Emails from sender «Dense Discovery».
Source: Readwise Reader export, ingested 2026-10-29. Entries: 27. Summaries are truncated from frontmatter summary; absent ⇒ omitted.
- 412 / Breaking up with Gmail — 2026-10-26
Don’t be evil.
- 411 / Nothing personal, just grifting — 2026-10-19
This isn’t to mock my mum. We’re all potential victims.
- 410 / Design: frictionless, flawless, forgettable — 2026-10-12
Whenever I come across yet another ‘why does everything look the same’ essay on modern design, I tend to roll my eyes. Not that I disagree.
- 409 / Leisure time, but make it useful — 2026-10-05
I’ve lately been enjoying Lisa Sibbett’s newsletter The Auntie Bulletin, which stretches the word ‘auntie’ to cover anyone who helps raise k…
- 408 / When the foxes want better fences — 2026-09-28
I don’t intend for DD to turn into another op-ed column chasing the week’s AI headlines, but if you’ve read the last few issues, you’ll have…
- 407 / Cynicism is not a strategy — 2026-09-21
I was ready for bed when my partner put on The AI Doc on Netflix, which I hadn’t heard of before. Naturally, she was asleep within ten minut…
- 406 / Sonntagsruhe: frivolously unmonetised time — 2026-09-14
If you’ve spent some time in Germany, you’ve probably noticed the strange calm that descends on Sundays. Shops are shut, there are fewer car…
- 405 / The Ponzi stage of being alive — 2026-09-07
When I see people betting their life savings on a memecoin or an influencer monetising every last bit of their privacy on TikTok, my first r…
- 404 / All click, no muscle — 2026-08-31
Sci-fi writers have spent decades imagining dystopian futures where humans hand over their agency to the machines for a bit more convenience…
- 403 / In praise of ‘it depends’ — 2026-08-24
If you’ve been reasonably lucky with your education, aren’t mentally overburdened, and haven’t stopped being curious about other people, som…
- 402 / Agency, not abstinence — 2026-08-17
When in the mid 2010s the first Silicon Valley folks started warning us about the addictive nature of social media, the idea that it wasn’t…
- 401 / Your call is important to us — 2026-08-10
As industrial technology advances and enlarges, and in the process assumes greater social, economic, and political force, it carries people…
- 400 / Hitting ‘send’ for the 579th time — 2026-08-03
First forget inspiration. Habit is more dependable.
- 399 / Not a machine: on fragility and self-worth — 2026-07-27
My mum recently had orthopaedic surgery, and although the German infrastructure is about as good as it gets, she’s now getting a crash cours…
- 398 / Cold turkey on the outrage machine — 2026-07-20
The social apps are long gone from my phone, but there’s one screen habit I haven’t managed to kick: the news.
- 397 / Last drinks at the AI casino — 2026-07-13
Last year SpaceX made no profit, but lost several billion dollars. Earlier this year it was valued at close to two trillion.
- 396 / On being properly unwell — 2026-07-06
One thing that’s taken me a long time to properly internalise is that not all disabilities are visible.
- 395 / Everything bleeds into everything — 2026-06-29
Get off the beaten track, find the little town the guidebook missed, eat where the locals eat, steer clear of other tourists. That’s the uns…
- 394 / The friendship recession — 2026-06-22
At some point in your thirties, you often start carrying a particular kind of grief.
- 393 / The view from the apocalypse — 2026-06-15
When the collective mood is dark and every headline seems to pile it on, the optimists love to wheel out the charts: we’ve never been health…
- 392 / Rest with a receipt — 2026-06-08
After making a case for our right to rest in public spaces last week, writer Leo Umilio got my attention with an essay that turns the whole…
- 391 / The disappearing right to rest — 2026-06-01
The architects of our apartment development did something rare during planning: they convinced the council to close off the last section of…
- 390 / Your neatly labelled mind — 2026-05-25
The rise of mental health awareness is a good thing. Fewer people suffering in silence, more shared language for experiences that used to be…
- 389 / Yours sincerely, prompt #41 — 2026-05-18
Lately I’ve been receiving a lot of emails that follow a recognisable rhythm: a long-time reader of DD, appreciative of how the newsletter n…
- 388 / Permission to play — 2026-05-11
We already know play is good for us, the same way we know sleep matters and vegetables exist. Knowing hasn’t made us do it more.
- 387 / Goodness in the flames — 2026-05-04
We cannot trample upon the humanity of others without devaluing our own.
- 386 / Name your middle-class precarity — 2026-04-27
Financial journalist Hanna Horvath has written a very clarifying essay on why this might be happening.