2026-07-06 15:07:25
One thing that’s taken me a long time to properly internalise is that not all disabilities are visible. It sounds so obvious written down like that, but it’s one of those things you still have to frequently remind the part of your brain that wants everyone filed neatly into binaries like ‘tall’ or ‘short’, ‘well’ or ‘unwell’.
I’ve been healthy for most of my life, and lucky enough to live in places with great healthcare, which explains why I’m still catching up on things other people figured out the hard way. There’s a lot to learn about fairness and who gets to belong just by listening to the people our system considers ‘unproductive’ or ‘difficult’.
Back in DD379, I discussed Kristie De Garis’ essay on how chronic illness refuses our tidy cultural script of recovery – the idea that you get sick, then you get better, then you’re back to ‘normal’. Pluto Rennie’s short piece for Salient Magazine made me similarly uncomfortable, but this time it’s about palatability.
Rennie says there’s an unwritten rulebook for how to be disabled correctly: consistent, legible, and above all, not too much trouble. Fall outside it, and people start getting suspicious.
“...disability should be obvious, stable, and easy to verify. That it should present itself clearly to others, like evidence. Anything less becomes suspect.”
It’s interesting, and kind of bleak, thinking about what someone’s suffering is meant to accomplish for other people:
“Because pain, as it turns out, is more acceptable when it is useful – when it can be turned into funding, into narrative, into something that circulates cleanly. What matters is not just that you suffer, but that your suffering can be told in a way that reassures people: about institutions, about care, about themselves. To object to that is to disrupt the story; and disruption is read as ingratitude.”
“Disability, then, is not just something you experience. It’s something you are expected to perform correctly. To present in a way that is legible, coherent, and above all, non-disruptive.”
Of course, our bodies don’t care about consistency. And yet we still expect people to stay on one side of that imagined abled/disabled binary, mostly so we know how to act around them.
“The problem is that bodies are not coherent. They change. They contradict themselves. They have good days that undermine bad ones, and bad days that refuse to be hidden. They do not move in clean, linear narratives. They are inconsistent in ways that make other people uneasy. And so you are asked, quietly but persistently, to smooth that inconsistency out. To become easier to read. Easier to accommodate. Easier, ultimately, to ignore.”
I guess most of us are doing some version of this performance, disabled or not. We edit ourselves down into something more digestible and easy to read depending on who’s watching. Rennie’s just naming it plainly, on behalf of people who don’t often get the chance to without suspicion.
And now to this week’s discoveries. – Kai
2026-06-29 17:51:39
Get off the beaten track, find the little town the guidebook missed, eat where the locals eat, steer clear of other tourists. That’s the unspoken creed of many travellers and that was me, too. I’d sniff at anyone who hung out at the obviously touristy spots, thinking that my own experiences were somehow more legitimate, more ‘authentic’.
This essay by David Sze opened my eyes to the fact that the very notion of authenticity rests on a fantasy that cultures are pure, fixed things that tourism then comes along and spoils.
Sze points out that no culture has ever sat sealed off and unchanging. The Silk Road, empires, trade, migration, missionaries, K-pop, Bollywood films played on a TV in a Senegalese mud hut – everything has always been bleeding into everything else:
“Through these processes, the world is increasingly intermeshed – with no country and no man an island. Each country, state, and city, down to the smallest village, is constantly changing with unceasing interaction with regional and global influences. How then to draw a boundary around a culture? We cannot, as each meld into and influence another.”
If a culture is always shifting, then the commodified, tourist-facing version of a place isn’t a fake version bolted onto something real. It’s just the most recent layer.
“If culture is inherently dynamic, we can argue that commodification does not produce a simulacrum of the ‘local’, but is instead just the latest step of a never-ending evolution.”
Sze argues that what travellers are actually chasing is a flattering story about themselves:
“It is a shiny label that the traveler pins on her experiences – a marker of Bourdieuian distinction, to prove that she is more knowledgeable, more adventurous, and more off-the-beaten track.”
So the search for the ‘untouched’ is really a search for something that was never there. Worse, it does a disservice to the people we claim to admire:
“‘Authenticity’ is the denial of a people’s privilege to their changing culture amidst changing times… [It] is a box into which the traveler crams what he wants to see, while ignoring the complexity of reality. It is both distorting, and lazy.”
