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Today, I’m celebrating a personal milestone: having published Dense Discovery every Tuesday for 250 weeks in a row (with the exception of a two-week break every Christmas).
A reason enough to look back and dig up some of my favourite issues. I loosely grouped them based on my introduction topic below – a good starting point if you only recently joined as a reader and a telling overview of the topics I feel strongly about.
Having consistently dispatched an email once a week is one thing, but it’s the many essays, podcasts, videos and books that influenced my thinking over that period what I’m most proud of. I feel very indebted to every reader for enabling me to do this sort of ‘learning in the open’. What a great, humbling way to alter your understanding of the world. Thank you for being a part of that! – Kai
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Big thinking & philosophy
- Building a Peace Narrative: a more harmonious way of looking at the world and each other. DD101
- The important difference between ‘power over’ and ‘power with’. DD111
- The Ideology of Human Supremacy: a sobering, deeply moving look at our era of human-centric world-building. DD151
- On the many gifts provided to us by the Earth and our lack of reciprocity. DD171
- A new type of productivity: viewing time as a network good that derives its value from other people having access to it. DD182
Marketing & growth
- On get-rich-quick schemes and the content marketing equivalent of the inflatable tube man. DD149
- Let’s turn off startup brain and celebrate human-sized projects. DD186
- ‘Non-Coercive Marketing’: a more ethical and feel-good approach to marketing. DD208
Sustainability & climate
- The climate challenge as a chance to assign new meaning to the words ‘wealth’ and ‘abundance’. DD232
- How we produce food in absurdly unsustainable ways. DD241
- Why we should not reduce our ecological crisis to just climate. DD247
Pessimism
- Pessimism as a critical guiding principle for designers. DD126
- And as a helpful feature of life that we too often try to run away from. DD181
Connection & community
- Why the notion of self-reliance is an illusion. DD134
- A case against the nuclear family. DD235
- On the importance of not just being with or next to others but among one other. DD165
- Why it may be time to abolish elections. DD220
Personal
- What helped me overcome my repetitive strain injury. DD158 + DD159 (I received a lot of ‘Wow! This helped me too!’ responses to this topic.)
Vegetarianism & activism
- My journey towards vegetarianism – or imperfect veganism. DD175
- Thinking of yourself as a node for social, political and moral contagion. DD155
Urbanism & Transport
- Feeling a numbness towards the idea of long-distance travel. DD197
- An eye-opening breakdown of the insane cost of cars. DD201
- The deeply entrenched car-as-a-default mindset. DD204
- How SUV are making everything worse. DD230
- Why we need to design cities for children. DD238
- A better suburbia: why it doesn’t have to be an infrastructure desert. DD244
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Become a Friend of DD today →
With a modest yearly contribution you’re not only helping keep Dense Discovery going, you also receive special discounts and get access to the DD Index, a searchable catalogue of past issues. (And it removes this message.)
You receive this email because you subscribed to Dense Discovery, a weekly newsletter at the intersection of design, technology, sustainability and culture. Writing to you from Melbourne is Kai Brach. Do you have a product or service to promote in DD? Find out more about advertising in DD.
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Apps & Sites
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Bookmarks & notes organiser
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Wrapped in a beautiful, calm design, My Mind is a bookmarking engine that stores anything you want to save for later – files, websites, texts, quotes etc. – and then lets you search by colour, keyword, brand, date etc. with the help of an integrated AI analytics feature. My Mind promises good privacy, no tracking, no ads and no social features.
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Alternative startup models
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If you’re curious about alternatives to the established startup and business models prevalent in Silicon Valley and the wider tech sphere, this extensive (free) Post Growth Entrepreneurship class from the University of Amsterdam will inspire you to think beyond the growth-at-all-cost template.
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A simple collection of images that take advantage of the iPhone’s ‘depth effect’ when applied as a home screen. Sites like this make me reminisce of the early days of the web when wallpapers were traded like baseball cards.
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Movie recommendation engine
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Movie Maths offers a simple formula for recommending something else to watch: ‘if you like this and this movie, try that one’. Data comes from the excellent The Movie Database.
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Favourite Books: Paolo Zinatelli
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Five book recommendations by copywriter and college instructor Paolo Zinatelli
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Published in 1978, Garp tells the story of a writer who is confused by his identity, his family and himself. It features sex, violence, a circus bear and even a story within the story, but mostly it is just a great piece of Americana writing.
