Physical phone-blocking devices, powered by NFC wireless technology, are becoming a popular solution for doomscrolling. Brigid Delaney puts one to the test

Wake up, 100 messages from group chat overnight about something – what? another assassination attempt; a village destroyed in Lebanon; the football result in England; the weather in Iran being manipulated; the pesticides causing lung and bowel cancer, so everyone who eats salads is now at risk of cancer; meditate for 20 minutes, then fire up x.com, a place I thought I’d never want to revisit, with its carnival barkers and supplement salesman, and have you seen the Lego thing calling Trump a paedo?, you gotta see the Lego thing, and this is before my first coffee, yet x.com is the coffee and the tea, whatever Elon has done to the For You algorithm is evil genius, it’s like the global collective id, nasty and funny and addictive and compelling – like gawking at a car crash, like soaking in a hot bubble bath of anger, and memes, and geopolitical dramas, and Trump, Trump, Trump – soaking in Trump, and then, For Me (just as Elon promised).

So begins the circuit around my phone, that goes all day and night, around the tiny screen with its icons (when a born-again Christian once told me he had favourite icons, for a long time I thought he meant apps, not pictures of the Virgin Mary). I started to feel like I was in Canberra, on one of those enormous roundabouts, rotating between the icons – not Joseph, not Jesus, but X and WhatsApp and TikTok and even LinkedIn for Christ sakes – round and round from one app to the next, just checking, checking in case something is happening. I watched tiny videos and maybe, occasionally, got distracted by the novel I am meant to be writing, which is due on 31 July. But the novel is boring, just a static Word doc on a screen, it’s not giving; it’s taking hard work. So I spend six minutes with my novel, and then it’s time to go back to my phone, to circle the roundabout visiting all my icons again, like a demented Stations of the Cross, because I can’t focus, I just can’t focus on work right now when there is so much good scrolling to do …

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Continent ‘sleepwalking’ into series of economic and national security problems due to over-dependence

Europe is “sleepwalking” into a series of economic and national security problems because of an over-reliance on Chinese green technology, according to experts.

A report co-authored by Michael Collins, a former deputy head of national security strategy at the UK Cabinet Office, described the risks of depending on China for green tech as “serious”.

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This is my 5th collection of my personal artwork. Hope you like it!

Prosecutors claimed the man gave his Russian intelligence handler information about German military aid for Ukraine and photos of NATO military convoys moving along motorways.

The report found that the group’s activity has not diminished despite a major Europol-led crackdown in July 2025 known as Operation Eastwood.

Hij vindt zichzelf de grootmeester van de deal, maar de diplomatie van de Amerikaanse president Donald Trump loopt spaak. Zeker rond Iran, waar de VS zelf partij zijn.

Auke Kok schreef een nieuwe biografie van NSB-leider Anton Mussert. „Wat me trof was zijn brutaliteit. Hij was voor de duvel niet bang.”

U schreef ons over de ontsnapte koe uit het slachthuis, stoeptegelkolonialisme en armoede.

Eleven up, ten down

On Tuesday in San Francisco at an event called "What's Next with AWS," CEO Matt Garman took the stage to announce that AWS is (for what, depending on how you count, is the seventh, eighth, or ninth time) moving up the stack and entering the applications business.…

A Georgia teen diagnosed with a rare cancer used his Make-A-Wish gift to help the homeless in his community. “I got out of my version of heck, and I want to help others who are in a similar situation, their own version.”