That’s not to say that tourism doesn’t negatively impact local cultures. Sze’s essay is now nearly a decade old and the full Instagrammification of travel was just beginning to take hold. Since then, social media has flattened travel into a checklist of shareable images. We don’t go looking for the ‘authentic’ as much as we try to recreate a photo we’ve already seen. Nicely summarised in this Domus piece:
“We no longer seek the unknown – or even what’s familiar – we chase images that are already well-known and highly shareable, affirming our place in a global community. We travel pursuing stories shaped by others, where the experience is influenced more by digital narratives than personal exploration. In essence, we create images to confirm an existing fantasy.”
That is its own kind of inauthentic, of course – arguably far more so than ordering that overpriced pad thai.
All of that said, wanting to look past the souvenir stalls to find corners that aren’t yet rearranged for tour groups is still worth doing. I guess we just shouldn’t expect some ‘pure’ version of a place that never existed. Like a panellist suggested back in DD271: serious travellers should do some homework first. Books, documentaries, podcasts by and with locals help us see an ever-changing culture through the eyes of the people who actually live it.
And now to this week’s discoveries. – Kai
2026-06-22 15:00:02
At some point in your thirties, you often start carrying a particular kind of grief. You find yourself mourning the years when friends were a constant, ambient presence – when mundane moments felt significant simply because they were shared. Beneath that grief sits a layer of guilt: for the calls you never made, the messages you meant to send, and for letting it get to the point where reaching out now feels like an awkward imposition.
Pranav Jain has captured all of this in a short, tender essay about how friendships fray in adulthood and how little language we have for that kind of loss.
With romantic heartbreak we can usually rely on a kind of support infrastructure. The dissolving of a close friendship, however, usually goes strangely unmourned. There are no dramatic breakups.
“Most friendships dissolve through unattended accumulation – postponed calls, exhausting jobs, geographic distance, emotional fatigue, (...) One day you realise the person who once knew your thoughts now only knows what you accidentally reveal on Instagram stories.”
When we were younger, school and university did the work of friendship for us – proximity bred intimacy, repetition bred familiarity. Adulthood dismantles that scaffolding:
“Today’s young professionals live inside systems that quietly erode friendship while pretending to celebrate connection. Work consumes emotional bandwidth. Cities stretch distances cruelly. Weekends become recovery periods rather than social spaces. Ambition transforms everyone into project managers of their own lives. (...)
We are perhaps the first generation to possess uninterrupted access to each other while simultaneously becoming emotionally inaccessible. We maintain ambient awareness of one another’s existence without participating meaningfully in each other’s lives. I know what my friends eat. Which cafés they visit. Which things they complain about. I know when they get promoted because LinkedIn informs me before they do. And yet sometimes I hesitate before calling because I no longer know the emotional weather of their lives.”
One of Jain’s best observations is that adult friendship has gradually absorbed the same logic we apply to everything else. We tend to weigh our relationships through a kind of invisible cost-benefit analysis:
“Somewhere along the way, friendships too began absorbing the language of management. We now discuss emotional bandwidth like data plans. Even affection sometimes feels evaluated through invisible cost-benefit analysis: Who texts first? Who makes more effort? Who is emotionally available? Who drains energy?
Friendship, however, has always depended on a certain irrational generosity. A willingness to waste time together magnificently. To listen to the same anxiety for the fifth time. To sit through silence. To remain available without agenda.”
Like idleness (see DD392), friendship is antithetical to the economic system we live inside, because so much of it is gloriously unproductive and unpaid. Friendship doesn’t show up on any balance sheet, so it gets discounted, forgotten, filed under things that can wait.
“It resists the transactional logic modern life rewards everywhere else. Because a real friend offers something profoundly rare: unoptimised presence. Family is structured by blood. Marriage by institution. Work relationships by utility. Friendship survives purely through mutual choosing. Nobody has to stay. And yet some people do.”
The good news is that many of these friendships aren’t dead so much as dormant. The thread is still there; sometimes a single late-night call is enough to pull it taut again and find, briefly, an earlier and more reachable version of yourself waiting on the other end.
And now to this week’s discoveries. – Kai
2026-06-15 15:37:08
When the collective mood is dark and every headline seems to pile it on, the optimists love to wheel out the charts: we’ve never been healthier, wealthier, safer, look at the data! But that comfort evaporates the moment you open the news and see that another country just joined the arms race or another month was added to the record books for heat.
