The non-obvious blog

Dedicated To Helping Readers
Be More Interesting Since 2004.

As Featured In:

30 2025 December

The Quantified Uselessness of the AI-Generated Year in Review

There’s a special kind of uselessness amplified by AI that’s probably surrounding you right now: the year in review. The idea wasn’t a bad one....

Read Now

03 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 Now

02 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 Now

01 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 Now

30 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 Now

26 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 Now

25 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 Now

24 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 Now

23 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 Now

19 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 Now