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Walking my dog this morning, I witnessed a beefed-up SUV barrelling down a residential street at twice the speed limit, narrowly missing a cyclist. Encounters like that really shake me.
Even as someone with 25+ years of experience navigating city streets on two wheels, nothing quite prepares you for the primal terror of a suburban tank hurtling towards you at 80 kilometres per hour.
I’ve written repeatedly about my frustration with Australia’s car-centric culture and a government that still refuses to acknowledge Truckzillas as a public health threat.
In an era where car manufacturers keep supersizing their vehicles – and their macho, identity-driven marketing – questioning our addiction to car bloat seems futile. However, as David Zipper points out in his recent anti-SUV piece on VOX, so did the fight against smoking – and there’s plenty we can learn from the anti-tobacco playbook.
Just like ‘secondhand smoke’, these road behemoths create what economists call negative externalities – “a product’s costs that are paid by society instead of its users ... Driving a gigantic vehicle endangers those who never consented to the danger they face walking, biking, or sitting inside smaller cars.”
But these individual choices don’t exist in a vacuum. As Zipper argues in another insightful piece, our infrastructure is designed to enable and encourage this behaviour. We continue to pour GDP-sized piles of public money into new road projects that do little to ease congestion while reinforcing car-dependent lifestyles and harming the environment. He draws a fascinating parallel between today’s ‘Big Highway’ vote-winner and the US’ dam construction craze (‘Big Dam’) in the first half of the last century.
When I do occasionally drive, I too would appreciate less congestion, smoother roads and easy parking, so I can see why politicians flaunt their car credentials and promise free parking as if it’s a fundamental human right. But urban designers, traffic engineers, policy experts – everyone agrees that throwing more money and asphalt at the problem only makes it worse.
That said, cracks are starting to show. Cities around the world are reclaiming streets for people, e-bikes are multiplying like rabbits, and even the most car-addicted among us are starting to question whether navigating a parking lot should feel like a military operation. Change might be slow, but watching e-bikes zip past gridlocked SUVs, it’s becoming clear which way the wind is blowing.
– Kai
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Hey DD, it’s your friends at Good Enough, a small team building thoughtful software for people just like you. We wanted a better way to manage shared email than passing around a login or spending $$$ on bloated support tools, so we built Jelly – a shared inbox for the rest of us.
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Apps & Sites
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Class Central aggregates online courses from a huge number of providers to help you find the best courses on almost any subject. This includes courses from Coursera, Udemy, Skillshare, TEDx, many universities and private organisations. I’m currently designing a custom dog crate and found some great free tutorials for learning Sketchup.
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Physically block distracting apps
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Disrupting our phone addiction is taking ever more creative approaches. Foqos is a free, open source iOS app that couples with physical NFC tags to de/activate certain modes that will block the apps you’d like to avoid. For instance, create a ‘work’ mode that blocks social media apps and then have an NFC tag near your desk that you need to swipe to en/disable this mode.
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Public domain image search
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Many search engines for public domain artwork feel clunky. Public Work is a simple search engine with infinite scroll that lets you explore 100,000+ copyright-free images from The MET, New York Public Library, and other sources. (A side project of visual bookmarking service Cosmos) Related: the Public Domain Image Archive.
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If you need to convince your boss/manager to schedule fewer meetings, this cost calculator might help. Enter the roles/salaries of each attendee and see the cost tick up with every minute of the meeting.
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Worthy Five: Bora
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Five recommendations by multidisciplinary creative and founder of ArtConnects, Bora.
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A video worth watching:
French street artist JR’s inspiring TED talk from 13 years ago, Use art to turn the world inside out, showed me that there are no limits to creativity. I still watch it from time to time as a reminder.
A book worth reading:
We often create our own mental prisons without realising it. While examining everyday behaviours, in Prisoners of Ourselves author Gündüz Vassaf reveals how we unconsciously accept limitations that no one actually imposed on us. It’s a powerful wake-up call to question the boundaries we’ve drawn for ourselves and recognise our role in maintaining them. Essential reading for anyone interested in personal freedom and growth.
A concept worth understanding:
Great achievements start with small steps. Take that first step now, no matter how tiny. Each step teaches you something new and creates momentum. Action beats waiting for the ‘perfect moment’. It’s immediately applicable and avoids unnecessary complexity.
