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Today, I’m celebrating the 300th issue of DD with a custom illustration by the wonderful Sebastian Abboud, who managed to capture so many of DD’s themes within a little square. Bravo and thank you, Sebastian!
What an honour it is to continue this ‘discovering in the open’ with such a seriously thoughtful audience as a sounding board. Your kind and insightful interactions have been a constant source of inspiration for me, prompting me to reflect on how I could elevate this relationship even further.
Creating a community space for newsletter readers isn’t a new idea. I’m part of a few Slack and Discord channels, but I hardly ever check in, let alone engage. Asynchronous chat apps can feel like a burden for occasional visitors trying to catch up on conversations.
So, earlier this year, I decided to create a custom-built community space that would make engaging with newsletter topics and fellow DD readers effortless and fun. And last weekend, just in time for the 300th issue, I flipped the switch!
The DD Lounge is a new community space for Friends of DD where you can discuss the latest issue and create a simple, personal profile to connect with others. And importantly: no logins required! Once you’re a Friend of DD, just click a link in your newsletter, and you’re ready to join the discussion, meet others, and manage your account. Here’s a quick screencast of the DD Lounge experience.
There are teething issues to resolve and many features I plan to add, but in the last 48 hours alone, nearly 250 Friends have activated their profiles. It’s been just wonderful to finally put faces to the names of so many readers I’ve emailed over the years.
If any of the past 300 issues of DD have sparked a sense of connection in you, consider becoming a Friend of DD, then come hang out with us in the DD Lounge to strengthen that bond. Either way, I’m grateful to have you as a reader and look forward to many more discoveries together. 🫶
– Kai
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Become a Friend of DD today →
With a contribution of less than $2 per month, you get access to the DD Lounge where Friends of DD discuss the weekly newsletter and meet other readers. Plus you can turn off ads, receive special discounts, get access to the DD Index (a searchable catalogue of past issues) and other perks.
Dense Discovery is a weekly newsletter with the best of the internet, thoughtfully curated, read by over 37,000 subscribers. Do you have a product or service to promote in DD? Find out more about advertising in DD.
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Build a World-Class TeamSPONSOR
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A free six-week course for founders & leaders
We’ll show you how to build a high-performance team – with a people-first mindset. Remotely or in the office. Join the course for free and mention ‘Dense Discovery’ in your application to save the regular fee of $500. Only this week!
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Apps & Sites
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Open-source Zapier alternative
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Created by a couple of indie developers based in Berlin, Automatisch (German for automatic) offers a simple, open-source alternative to Zapier. Their list of integrations is decent, but you can always just run Automatisch on your own server and add the integrations you need.
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Mostly a tool for brand designers: if you need to quickly throw your logo on a real life surface without faffing around in Photoshop, Maneken offers a purely browser-based mockup generator.
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Open-source bio/link page
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Linkstack lets you create a highly customisable landing page to show your bio and social media links. Use one of the free server instances and many themes, or host it yourself.
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Thesaurus with superpowers
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OneLook helps you find words for any type of writing. It’s similar to a traditional thesaurus that finds synonyms and antonyms but provides greater depth and flexibility. Simply enter a single word, a few words, or even a whole sentence to describe what you need and find related concepts.
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Correction: the link to the Concepts app in last week’s issue was incorrect. Here is the correct link to Concepts. Remember: if you find an error in DD, please check the issue’s online version in the archive where I usually publish corrections.
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Worthy Five: Bette Adriaanse
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An Instagram account worth following:
Sister Library is the first feminist library in India, founded by the Indigenous artist Aqui Thami. Aqui defied the odds by leaving the tea plantation where she grew up and becoming an artist. She is changing the lives of girls and women by making communal spaces for healing and sharing knowledge.
A concept worth understanding:
Controlled Digital Lending (CDL) is the library system archive.org uses to give 70;000 people per day on average access to books they would otherwise not have access to. This concept is important to understand in a time where publishers are sueing the Internet Archive and trying to force libraries into expensive ebook licensing deals.
An activity worth doing:
Practicing Radical Honesty is not about bluntly volunteering negative opinions (though we Dutch people have a long tradition of doing that). It is about telling yourself and others what you do, what you have done, what you think and feel. I find it difficult, but it helped me find more connection and joy.
A piece of advice worth passing on:
“If you want a new world, start making it right now, in whatever you are doing.” This is the best advice I ever had, it came from Brian Eno. If you imagine the world you would like to be in and start making objects, systems and collaborations that belong to that world, that world comes into being.
A quote worth repeating:
“Right now, we need writers who know the difference between the production of a market commodity and the practice of an art.” From Ursula Le Guin’s acceptance speech at the National Book Awards, where she points out that literature’s true reward is not profit, but freedom.
(Did you know? Friends of DD can respond to and engage with guest contributors like Bette Adriaanse in one click.)
