The non-obvious blog
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28 2026 July
The Non-Obvious Book of the Week: The Ultimate Future Words Collection
This week’s “book of the week” is a bit of an unusual share. For those of you who follow me on Linkedin, you might have...
Read Now07 2025 October
The Non-Obvious Book of the Week: Soundbite by Sara Harberson
As you might expect, when I started digging into what makes a great college application essay, I started by skimming or reading dozens of books....
Read Now06 2025 October
The Cormackian Challenge and What AI Could Really Do
There were two major stories this week that seem on the surface to have little to do with one another. The first is one you...
Read Now03 2025 October
SXSW 2026 Announcement!
SXSW is reinventing itself in 2026! The latest session announcement just came out and I’m excited to share that I’ll be back as a Featured...
Read Now02 2025 October
The Swedish Perfume That You Pay for with Your Time in Nature
Deep in the Småland woods of Sweden, there is a “forest-based perfumery” where perfume brand Koyia invites customers to “pay” by spending 599 seconds being...
Read Now01 2025 October
Why the Podcast Company Making 5000 Episodes of AI-Slop a Week May Be Good News
Yesterday I listened to a podcast called Garden featuring Nigel Thistledown, a self-described “garden enthusiast, botanical provocateur and occasional mediator of bird-plant disputes.” The podcast...
Read Now30 2025 September
The Non-Obvious Book of the Week: So You’ve Been Publicly Shamed by Jon Ronson
Some of the stories in this book are hard to read. And you’ll probably be glad that you’re not facing any of the situations that...
Read Now26 2025 September
An Insider Perspective on What Happened to Silicon Valley
One of the long reads from this month’s WIRED magazine offers an insider account to the shift that’s happened within Silicon Valley and particularly to the ideals...
Read Now25 2025 September
The New Science of the Trend Towards Grey Divorces
Couples that get divorced later in life when their children are already adults was once a rarely studied field—particularly the effects on those adult children...
Read Now24 2025 September
The Tuna Cans Film Festival: A Perfect Throwback Marketing Strategy?
Would you make a movie about a can of tuna? Inspired by the Cannes Film Festival, Bumble Bee launched the Tuna Cans Film Festival – a search...
Read Now23 2025 September
The Non-Obvious Book of the Week: Design for a Radically Changing World by Diane Hoskins and Andy Cohen
The offices (or coffee shops) we work in, bridges we drive across, and temples we pray in were all imagined, designed, and built by architects....
Read Now19 2025 September
The Clever Secret Message Behind South Park’s Delayed Episode
There was a new episode scheduled for South Park on Comedy Central last night. It never aired. When the announcement was made, it came alongside this...
Read Now18 2025 September
The Future of Agriculture Is Peak Farmland + Growing Reforestation
Today, about half of the world’s land is used for farming. In the future, it could be far less–even as food production increases. As technology...
Read Now17 2025 September
The Long-Awaited AI Copyright Payday May Soon Arrive
For years now, publishers in all categories of media have been fighting a battle with AI firms to be compensated for their content that was...
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