My default setting leans pessimistic (like a proper German) but zooming out and putting our current anxieties in historical context can be a useful exercise, particularly now, when every piece of media wants to hijack our basic threat-response systems.
Oliver Burkeman’s latest newsletter issue makes a great case for keeping a healthy perspective:
“The truth is that we’re probably living through times that future historians will think of as broadly normal. Dangerous and consequential, yes, but still normal.”
The reason this is so hard to accept, he argues, comes down to what has been labelled as ‘temporal chauvinism’:
“The feeling that the time you’re living in now is the most significant or terrifying one ever – simply because it’s the one you happen to be around to experience.”
Burkeman points to centuries of failed apocalypse predictions – from astrologers to religious leaders – and notes:
“There wasn’t some little part of their brains that was thinking ‘I know I’m being superstitious here – it’ll be different in the future, when people aren’t so ignorant!’ As far as they knew, they were in possession of the facts; they surely felt just as secure in their convictions as any AI thought leader today.”
He argues that much of today’s doomerism is a coping mechanism:
“Human existence is intrinsically unsafe and insecure, all the time. Anything could happen at any moment, the future is unknowable, one day you’ll die, and some people end up having vastly more traumatic encounters with these realities than others. Against this backdrop, AI doomerism starts to look like a coping mechanism for dealing with existential anxiety.”
This zooming out connects nicely with something Yuval Noah Harari points out on the Ezra Klein podcast. Harari offers a quick test for whether you’re a liberal: do you believe people should choose their own government, their own profession, their own religion, and their own spouse? If you say yes to all four, congratulations, you’re a liberal. And so are the vast majority of people across the political spectrum today, including most people who’d never call themselves that.
His point is that for most of human history, none of those four things were up for debate, let alone agreement. Today they are, and most of us land in the same place, which means the actual ideological gap is narrower than it’s ever been, even as everyone keeps telling us that we’ve never been more divided.
Optimism always comes with a risk. Lean too hard into ‘it’s all fine’ and you risk sapping the urgency that actually gets things done. Movements for change need momentum and action – they don’t just come about naturally.
But there’s an equally seductive trap on the other side – the doom spiral that feels like German seriousness but is really just another excuse to check out.
Things are bad, some of them are legitimately dangerous, and also, this is roughly what being alive has always felt like. The difficult trick is holding onto both at once: staying angry enough to act, without convincing yourself the sky is permanently falling.
And now to this week’s discoveries. – Kai
2026-06-08 15:52:35
After making a case for our right to rest in public spaces last week, writer Leo Umilio got my attention with an essay that turns the whole premise on its head. Not just rest in public, but rest itself. His argument: the kind of rest our culture endorses isn’t really rest at all. It’s maintenance. It’s the oil change your employer needs you to perform so you show up on Monday, sharp and ready to perform.
Umilio draws a line between rest and idleness. Rest, he writes, “is idleness with an alibi”. It can be justified, sold, optimised. It earns its place in the economy of your time by making you better at everything that comes after.
“Rest can be sold, because rest promises a return. Buy the mattress, the app, the retreat, the supplement, and you will work better, earn more, perform at your peak. The promise is always, in the end, a promise about your output.”
Idleness, by contrast, refuses the whole framework:
“The idle hour does not exist in order to improve the hours around it. It does not recharge you for anything. It is not an investment whose return is collected later at the desk. It serves nothing, points toward nothing, produces nothing, and answers to no one, and this is not a flaw to be corrected but the entire substance of the thing.”
Which is why the wellness industry adores rest and has nothing to offer idleness. Rest can be packaged. Idleness cannot.
“You cannot monetise a man staring at rain. You can sell him a meditation app that promises the rain-staring will lower his cortisol and improve his quarterly performance, but the moment he accepts that pitch he is no longer idle. He is resting, strategically, on the advice of his wellness coach. The rain has become a tool.”
You could argue this is splitting hairs or fighting over semantics, but Umilio is pointing at our broader habit of absorbing acts of refusal and selling them back as a technique. Walking becomes a ‘wellness practice’ with a step count. Doing nothing becomes ‘niksen’, a Dutch lifestyle trend, complete with methodology and a book deal. Even boredom has been captured:
“Boredom is good for you, the articles announce, boredom boosts creativity, boredom makes you more productive when you return to work. And there it is again, the inevitable return to work, the alibi reattached to the very thing that was supposed to escape it.”
