After spending time in a really friendly one, I decided forums are the best platform for communities. So, I replaced my community’s Mastodon instance with a forum. While the vision and values of the community haven’t changed, the platform has.

I’m now running my own private social media website for my friends.

Culture Matters is a useful tool in cross-cultural understanding. It pulls back the curtain on nearly every aspect of life and you start to understand why people, of other cultures and your own, behave the way they do. Why do Americans stand in lines? Why do Moroccans use different words for maternal and paternal aunts? Culture affects what we value, how we think, and ultimately how we behave.

Neff lays out the benefits and a roadmap for becoming more self-compassionate. Full of exercises, this book is equal parts theory and practice.

Atlas of the Heart is exactly that. It’s a glossary, a guide, for navigating the range of human emotions that we all experience.

A Thousand Splendid Suns follows the difficulties and loss of two women in a war-torn Afghanistan.

Brackett provides five key emotion skills that are the basis of the book and a framework for becoming more emotionally intelligent and empathetic.

Rosenburg provides a communication method that puts compassion and empathy first. He provides the steps to communicating more effectively with a mix of concrete tools and abstract ideas.