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Extended travel a few weeks ago finally gave me a chance to burrow into my podcast backlog. I was on a train listening to this 2025 conversation between legendary Australian journalist Peter Greste an

One of the more bizarre features of this era is that even people who are doing objectively well by any reasonable measure can’t seem to shake the feeling that they’re falling behind. Financial journal

Camilo Moreno-Salamanca shared something recently that I has stayed with me. He describes the pull between two speeds: the race to be at the technological vanguard on one side – keeping up with prompt

Inequality is one of those words that does its own damage just by showing up. By the time you’ve read it, your brain has already mentally filed it under ‘nothing I can do about’. That was before oliga

Over the Easter long weekend I did some light podcast listening – and by ‘light’ I mean an 80-minute deep dive into the psychology of why most people, most of the time, don’t want things to change. Ni

Here’s a familiar story we tell ourselves about our new inability to focus: screens bad, books good, civilisation circling the drain. It’s a seductive diagnosis – and also, probably, a lazy one.

Rebecca Solnit has this rare gift of making you feel like the mess we’re all living through is at least comprehensible, if not fixable. In time for the launch of her new book (see the Books section),

In my Notes app, there is a graveyard of abandoned self-improvement projects: morning routines, book titles, names of journalling and meditation apps I downloaded with genuine conviction and opened tw

There is a special kind of gaslighting that nobody intends. It lives in the well-meaning question – ‘have you tried magnesium?’ – and in the friendly observation that someone looks well. It’s in the g

Reading is dead. Attention spans are toast. We are, collectively, heading toward a post-literate wasteland of reels and soundbites – our once-curious brains reduced to dopamine-seeking mush. At least,

By the time you’ve finished reading this sentence, seventeen new big things have happened on the internet. Most of them will be forgotten within the hour – including, probably, by the people who poste

For years, ‘knowing how to code’ was treated like the golden ticket. Even junior software developers were paid absurd amounts of money, and those who couldn’t speak computer watched with a mix of envy

I grew up thinking the USA was basically one giant action movie with better shopping. Then I heard stories from friends who’d visited, and it started to feel less like a blockbuster and more like a ca

Not a day passes without another AI think piece. I’ve mostly trained myself to scroll past them – the prophecies and confident predictions built on speculation. Last week I shared an O’Reilly piece be

Early after moving into our new apartment building here in Melbourne, we kept getting hit by burglars who stole bikes and ransacked storage cages. The response was predictable: we spent hours reviewin

Tech companies have spent years perfecting their image as enablers – as tools that promise to amplify our capabilities. The pitch has always been ‘convenience’ and ‘efficiency’. But today, we’re comin

On the top shelf of my wardrobe sits a box containing still-wrapped copies of every issue of Offscreen Magazine, along with some stickers and coasters I’d made as giveaways. Twenty-four issues. Thousa

Welcome to a new year of insanity. And boy did it show up quick! I’m glad you’re here, looking for meaning in the soul-crushing reality of modern-day existence. (We’re all in this together, etc.) You

Last week’s issue on how we’ve designed away childhood independence struck a nerve with many of you. Makes sense – nothing exposes decades of systemic failure quite like watching children

I have this vivid memory from childhood of spending summer afternoons in the scrubby bushes on the edge of town, attempting to build a ‘fort’. We’d disappear after lunch with the only ins

About a year ago I shared Rosie Spinks’ piece on ‘collapse awareness’ – that slow-dawning realisation that our current systems are failing and a transition is under way from a life built

Frank Chimero has long been one of my favourite design thinkers, and this transcription of a recent talk is good reading for any creative person who feels a bit yuck about using AI. I mea

The evidence is piling up that the nuclear family unit – two parents with one or more kids in one household – is failing many of us. Parental burnout; scary rates of loneliness; marriages

I’m currently in Germany helping my mum pack up our old childhood home in the country and move to a smaller flat in the city, closer to my brother. It’s one of those life transitions you do

The mental health crisis, the manosphere, the rise in addiction and the lean towards strongman politics – young men’s struggle for identity manifests in so many troubling w

The more cynical view of Big Tech is that it excels at solutions to problems we either didn’t have or they manufactured in the first place. AI chatbots to substitute for fr

I’ve been thinking about Taylor Swift lately, not because I particularly want to, but because it’s nearly impossible not to. She’s everywhere – arguably the most

It’s been said that we’re increasingly governed by the logic of the Facebook comments section. The brazenness, the casual cruelty, the performative stupidity – i

I wouldn’t call myself a minimalist – I still want a home that looks lived in – but there’s something about open space without clutter that makes my brain exhale

After one too many sessions of mindlessly scrolling through The Slop Feed, I finally deleted Instagram from my phone. Yes, I still check it every few days, but v

Last week I woke up to find the biggest DD ad sale in over a year sitting in my inbox. My heart sank when I read the client’s name. It was a SaaS company I once

The best description I’ve recently heard for our collective emotional state comes from Danish anthropologist Christian Madsbjerg, who – in an interview with the

Minor surgery last week granted me something I rarely allow myself: permission to do not much productive. Between waiting and the post-anaesthetic fog that follo

I developed my digital design chops in the Web 2.0 era, when everything felt possible and most things felt harmless. Then the smartphone arrived, and we suddenly

I can’t recall how Isaac Asimov’s 1988 essay ‘The Relativity of Wrong’ made it onto my reading list, but it’s a welcome dose of nuance in this era of absolutist

July marked the third anniversary in my apartment here in Melbourne. Three years that have been something of an experiment in place-making. I’ve shared glimpses

Here we go again. Migrants have become the populists’ favourite boogeyman – the convenient reason behind every perceived ailment plaguing the nation. Nothing see

There’s an unsettling ‘okayness’ spreading through the tech world about democracy’s decline. It’s not just the usual suspects – the oligarchs and venture capital

Overnight updates from family in Germany, a neighbour’s text about an upcoming gardening project, playing calendar Tetris in a group chat to organise a weekend a

Here we are, staring down civilisational challenges that desperately need rigorous scientific thinking – climate breakdown, biodiversity collapse, technological disruption –

If you told someone from the ’70s that we’d one day celebrate executives earning 6,000 times more than their workers while simultaneously trusting these same people to solve

In the early 2010s, I was guilty of perpetuating the ‘do what you love, love what you do’ gospel. As someone who genuinely relished the challenge of putting together a new m

Running a newsletter like DD is, at its core, an expression of taste. It’s me saying, ‘Here’s what I think deserves your attention this week.’ A process that Stepfanie Tyler

There is a particular kind of modern anxiety that hits around 3am – the one where you’re lying awake wondering how to build a viable retirement plan for a world where the ol

Isn’t it interesting how quickly a minute of genuine human interaction can dissolve years of carefully constructed political narratives? Over the weekend, I stumbled across

I love the occasional pep talk from Oliver Burkeman, one of the few self-help writers I genuinely enjoy – mostly because his delightfully British approach to productivity an

The friction that technology removes from our daily lives, our relationships and increasingly our thinking has been a recurring theme in DD. But Kyla Scanlon’s recent essay

In his TED talk ‘3 Ideas for Communicating Across the Political Divide’, Isaac Saul advocates for language that appeals to the centre in order to reduce polarisation. While h

It’s easy to feel cynical about the language of ‘better capitalism’. B Corps, social enterprises and other do-gooder brands promise to rewrite the rules of the game – but mor

I tend to keep my distance from ‘stunt journalism,’ which is why I approached A.J. Jacobs’ work with a healthy dose of scepticism. Yet, in reading his posts on a