happiness

Welcome to The TechCrunch Exchange, a weekly startups-and-markets newsletter. It’s inspired by the daily TechCrunch+ column where it gets its name. Want it in your inbox every Saturday? Sign up here. Last April, Alex and I reported CB Insights data showing that venture investment into mental health startups had dropped sharply in Q1 2022 compared to the preceding quarter. But in the last couple of weeks, I have heard about several venture-backed deals into the subsector of health tech. They got…

We’ve romped most of the way through Life With You, the title track from the Proclaimers’ seventh album, when the lead actors fade out of view and hand the stage to the musicians. Six of them come to the front with their assorted string instruments and belt out the remainder of the song. They are full-voiced and joyful.It is a lovely moment and not just because it foregrounds Richard Reeday’s musical direction and David Shrubsole’s acoustic-led arrangements. It is also because it acknowledges how much Stephen Greenhorn’s…

Almost exactly 10 years ago, Simu Liu was called into an office at Deloitte where he worked, and was laid off. “One of those moments that are seared into your life for ever – we all have them,” he says, remembering walking back to his desk in the open-plan office to collect his things, trailed by someone from HR and security, “like I was some sort of criminal”. The absolute silence as his colleagues, eyes glued to their screens of numbers, pretended not to notice.Despite the fact he was in his 20s, he didn’t have the…

In a trio of overgrown garden beds, tomatoes and chillies climb towards the sky. There are bite-size capsicums, both green and orange, plus bushy shrubs of parsley and rosemary. Somewhere in here, I am told, is pumpkin and sweet potato.“I had a bunch of kale, too, but it died when I was at Coachella,” Harley Streten says.We are at the northern rivers property where Streten – better known as music producer Flume – now spends most of his time, growing veggies and taking things slow. Further down the back yard he has citrus…

Soft Cell: *Happiness Not Included album coverForty-one years since their debut album, Non-Stop Erotic Cabaret, and 20 since their last album, 2002’s underwhelming Cruelty Without Beauty, Soft Cell return with an album that makes the very best of their vantage point as synth-pop elders with an eye on the future. *Happiness Not Included cleverly compares the 80s promises of a future straight out of science-fiction (“rocket ships and monorails, electricity that never fails”) with how things have actually turned out. While…

Credit: Unsplash/CC0 Public Domain Human beings are social animals. This means, almost as a matter of logical necessity, that humans' quality of life is largely decided by the quality of their societies. …