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post thumbnail for The Non-Obvious Future Word of the Week: Fauxstalgia & The Lost Goal of Pelé

23 2026 July

The Non-Obvious Future Word of the Week: Fauxstalgia & The Lost Goal of Pelé

Fauxstalgia – The ache for a memory that was AI-generated and never actually lived through. The most legendary soccer player in history once shared that the best...

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post thumbnail for A New Product That Imagines an Anti-Surveillance Future

19 2026 March

A New Product That Imagines an Anti-Surveillance Future

One of the biggest viral tech stories this week was an announcement from a company called Deveillance that announced a product called Spectre 1: the first smart...

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post thumbnail for The AI Startup That Raised $1B While Betting Against Generative AI

18 2026 March

The AI Startup That Raised $1B While Betting Against Generative AI

When a Turing Prize winner raises over a billion dollars to create a new model for the future of AI, people should be paying attention....

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post thumbnail for The Non-Obvious Book of the Week: Don’t Be Yourself by Tomas Chamorro-Premuzic

17 2026 March

The Non-Obvious Book of the Week: Don’t Be Yourself by Tomas Chamorro-Premuzic

The provocative title of this book describes its premise but rather than being an exaggeration, Don’t Be Yourself actually does lay out a pretty convincing...

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post thumbnail for The Pioneering New Science of Dream Engineering

16 2026 March

The Pioneering New Science of Dream Engineering

It sounds like a story out of science fiction. Technology that can influence how we dream and what we dream about. This fascinating new field is...

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post thumbnail for Secrets of Human Connection and My Deeply Personal Annual Challenge

12 2026 March

Secrets of Human Connection and My Deeply Personal Annual Challenge

You know when they describe a moment as a calm before the storm? That was last night in Austin as I prepared for a whirlwind...

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post thumbnail for People Are Taking Pride in Using Old Devices

11 2026 March

People Are Taking Pride in Using Old Devices

You might call it the longevity flex. As more cell phone services offer constant phone upgrades as soon as you hit the one year anniversary for...

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post thumbnail for The Non-Obvious Book of the Week: Superbloom by Nicholas Carr

10 2026 March

The Non-Obvious Book of the Week: Superbloom by Nicholas Carr

Nicholas Carr is a well-known thinker and Pulitzer Prize winner who writes about how the Internet has affected our brains. In his latest book published...

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post thumbnail for The Wildly Effective #QuitGPT Movement May be the Easiest Boycott in Human History

09 2026 March

The Wildly Effective #QuitGPT Movement May be the Easiest Boycott in Human History

The #QuitGPT consumer boycott movement is accelerating. More than 2.5 million people have chosen to delete ChatGPT and switch to another AI model such as Anthropic’s Claude....

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post thumbnail for How Anthropic Is Winning the AI Platform Marketing War by Being Less Evil

05 2026 March

How Anthropic Is Winning the AI Platform Marketing War by Being Less Evil

Anthropic is winning the AI platform marketing war. In the quest to become the dominant category-defining player, OpenAI had the largest lead with ChatGPT. Then...

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post thumbnail for The Professor Saving History and Truth with Guerilla Teaching Methods

04 2026 March

The Professor Saving History and Truth with Guerilla Teaching Methods

When the Smithsonian National Portrait Gallery changed the image of the current President in January, it also removed the original placard which mentioned Donald Trump’s...

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post thumbnail for The Non-Obvious Book of the Week: Another World Is Possible by Natasha Hakimi Zapata

03 2026 March

The Non-Obvious Book of the Week: Another World Is Possible by Natasha Hakimi Zapata

What if you could study the best programs and ideas from around the world and offer an argument for how to replicate them elsewhere? That’s...

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post thumbnail for Is Las Vegas Really Experiencing a Death Spiral?

02 2026 March

Is Las Vegas Really Experiencing a Death Spiral?

They say it’s just for rich people. Visitation is down 7.5% thanks largely to tariffs and reduced travel from international visitors (particularly Trump-despising Canadians). By...

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post thumbnail for What Countries Are Proudest of Their Culture and Lifestyle?

26 2026 February

What Countries Are Proudest of Their Culture and Lifestyle?

As I spent far too much time watching the Olympics this past week, over and over from the winner’s podium you would see patriotism on...

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