A quote worth repeating:
Animal behaviour scientist Temple Grandin on progress: “People are always looking for the single magic bullet that will completely change everything. There is no single magic bullet. Progress is about bridging the gap between what we observe and what we can imagine – one careful step at a time.”
A piece of advice worth passing on:
We talk too much. We should listen more.
(Did you know? Friends of DD can respond to and engage with guest contributors like Bora in one click.)
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Books & Accessories
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Curiosity to cure polarised times
Journalist and author Mónica Guzmán offers a framework for having constructive conversations across ideological divides, emphasising the power of genuine curiosity and active listening to bridge seemingly insurmountable differences. “Mónica shows how you can put your natural sense of wonder to work for you immediately, finding the answers you need by talking with people – rather than about them – and asking the questions you want, curiously.”
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When stories eat reality
Rather than dismissing conspiracy theorists, the creators of the Origin Story podcast delve into the psychological and social factors that make these ideas so persistently appealing, while offering insights into how we might navigate an era where the line between healthy scepticism and harmful paranoia grows increasingly blurred. “From biblical myth to online hysteria, this book explains what happens when the human gift for storytelling goes wrong – and how we might restore our common reality.”
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Overheard on Mastodon
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You can tell Monopoly is an old game. There’s a luxury tax and rich people can go to jail.
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Food for Thought
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Gigantic SUVs pose a threat similar to the dangers of secondhand smoke, argues David Zipper. Just as we got smoking regulations from recognising the harm of cigarettes to others, oversized vehicles endanger other road participants. We need public support for regulating vehicle sizes, much like the anti-smoking movement did decades ago. “To fight car bloat, local activists must first expand the ranks of people who see big vehicles as a danger to themselves and their loved ones. ‘Part of the genius of the nonsmokers rights movement was to point out that what we have taken for granted as the social default shouldn’t be the social default’, Milov said. Perhaps a new generation of community groups could devise a slogan akin to ‘Thank you for not smoking.’ (‘SUV is not for me’?)”
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Wonderfully insightful read on aviation safety and what we can learn from it more broadly. Air travel is safe because aviation investigations focus on learning from mistakes rather than assigning blame. This approach helps improve systems and prevent future accidents. “A just culture encourages self-reporting of errors in order to gather as much data about those errors as possible. In contrast, an organization without a just culture will be left unaware of its own vulnerabilities because employees hide their mistakes for fear of retribution. Such an organization will discover those vulnerabilities only when they result in consequences that are impossible to hide.”
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Scarcity mindset is the belief that what you want is in limited supply, leading to feelings of lack and obsession with what’s missing. Sarah Lutkenhaus offers a lovely overview of the opposite: abundance mindset helps you focus on gratitude, prioritise what truly matters, and recognise that opportunities are constantly replenished. “Luxury is not about designer goods or fancy vacations, but about recognizing what’s important to you, and giving yourself permission to experience abundance in your everyday life. If you actively exercise abundance with yourself (because you’re worth it!), it becomes easier to recognize it out in the world.”
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Aesthetically Pleasing
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Hannah Bullen-Ryner calls herself an Earth artist “painting with nature’s tiny treasures directly on the ground in a magical patch of woodland”.
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Mikael Hallstrøm Eriksen is a Danish visual artist whose work explores the relationship between nature and culture, employing repetitive and accumulative mark-making techniques. I love the earthy colour palette.
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Gorgeous photography by Ahmad Mansour, a photographer from the heart of rural Egypt, who captures “the beauty of everyday life – those fleeting, unplanned moments that tell stories more powerful than words”.
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Font of the week: The Melun family is a geometric sans-serif with retro influences, presented in 3 subfamilies.
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Notable Numbers
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Based on a new Oxfam report, billionaire wealth grew by $2 trillion in 2024 alone, equivalent to roughly $5.7 billion a day, at a rate three times faster than the year before. An average of nearly four new billionaires were minted every week.
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According to the Thai Interior Ministry, 1,832 couples across the country registered marriages on the first day of a new same-sex marriage law taking effect.
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56% of car commutes to work in England and Wales could be made by shared e-bikes or e-scooters, UK charity for shared transport CoMoUK has found.
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Classifieds
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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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