I can think of many other examples of this semantic creep. Leisure becomes ‘recreation’ and now implies a purposeful activity designed to restore you. Learning becomes ‘upskilling’ – curiosity reframed as labour-market capital. Community has gradually become ‘audience’ – people are not participants but consumers surrounding a brand or a creator.
The counterpoint, and it’s a big one, is that most of us aren’t really in a position to treat idleness as a philosophical stance. Some people rest strategically because that’s all the time they have. Umilio acknowledges this too – rest is good, rest is necessary. His argument isn’t against recovery but against the belief that recovery is the only legitimate form of stillness.
The case he’s really making is for an hour that answers to nothing: “not time freed up for other tasks, but time that is genuinely free, owned by no purpose, answerable to no return.”
Worth sitting with – unproductively, if you can.
And now to this week’s discoveries. – Kai
2026-06-01 15:59:30
The architects of our apartment development did something rare during planning: they convinced the council to close off the last section of the street, replacing it with greenery and seating. As a result, there are now concrete blocks to sit on, stepped-back shop fronts whose edges double as places to perch, and a handful of wooden picnic benches added later by us residents.
On a sunny weekend, the street feels alive. People linger over coffee, kids jump the rocks in the garden, neighbours running errands end up in conversation. (Here’s a short video of our street from a couple of years ago.)
That experience makes me feel the loss described in Gabrielle Bruney’s eloquent and damning essay on the disappearance of the public bench. Somehow the humble bench – low-cost, low-tech, uncommonly democratic – has become one of the most contested objects in urban design.
Bruney’s case in point is New York’s beautiful Moynihan Train Hall, where travellers sprawl on the floor and families use their luggage as furniture – not because it’s overcrowded, but because the benches are largely gone, removed by design to discourage homeless people from lingering.
“Unlike parks or homeless shelters, [benches are] small and relatively inexpensive interventions, six-foot-long microcosms of a far broader debate over whom our cities should be structured to serve and how best to do so. To remove benches, or to curate who gets to sit, is to abandon the work of defining a civic ideal and determining, together, how to live up to it. When seating disappears, our relationship with public space becomes more grudging and utilitarian. Benches are symbols of hospitality, an invitation to participate in the civic realm.”
I loved her observation about what we lose beyond the physical convenience of somewhere to rest. Sitting on a public bench means surrendering some control. The friction is the point:
“In interacting with civic infrastructure, we surrender a degree of control. If the book I want has been checked out, or the seat I sought is occupied, there’s not much to do but wait my turn. These collective goods offer a refresher course in a skill rarely taught after kindergarten: sharing. Public goods help us learn, as Honig writes, that ‘we are not always in charge’.”
Sadly, today the image of a park bench has become almost synonymous with homelessness – a problem to be managed rather than a resource to be shared. Bruney reminds us that benches are one of the last things in public life that doesn’t require a ticket or a purchase:
“Like the subway and public library, benches are places that people who have nowhere to go, go. Observers of the public realm have long pointed out that depriving people in distress of a place to sit down is gratuitous cruelty. … In occupying a public bench, the most marginalized members of society make a claim to visibility, which is also a claim to personhood. And not everyone finds them deserving.”
This hostility has been institutionalised through the rise of privately owned public spaces – plazas and atria that look public but are managed by developers with a commercial interest in who lingers and who doesn’t.
The same logic – public space that are increasingly hostile to anyone who isn’t actively consuming – applies just as well to the internet. Spencer Chang makes this connection in a companion essay:
“[The Internet] has been overdeveloped and undergoverned. Like cities that have prioritized cars over people, visiting the Internet now entails controlled apps and search engines, designed for extraction. There’s nowhere to rest because the benches are covered in spikes. All we can do is sink into the feed and run along the scrollbar until our eyes bleed.”
Homelessness is a layered crisis and, no, more benches won’t solve it. But designing public spaces that offer nowhere to rest doesn’t move us closer to a solution – it just makes the failure less visible. I’m aware of how privileged I am to live on a street designed with this kind of generosity, but privilege shouldn’t be a prerequisite for somewhere to sit.
And now to this week’s discoveries. – Kai
