Welcome back, Shit Givers.

There’s a mysterious 30 foot chamber inside the Great Pyramid and Brendan Fraser is back. What a time to be alive!

⚡️ Last week’s most popular Action Step was window-shopping for fancy used furniture with Kaiyo.

👩‍💻 You can read this on the website

🎧 Or you can listen to it (Apple Podcasts, Spotify)

📺️ Like to watch? Check out our YouTube channel

📧 New here? Sign up to join 11,500+ other Shit Givers

TOGETHER WITH READWISE

You ever feel like your reading just goes to waste?

Sure, maybe you highlight, and highlighting is great, but what the hell's the point if you're never going to see any of those highlights again?

Readwise lets you quickly liberate your highlights (all into one place), and helps you tag, note, search, and organize them, ensuring you'll actually see and use them. Want to sync them to your favorite note-taking app? Great. Done.

Think about it this way: How often do you finish a book, or an article, only to forget the key ideas two weeks (or in my case, minutes) later? Right? I cannot emphasize enough: Readwise is the most valuable tool I use, every single day.

Get Readwise free for 60 days (double the usual trial length) and start reading — but with superpowers.

What We Can Do

⚡️ Help your local farmers sell online — not just at farmer’s markets — with GrownBy.

⚡️ Help people worldwide get clean, safe, accessible drinking water with charity: water.

⚡️ Support Dr. Ayana Elizabeth Johnson’s Urban Ocean Lab as they write the future of ocean policy.

⚡️ Stay ahead of water news with the award-winning Circle of Blue non-profit newsroom

⚡️ Queer student journalists: Apply to be a member of the 2023 Nat’l LGBTQ Journalists’ Conference Student PROGRAM, a week-long all-expenses-paid reporting intensive

Even the smallest person can change the course of the future.

Many words and gallons of figurative blood have been spilled in the long war over how most effectively to take on the world’s biggest problems and opportunities.

The lines or “how you can help” are often and obnoxiously drawn between the factions of “individual actions” and “systemic change”. The gatekeepers of each side often spend as much energy telling newcomers how they’re doing it wrong as they do fighting the good fight.

But it’s important to have a little empathy and understand why these captains of progress are forced to clarify our most prudent way forward, again and again. The forces aligned against them -- and us -- have sought since the 1950’s to confuse you, to misinform you, to create chaos among the ranks of the well-intentioned, to make this your fault.

And the onslaught of greenwashing and environmental original sin continues to this day.

This, is a moment when we need all hands on deck. Every gender, every race, every dollar, every effort.

And not just because this ticking clock is a measure of the Anthropocene — in itself a war of attrition involving every hand on deck — but because the systems built so far, without incorporating every gender and race, have failed for every demographic save one, white men.

To be clear: Those same stakeholders have spent enormous sums to convince you that you, your person, your habits and choices, are the problem. And that, in turn, only you and the very personal choices you make — to buy low tar cigarettes, to use fewer plastic straws, wear a mask — can reverse these very unfortunate circumstances we find ourselves in.

Tick, tock. Make better choices, Gary.

These stakeholders — profiteers, poisoners of mind and body, Wormtongues but with Twitter accounts and trillions in subsidies — seek to divide us, to extinguish our brightest flames before they can be lit. That’s bullshit, man.

Join the Important Membership to read the rest.