2026-11-09 12:13:43
I can still feel it – the collective exhale. Ann Friedman calls it ‘the great unclenching’, and Rebecca Solnit writes that a win for democracy of this size deserves a proper celebration. Fair enough.
But while the rest of us were glued to swing-state maps, something remarkable was unfolding in a corner of Europe that rarely makes our news feeds.
In Serbia, a movement led by students forced snap elections and then won them outright, ending more than a decade of autocratic rule. It started in 2024, when a train station canopy collapsed and killed 16 people. To many Serbians, it was corruption made visible. Students blockaded their universities and demanded accountability. Within months, farmers, actors, judges and pensioners had joined them, filling city squares in some of the largest protests the country has ever seen.
What’s amazing is that this ideologically mixed movement hasn’t splintered into rival factions. Instead, it has built a shared identity without a single face on the poster. Its electoral list had no leader. The 250 candidates on the ballot papers were nominated, grilled and voted on by student plenums – open assemblies at each university. This produced something that represents a decent slice of the country: a cardiologist, a grammar school teacher, a coal miner, a social worker, a former central bank governor and, for good measure, a retired basketball star.
I’ve been a fan of citizens’ assemblies for years (see DD220). There is lots of evidence that ordinary people, given time, reliable information and a genuine stake in the outcome, can make remarkably good and fair decisions. Serbia’s plenums aren’t a textbook citizens’ assembly – nobody was picked by lottery – but they share the spirit. The power to choose sat with big, messy rooms full of people. And few people have a bigger stake in the outcome than students, who’ll be living with the results long after today’s power brokers have retired to their holiday homes.
It’s hard not to see echoes of Serbia in the Gen Z protests spreading across the world. Of course, some protests turn ugly, and the looting and vandalism deserve condemnation. But the media is often far more interested in pictures of ghouls smashing shop windows than in understanding why so many people took to the streets in the first place, why so many young people can’t see a future worth studying for. Serbia shows what that frustration can build once it gets organised.
The proof is in the pudding, of course. Leaderless movements can be great at opposing and clumsy at governing. Decision-making by committee isn’t pretty. Consensus takes time, patience and a healthy tolerance for disagreement. But there’s something very inspiring about a political movement that started by asking who should represent it, not who should lead it.
And now to this week’s discoveries. – Kai
2026-11-02 11:59:43
As a kid, I loved our big lunch and dinner parties. There are photos of 30-odd people – friends, family, neighbours – squeezed into our apartment on borrowed chairs around tables that didn’t match. It was chaotic, loud and a lot of fun. They didn’t happen nearly often enough, and I sometimes wonder why something we all enjoyed so much was saved for birthdays and other rare occasions.
Over the years, we’ve actually made them rarer still. Derek Thompson has the numbers to prove it:
“In the last 30 years, Americans have seen double-digit declines in practically every measure of socializing. ... The share of Americans who say they host friends or family at their home at least monthly has fallen from 42 percent in 1975 to 12 percent in 2026 – a 70 percent collapse in a half-century.”
These days, the convenience economy has made staying in so easy that inviting people over feels like a self-inflicted chore.
Elizabeth Oldfield went the other way. For more than a decade, she and her husband have hosted shared dinners every other week, first squeezing eight people around a table in a tiny London flat, now feeding up to 16 at a time in their community house. By her count, around 1,500 people have come through the door. The trick, she says, is putting it in the calendar and refusing to renegotiate:
“This bizarre culture of possessive individualism will always give us reasons not to be together, so sometimes it takes a strong container to push back. ... Always keeping our options open and autonomy over our time sounds good but leaves us lonely and disoriented. Make a commitment and your future self will thank you.”
I love how unbothered she is about the state of the house. As her husband puts it, hospitality is ”not the same as entertaining”:
“To be invited into someone else’s imperfect house is, it turns out, a blessing. I do not tend to find very primped, spotless, Instagram-ready homes especially relaxing to be in. If we are going to move towards each other and build real community we have to let go of the desire to impress people.”
