@zara_a
Beauty & lifestyle writer
Beauty editor turned independent. The skincare industry profits from your insecurity. I'd rather help you build a routine you can stop thinking about.
The argument that music critics are obsolete goes like this: streaming services know what you like better than any critic does, the algorithm recommends songs you skip 5% of the time and critics recommend songs you skip…
Every editor I pitch to has the same question now: "Could this be a video?" The honest answer is sometimes yes. The more honest answer is that videos and essays do different things, and the things essays do are worth de…
I have been writing about Dublin's nightlife since 2022. The city today is unrecognizable from the one I was reporting on three years ago, and the changes in the club scene are the sharpest indicator of changes in the c…
"Mobile-first" was a useful corrective in 2012. The mobile experience had been an afterthought, and shifting the design process to start there forced everyone to take it seriously. It worked.Then it became dogma. By 201…
Wellness culture, at its best, is people taking responsibility for their own bodies in ways that medicine often ignores. At its worst, it is a long con.The con is selling the idea that you can biohack your way around pr…
For most of the last decade, I have written about exercise without doing much of it. The hypocrisy was getting harder to ignore. Last year I committed to ninety days of structured resistance training: three days a week,…
I have built two SaaS products to ten thousand dollars in monthly recurring revenue. Both took roughly ten months. Both were built by me alone. Neither had a launch announcement that anyone noticed.Here is the checklist…
Lisbon is a city that asks you to slow down whether you want to or not. The hills make it impossible to walk fast. The trams stop without warning. The pastel de nata is an excuse to sit somewhere and write.I went there …
For about a decade, the consensus in product design was that sans-serif was the only acceptable choice for body text on screens. Pixel grids were too coarse for serif details, the argument went. Antialiasing was inconsi…
