There comes a point where we need to stop just pulling people out of the river. We need to go upstream and find out why they’re falling in.

– Desmond Tutu

❏

Featured artist: Laci

Dense Discovery
Dense Discovery
 

Welcome to Issue 92!

View/share online

The author Tim Urban, who’s written one of my favourite internet essays of all time (his no-nonsense take on The Fermi Paradox), tweeted yesterday:

A common cliché is that the world is a battle between love and hate. It’s true, but not quite the right point. The world is a battle between clarity and delusion. Where there’s clarity, love is obvious and hate makes no sense. Before you read this tweet and think, “Totally – if only everyone could have as much clarity as I do!” remember that the clarity/delusion battle is our collective mental illness and no one is immune. Best way to help clarity win in the world is to get better in your own head.

We often think that getting clarity on a specific topic/issue just requires taking in more information, more facts. But gaining clarity mostly requires challenging and undoing existing mental models, which is much harder. Because of the way we were brought up and how we experienced the world around us thus far, we’re all in our own state of delusion: we make external realities fit into internal perception buckets.

I like the idea of there being a delusion-to-clarity path. It sets a new baseline by acknowledging that not ignorance (we miss information) but delusion (we use faulty judgment) prevents us from gaining clarity. As mentioned in last week’s issue, the difficult, never-ending work of ‘untangling’ our minds is one of the most important and kindest things we can do – to ourselves and to others. – Kai

You receive this email because you subscribed to Dense Discovery, a weekly newsletter at the intersection of tech, design, and culture read by over 37,000 subscribers. Support us by sponsoring an issue, booking a classified ad, or sharing this issue with friends.

 

Forget About DNS SPONSOR

❏

DNSimple →

Connect your domains to services you love

No matter your skill level, use DNSimple to connect your domains to the services you love and use every day – without thinking about DNS. We offer simple, secure domain management and DNS hosting for companies of any size. Try us free for 30 days.

 

Apps & Sites

Quire →

Project collaboration

Add Quire to the giant list of available tools for project management. It comes with the usual set of features, such as nested to-do lists, Kanban boards, and progress trackers.

Shosho →

Editor for plain English

Shosho is a text editing tool that points out ineloquent parts of your writing to make you “sound better and confident”. The editor highlights things like wordiness, buzzwords, weak expressions, and complex words.

Psyche.co →

Essays on the human condition

I’ve always been an admirer of Aeon. Not just for the writing – it’s one of the most beautiful digital publications around. Now it has a new sister site called Psyche that “illuminates the human condition through three prisms: mental health; the perennial question of ‘how to live’; and the artistic and transcendent facets of life”.

GIF Brewery →

GIF maker for Mac

GIF Brewery lets you convert video files into GIFs with powerful editing tools such as resizing, cutting, cropping, frame rate adjustments, image filters, and more.

 

Indie Mag of the Week

❏

Standart →

A print magazine dedicated to the beauty of coffee and the people and culture that surrounds it.

– Latest Issue: 19
– Frequency: 4 issues/year
– Formats: print
– Origin: Slovakia

Every week, we’re giving away five copies to randomly selected DD readers. Keep an eye on your inbox to find out if you’re among them!

 

Books & Accessories CONSUME RESPONSIBLY

❏

Big Friendship →

How we keep each other close

These past few months I’ve been thinking a lot more about friendships, and what it means to ‘be close’ to someone. I’m curious about this new book, co-authored by Ann Friedman, whose writing I really appreciate: “An inspiring and entertaining testament to the power of society’s most underappreciated relationship, Big Friendship will invite you to think about how your own bonds are formed, challenged, and preserved. It is a call to value your friendships in all of their complexity. Actively choose them. And, sometimes, fight for them.” (Release mid July)

❏

Doughnut Economics →

Economics for the 21st-century

I keep hearing that now is the time to rethink our economic system – moving away from GDP and infinite growth. ‘Doughnut Economics’ frequently comes up in this discussion and it’s on my long list of to-read books: “Economics is the mother tongue of public policy. It dominates our decision-making for the future, guides multi-billion-dollar investments, and shapes our responses to climate change, inequality, and other environmental and social challenges that define our times. Pity then, or more like disaster, that its fundamental ideas are centuries out of date yet are still taught in college courses worldwide and still used to address critical issues in government and business alike.”

 

Overheard on Twitter

The real torture wasn’t that Sisyphus has to roll the rock up the hill for eternity, it was that Zeus kept telling him that if he worked hard and applied himself, one day he might be able to pay off his student loans.

@existentialcoms

 

Food For Thought

How We Make Sense of Time →

Read

A fascinating look into how humans perceive time and how our thinking is influenced by language, culture, and more local circumstances. “In Pormpuraaw, an Aboriginal Australian community, past and future are determined by cardinal directions, with past times to the east and future times to the west. In Yupno [Papua New Guinea] (...) the future is uphill and the past downhill.”

Are you an intellectual? →

Watch

Loved this commencement speech by Ibram Kendi in which he talks about what being an intellectual means and how anti-intellectualism is at the root of systemic racism: “I define an intellectual as someone with a tremendous desire to know. Intellectuals are open-minded. Intellectuals have a tremendous capacity to change their mind on matters, to self-reflect, to self-critique. Intellectuals are governed by only one special interest that is rarely self-serving – the special interest of finding and revealing the truth.”

A Future For Space Billionaires →

Read

Billionaires going into space is mostly about their furthering of their position of power. “In his 2009 book Capitalist Realism, the late writer Mark Fisher asserted that it’s easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism. As it stands, the visions of the future dominating media coverage and public conversation are still those by and for the billionaire class. (...) It’s imperative that we reject visions of the future designed for billionaires to extend their power and wealth for decades, if not centuries, to come. We need visions that bring us back down to Earth, and put the well-being of the many before the self-interest of the few.”

 

Aesthetically Pleasing

❏ ❏

A lovely branding and packaging project for a cosmetics brand using a natural colour and material palette.

❏ ❏

Oscar Pettersson is a 3D motion designer sharing his infinite 3D loops with some fun sound effects on Instagram.

❏ ❏

Another National Geographic photographer worth following on Instagram: Paul Nicklen

❏ ❏

Romantic and curvy, Voyage is a display typeface, useful for headlines or short to medium-length texts.

 

Classifieds

Float: Resource management software for agencies, studios, and firms. Plan your projects and schedule your team’s time in one place. Get started with a free 30 day trial.

Emailancer are your fast and friendly experts in email template design and development. We can deliver a custom design or convert yours into code that works across all devices.

Subscribe to Find That Pod – A weekly newsletter bringing you 5 great new podcasts you’ll want to listen to.

Penbook is a magical notebook for your iPad and Apple Pencil, with hundreds of beautiful, dynamic stationeries included.

Classifieds are paid ads that support DD and are seen by our 37,000 subscribers each week.

Book yours →

 

The Week in a GIF

❏

Email or tweet us the URL to your favourite GIF and we might feature it here in a future issue.