I wrote about the radical act of regular open-door dinners a while back (DD331), and Oldfield’s dinners are about the most practical version of that idea I’ve come across. (Do check out her list of tips in the essay.)
So why don’t more of us do it? Thompson has a pretty good theory:
“Everybody might prefer, in the abstract, a world of dinner parties, neighborhood friendships, and spontaneous gatherings. But on any given Wednesday at 7:45pm., it is easier to look at a screen than to host a party; easier to listen to a podcast while doing yoga than to plan a gathering. This is not so much an individual failure as a coordination failure. ... Compared to TikTok, a dinner party is a terrible leisure technology. It requires matching schedules, cleaning the house, buying food, accommodating children and allergies, tolerating awkwardness, and taking the risk that the evening is mediocre. By contrast, what does television ask of us? Nothing. TikTok? Even less.”
When I look at those old photos and my mum’s kitchen, I notice who’s doing the cooking. Those parties ran on a lot of unpaid labour, mostly by women, and Thompson points out that the social calendar frayed when they took on paid work and the men didn’t pick up the slack. Today’s cost-of-living pressures and two exhausted working parents make the couch and screens combo look very appealing.
Oldfield offers us a way back that doesn’t require a kitchen full of women doing all the work and stressing about being a perfect host. Her dinners run on cheap dahl and wine from Lidl. Guests chop, set the table and stay for the clean-up. Nobody performs, nobody keeps score, and somehow everyone leaves a little less alone.
And now to this week’s discoveries. – Kai
2026-10-26 13:54:17
On a visit to Google’s HQ in Mountain View in 2007, I watched people run almost their entire working lives out of a browser. Gmail was still new-ish, and the Googlers I met were doing clever things with labels, aliases and filters that made my Outlook setup look like an old filing cabinet.
When Google started offering a paid Gmail version with custom domains, I made the move and Gmail slowly became the app I spent most of my days in. Docs, Sheets and Google Maps followed.
By the time I started feeling uneasy about Google, I was thoroughly entangled. The thought of dragging hundreds of thousands of emails somewhere else, and giving up some of Gmail’s then-unique features, sat in the too-hard basket for almost a decade.
But earlier this month, a friend reminded me of the EFF’s Opt Out October, and that finally gave me the nudge. I know plenty of you are in the same boat, so here’s a quick rundown of how it went.
My emails turned out to be the easy part, which is annoying given how long I spent dreading it. My shortlist came down to Proton, Fastmail* and iCloud. I liked Proton a lot when I trialled it, but its (admirable) emphasis on security means calendars and contacts won’t sync with the native apps on my iPhone. iCloud now supports custom domains, and since I’m already deep inside Apple’s walled garden, it would have been the path of least resistance. It would also have meant handing more money to a different Big Tech company.
So I went with Fastmail, a small Melbourne company (represent!) with a solid reputation. Its migration tool pulled everything across via IMAP in a few hours and mirrored my Gmail labels. On my laptop I use the web interface and don’t miss a single feature. On my iPhone, I can still use the native Calendar and Contacts apps, and Fastmail’s own app for email (it’s good). When I made a mistake during my custom domain setup, an actual human replied to my support request within a day with an answer that helped. I’d forgotten that was possible.
Google itself isn’t disappearing from my life any time soon, though. Too many clients and collaborators live in Docs and Sheets. But, I learned that once you remove your custom domain from Google Workspace, it takes Google about 20 days to ‘release’ it, after which you can sign up for a free Google account with that same custom email address.
What you can’t do is bring your other stuff with you. Ugh. Drive files have to be exported and re-uploaded into the new account. Maps and YouTube have no migration path at all, so I’m rebuilding those from scratch, one saved café at a time. Google Maps’ reviews are hard to beat, sorry Apple.
So yeah, Google does remain a fixture for a handful of ‘free’ apps. But the elephant in the room – my big fat inbox – walked out the door far more willingly than I’d expected. All up, it took a few hours over a couple of weekends. Years of dread, overcome by two weekends of mild admin. Shoulda done it ages ago. (And yet, I was just in time.)