Following a minor car crash caused by Clara, her life is inexplicably turned upside down when she decides to do all she can to help the family she harmed. This beautiful novel by Canadian author Marina Endicott asks the questions ‘Can being a good person be too much?’
A sprawling epic that tells the tale of George Washington ‘Wash’ Black, born into slavery in Barbados in the early 1800s. As Wash fights for his freedom, he goes on adventures that includes a flying balloon, an Arctic storm and an aquarium you need to see to believe.
This French novel is so beautifully written, I couldn’t put it down. It centres on the lives of Renee, a building manager for a small apartment complex, and Paloma, a 12-year-old resident who have more in common than either of them could possibly know. A brilliant novel.
This book may have come out in 1964, almost 20 years before I was born, but it quite simply changed my life. Harriet is both sure of herself and full of insecurity, with a nosy streak worthy of any writer. She inspired my career aspirations, and as a child, made me feel a little less alone in the world.
(Did you know? Friends of DD can respond to and engage with guest contributors like Paolo Zinatelli in one click.)
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Books & Accessories
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The astonishing world of animal senses
Pulitzer Prize-winning author Ed Yong takes us on a tour of the radically different ways that animals perceive the world through their own unique sensory bubble. “We encounter beetles that are drawn to fires, turtles that can track the Earth’s magnetic fields, fish that fill rivers with electrical messages, and even humans who wield sonar like bats. We learn what bees see in flowers, what songbirds hear in their tunes, and what dogs smell on the street. We listen to stories of pivotal discoveries in the field, while looking ahead at the many mysteries that remain unsolved.”
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From judgement to connection
A book that makes us interrogate our fears and beliefs about justice and punishment – written by Robin Steinberg, a public defender who represents people ‘at their worst moment’. “Compassion for others, especially those that we don’t know or understand, must be learned. Our lack of compassion is perhaps most extreme in the exercise of criminal justice, where a person’s entire life, worth, and character are judged through the myopic lens of a single act.”
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Overheard on Mastodon
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Wish I had the free time of someone who leaves a positive Amazon review for a rake.
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Food for Thought
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Giving readers a taste of his new book (featured in DD248), Morgan Housel offers some psychological nuggets about how and why we spend money in the right and wrong ways. “People generally aspire to be respected and admired by others, and using money to buy fancy things may bring less of it than you imagine. If respect and admiration are your goal, be careful how you seek it. Humility, kindness, and empathy will bring you more respect than horsepower ever will.”
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Another great video by Not Just Bikes, this time with a closer look at the noise levels generated by cars (and other vehicles) and how it impacts the liveability of cities. “Electric vehicles are definitely an improvement, but only at low speeds, where rolling noise is minimal. In fact, electric cars may be even worse at high speeds, because tire noise increases with tire width as well as by weight.”
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Here in Australia, our environment minister is pushing for a so-called ‘nature repair market’ that would treat ecosystems like a share market. In this short piece, Adrienne Buller asks whether these ‘green’ finance schemes can actually protect the natural world. “Efforts to ‘protect’ nature through its commodification are ultimately founded upon continuity with the very economic model underpinning nature’s state of crisis in the first place. They hinge on the belief that despite all evidence to the contrary – markets are the most efficient and effective way to prevent ecological breakdown.”
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Aesthetically Pleasing
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Woah! Artist Saype draws giant murals on natural surfaces using eco-friendly spray paint.
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Chinese American artist Richard Liu creates hyperrealistic art, mostly with just pencils.
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Based in Düsseldorf, Germany, Kö-Bogen II is an office block covered in 30,000 plants to form hedges that would stretch eight kilometres laid end to end and provide an ecological benefit equivalent to 80 fully grown deciduous trees.
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If you’re looking for a great example of a brand identity guide, look no further than Sweden’s official brand guidelines, an extensive collection of use cases for the visual expression of Sweden – including its own typeface ‘Sweden Sans’, available as a free download.
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Notable Numbers
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Using data covering 391 companies in 98 US cities, a new study concludes that the introduction of e-scooters in a city impacts restaurant spending, increasing spending by approximately 5.2% for e-scooter users.
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According to a study by researchers from Yale University, the excess death rate among Republican voters was 43% higher than the excess death rate among Democratic voters after vaccine eligibility was opened.
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Uber reached a milestone last week: posting its first-ever operating profit of $326 million. Uber has burned through $31.5 billion in operating losses since it started reporting finances in 2014.
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Classifieds
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The Week in a GIF
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Reply or tweet at DD with your favourite GIF and it might get featured here in a future issue.
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