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Books & Accessories
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Everything you want to know about therapy
A book that delves into what goes on behind the doors of psychotherapist Joshua Fletcher, lifting the veil of secrecy around an often misunderstood profession. “He takes us on a tour of the inner mind of a therapist – revealing a hilariously candid point of view on the therapeutic process, a practical guide to therapy, and maybe a few more cobwebs and dark corners than one might expect.”
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Small footprint living
One of my favourite architecture-related Youtube channels is Never Too Small, showcasing thoughtfully designed, compact homes. NTS has turned into a media company dedicated to small footprint design and living. After launching a book, there is now also a quarterly magazine – with one of my neighbours on the cover!
Friends of DD enjoy a 20% discount on the first issue of a subscription.
Become a Friend to access specials like this.
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Overheard on Mastodon
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Move slow and improve things.
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Food for Thought
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M. E. Rothwell on our obsession with documenting every moment – in service of the ‘Cloud’, our modern deity – and how that reflects a deeper disconnect from living in the present. “We have become archivists of the self, I thought, curators of a life half-lived. Each countless photograph of a wonder, of dinner, of a view, of our children, of the utter banality of our everyday lives, was not a memento, a way of remembering the things we did, but instead evidence of the poverty of our engagement with the present moment. We frame our lives through lenses, filters, and screens, trading the chaotic beauty of reality for a sanitised, editable version. Our photographs are not memories; they are advertisements, billboards for a life we are too preoccupied to live.”
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A nice little reminder that in challenging times, we all still have the opportunity and obligation to make a positive difference, regardless of the scale of our actions. “There is that expression about how the moral arc of the universe bends towards justice. I don’t think that’s really the right wording. It’s that the moral arc of the universe is bent toward justice. It’s bent that way by people who reach up and grab it, people with the courage to stand against the norms of what was and a steadfast commitment to what they knew was the right thing. It was people who ignored the cynics, the people who told them it was hopeless, told them that one person could not make a difference.”
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DD readers probably don’t need more convincing of the power of walking. Still, Audrey Watters reminds us that this simple act helps us see and understand the world better, especially as technology distracts us from noticing the world around us while walking. “Walking lets you read the world – and much like the slow, contemplative mental processes involved in reading a book, the pace with which one moves through the world while walking allows for a different, deliberative kind of seeing. You notice more. You think more.”
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Aesthetically Pleasing
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An eye-opening photo series by US American photographer Gregg Segal called 7 Days of Garbage: “I call attention to the problem of waste by personalizing it. I asked family, friends, neighbors and other acquaintances to save their trash and recyclables for a week and then lie down and be photographed in it. I photographed my family because I want my 8-year-old son to understand that we’re contributing to the problem, too.”
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Lola Dupre is a Glasgow-based collage artist and illustrator known for her cute and weird distorted feline and canine portraits. Sign up to her mailing list to get first dibs on new print releases.
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I love black & white photography and just discovered the Monochrome Awards – a photography competition specifically for the colourless medium. The 14 categories are filled with stunning imagery. (Top by Mahendra Bakle, bottom by Nguyen Dang Giang)
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Make your time in the editor more fun with Codelia, “a monospaced humanistic typeface designed for coding with focus on comfort and fun without sacrificing legibility or coding functionality”.
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Notable Numbers
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To illustrate how insanely powerful and profitable Big Tech is: Alphabet’s latest quarterly report revealed that the company made over $1 billion in net interest income for the three months ending in June. 397 companies in the S&P 500 didn’t make that much in total net income in their most recent quarter.
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Sweden has passed a world-first law allowing grandparents to access paid parental leave while caring for grandchildren. Parents will be able to transfer parental leave to the child’s grandparents for up to 45 days of a child’s first year or 90 days for single parents.
Sweden offers around 16 months of paid parental leave per child, divided equally between the mother and father, yet either parent can donate five of those months to the other parent. For the first 13 months, parents receive 80 per cent of their salary, with a limit of up to 38,480 krona (~$3,600) per month.
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More than 500 developers at Blizzard Entertainment who work on the game World of Warcraft have voted to form a union. Together, they have formed the largest wall-to-wall union – or a union inclusive of multiple departments and disciplines – at Microsoft.
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Classifieds
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Design Lobster brings you ideas and stories from the world of design that you haven’t heard before.
Defer is an iOS & Mac menu bar app to capture your tasks. No futzing about with which app, folder or tag to use – just capture and organise later. No signup needed, start for free.
Hi there! I’m Sebastian Abboud, a big fan of Dense Discovery and proud to have illustrated the header for this issue of DD! Wanna work together on your next creative project?
Scale your marketing through experimentation. Flat-rate services designed to identify opportunities, execute on data-driven insights, and deliver results. Book your free strategy →
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Classifieds are paid ads that support DD and are seen by our 37,000 subscribers each week.
Book yours →
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The Week in a GIF
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Reply with your favourite GIF and it might get featured here in a future issue.
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DD is supported by Friends and the modern family office of .
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