Falconer’s distance set conjecture says that a compact set E in the d dimensional Euclidean space with Hausdorff dimension larger than d/2 must have a distance set of strictly positive Lebesgue measure. The conjecture is open in all dimensions but has seen a great amount of development lately. I’ll discuss some recent works (joint with Xiumin Du, Kevin Ren, and Ruixiang Zhang) in the higher dimensional case of the problem, based on new techniques in projection theory and decoupling.