And now to this week’s discoveries. – Kai
* This is a referral link that gets you 10% off your first year.
2026-10-19 14:21:24
A couple of years ago, my mum nearly sent $1000+ to someone on WhatsApp who was pretending to be me. A (human) bank teller saved her by suggesting she call me first.
This isn’t to mock my mum. We’re all potential victims. But some days I’m surprised nothing worse has happened, given how much of the internet has become fertile ground for scams, fakery and plain nonsense.
Merritt K thinks the only sane response is to go back to the suspicion of the internet’s early days. She writes:
“We must return to 1990s-type hysterics with regards to the internet. Refuse to take anything or anyone at face value. Assume that everything you see is a falsehood tailor-made to mislead or manipulate you. If it seems too good to be true, if it reinforces your beliefs in a neat little way, it’s probably AI-generated.”
I remember those hysterics. I was just on the other side of them. When I first got online, there were pretty much two kinds of people. There were the curious tinkerers, thrilled by ‘right-click, view source’, and then there was a much larger group of sceptics who saw the whole thing as a waste of time and assumed anyone merely mentioning the exchange of money was up to no good.
Scams and dodgy sites have always been part of the furniture, of course. But back then the elaborate cons sat at the edges. Hardly anyone typed their credit card details into a random website, mostly because hardly anyone was selling anything.
Today everyone is selling something. Everywhere we look, someone is scrambling to profit from whatever they can push into the tubes, and that desperation doesn’t stop with the scammers.
One of the comments under Merritt’s piece captures this well. Most of the people chasing attention for a living now have to feed the machine with engagement bait, outrage, contrarianism and half-baked takes, whatever keeps the show rolling. News outlets do it too, the legitimate ones as much as the ones rehashing everyone else. And once honest people have to perform as well, the line between real and fake stops meaning much.
Spend two minutes on Product Hunt and you’ll see how much of what gets celebrated is the plumbing for this desperate economy: tools to generate posts at volume or to spin one idea into fifty variations. Fakery used to be the exception you had to spot. Now authenticity is the exception you have to verify.
Worse, curiosity itself has become something to fake. I see it in my inbox every day. A dozen AI-generated pitches pose as loyal subscribers, all running the same prompts to get my attention. I can live with the volume and the extra admin. What bothers me is the pretence. It’s interest that’s been automated and scaled. All the right words, none of the curiosity.
As I’ve written here before, I’m wary of romanticising the early web. It was narrow, mostly white, mostly male. But I miss its honesty, its naivety. Sure, many small, personal corners of the web will survive, but it’s hard not to grieve, just a little, for a web where most of the people talking to you actually meant it. And were, you know, actually people.
And now to this week’s discoveries. – Kai
2026-10-12 13:36:50
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. I just think the sameness they complain about isn’t a glitch but the logical endpoint of our operating system. When markets and algorithms decide what is good, and efficiency decides what gets made, convergence is the result.
I’ve grown pretty tired of design discourse overall. For all the noble language around craft and care, the discipline’s main job is usually just to help grease the engine of consumption – with better kerning.
So I was sceptical about Ezra Klein’s conversation with designer Debbie Millman on why the modern world looks so drab. I admire Millman’s podcast, but to be honest, her answers here fell flat for me. Klein raises some interesting questions, though.
He says modern apartment buildings, cars or even some municipal infrastructure make us feel nothing. Much of the built environment has been smoothed into something frictionless, functional and inoffensive – convenient, but increasingly hard to distinguish from anything else.
“I actually think some of the drabness that we’re talking about comes from people living in a world that has been smoothed for them, such that it, on the one hand, works really well, and on the other hand, it doesn’t feel alive to them. It just sort of has been like flattened into a kind of soulless service.”
Klein makes a great point: some of the reasons for this drabness are actually positive. When it comes to housing, we now know how to make buildings more energy efficient, thermally comfortable and safer in earthquakes or extreme weather, and those technical requirements inevitably narrow the range of forms and materials.
