A weekly newsletter with four quick bites, edited by Tim Leffel, author of A Better Life for Half the Price and The World’s Cheapest Destinations.

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The Tipping Point for Remote Work
Malcolm Gladwell didn’t exactly come off like a future-looking thought leader last week when he lumped all remote workers together as isolated loners sitting behind a desk in their pajamas. Sounding like a cranky old boss who is pining for the “good ole days,” Gladwell has apparently not noticed co-working spaces, international remote-only companies, digital nomads, remote expats, quarterly company retreats, or even conferences. A sign that we’ve passed the tipping point?

Gluten-free Language Cards
Former lawyer and digital nomad Jodi Ettenberg is celiac, which made it hard to eat safely while traveling the world. So she built detailed translation cards that use local ingredient names and mention cross-contamination. They come in 13 different languages for now, along with long, free gluten-free country guides that accompany most of them.

Where Nomads Congregate
One Nomadico reader asked if there’s some kind of list of where nomads are working “or a cities guide maybe?” While it’s far from perfect, there’s been one out since long before the explosion in remote workers: Nomadlist. The data often doesn’t jibe with what you’ll find outside the expat bubble and the ranking algorithm of often subjective criteria seems to be as nutty as TripAdvisor’s. (Warsaw is the #1 city?!) But it’ll help you compare cities in terms of costs, average Wi-Fi speed, weather, and more. You can sort by a variety of categories, including “lack of racism.” 

The Creative Middle Class
My Nomadico co-founder Kevin Kelly probably has some bones to pick with Cal Newport’s New Yorker article quoting his “1,000 True Fans” theory. But after a lot of meandering it comes around to the conclusion that remote work has enabled the creative middle class to flourish in a way that few could have imagined back in the early ‘00s.