects four headlines from actual newspapers — each one positioned differently across the political and informational spectrum, ranging from “Far left” to “Far right”, and from “Clickbait” to “Informative”.

And this is it. We won’t tell you how many sets to do, because it’s not by repeating things 3x12 that they will come to matter - it’s by being open to ideas, considering them critically and examining them with care. After all, critical thinking is a crucially intentional exercise, not a chore… 

Hope to see you at PolsXtrems! Time to get shredded (mentally) 💪

Neuronal biceps, aerobics of common sense-

From those who work out their data - through a critical lens xx