And, sadly, housing has become a tradable financial asset. For many people it’s a stepping stone, not somewhere they expect to stay for fifty years. Painting your house flamingo pink might express your personality, but it won’t do your resale value any favours.
The charming old streets we romanticise for their beauty are mostly what’s left of housing built for people with money. The workers’ cottages were largely bulldozed or thoroughly renovated. It’s a bit like judging how people live today by watching Grand Designs.
So everything is being nudged towards the inoffensive middle. But there’s a counterforce now too: attention. In a desperate attempt to stand out, design has swung hard the other way – loud, oversized, garish, deliberately grating. Millman describes it as ‘vulgar’ design. The Cybertruck is the perfect example.
Most design these days feels as though it passed through a branding agency. The new ugly cuts through the noise because it feels like somebody made it, rather than a committee approved it. It provokes a reaction, good or bad. That’s a rare feat in a world gone numb.
“It’s not that the market hates beauty. It would love to sell you something beautiful. But the intentionality of the market is to sell product.”
Every bargain has its price. In houses, we traded character for comfort. Instead of our grandmother’s soulful dining table that lasts generations, we buy a flatpack we can carry up three flights of stairs to our tiny apartment where we live for a couple of years until the landlord wants to sell.
Beauty is still possible. It’s just that the freedom to build a world around your own tastes and expectations of quality is largely reserved for those who can afford it. As it always was.
And now to this week’s discoveries. – Kai
2026-10-05 14:17:27
I’ve lately been enjoying Lisa Sibbett’s newsletter The Auntie Bulletin, which stretches the word ‘auntie’ to cover anyone who helps raise kids that aren’t their own. Her writing explores the idea of ‘alloparenting’: the step-parents, neighbours, paid carers and family friends who somehow became family. Almost every issue leaves me with a couple of essays or books to dig into.
A recent one was a piece by Gemma Hartley on the emotional labour so many women carry in their relationships. She describes the running mental list of who needs what and when, a list their partners often don’t know exists. She also asks what we pass on to our kids when these roles go unquestioned.
Interestingly, my own relationship runs counter to that pattern, with me taking on most of the household duties. But Hartley’s piece made me once again think of my mother, who did an amazing job raising two kids while working, with hardly any day-to-day support from my father.
Another essay, by a writer named Astrid, explores a related imbalance through something we tend to think of as a personal choice: our hobbies. Women, she argues, are expected to fit leisure around their responsibilities, while men more readily treat their interests as non-negotiable.
“Women have been steered toward hobbies that happen when life allows them, while men get to pursue hobbies that require life to move aside.”
Astrid organises hobbies into a matrix, sorted by whom they serve and how much life has to make room for them.
“A woman who says she loves to bake is assumed to have found her hobby. A man who says he loves to golf is assumed to have found his. The difference is that one of those hobbies also has a pragmatic end, it feeds the family.”
Hobbies that demand uninterrupted time, like surfing, climbing or long-distance cycling, need someone else to pick up the slack. When women do take them up, they’re often encouraged to frame them as self-care, or as a way to become better carers, instead of something worth doing simply because they want to. The fitness industry’s marketing hints at it, too:
“The men’s version sells performance, dominance, achievement. The women’s version sells community, balance, fitting training into a busy life. ‘A plan that works around your schedule’ is a subtle apology for the hobby’s demands and a reassurance that it will not ask too much, will not require you to be inconvenient. It is sovereign hobby activity marketed in restorative hobby language, because the market understands, even if it does not say so, that many women need permission to be inconvenient before they will sign up.”
Inequality persists through big, obvious divisions of labour, and also through the habits and assumptions that make an unequal arrangement feel perfectly normal.
Of course, every relationship is different, and plenty of people don’t fit these patterns, my own household included. The irony here is that spotting these imbalances, naming them and writing them up for the rest of us is yet another job that mostly falls to women. Add it to the list.
And now to this week’s discoveries. – Kai
