The non-obvious blog
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18 2025 July
7 Tips for Making Your Website Non-Obvious (and Interesting)
Updating a website is one of my least favorite things to do as an entrepreneur. It just takes so much time. But if you’ve ever...
Read Now17 2025 April
Google Uses AI to Reimagine The Wizard of Oz (and Maybe the Future of Hollywood)
This past week, a closed group of attendees at a private Google event got a first look at an ambitious project that has been in...
Read Now16 2025 April
The Beautiful and Destructive Potential of Using VR on Prisoners in Jail
This week there were a few stories of questionably ethical uses for virtual reality headsets that raised some new questions about how it can and...
Read Now15 2025 April
The Non-Obvious Book of the Week: The Sibling Effect by Jeffrey Kluger
As part of the celebration for National Siblings Day, I chose to resurface The Sibling Effect this week—a book written several years ago about the impact that...
Read Now14 2025 April
“The Last Pot” Exhibit Reimagines Funeral Urns for Milan Design Week
At Milan Design Week (Salone del Mobile,) you might expect to see new designs for chairs or reimagined interior living spaces. A category that rarely...
Read Now11 2025 April
How “Chrono-Nutrition” Could Use Metabolism Science to Change When We Eat Anything
If there is an optimal time to eat a particular type of food, then there are suboptimal times to have it too. The problem is,...
Read Now10 2025 April
The Backstory of How Dubai’s Museum of the Future Was Imagined Is Worth Reading
Thirty percent of the visitors to the Museum of the Future in Dubai have never been to a museum before. That’s just one of the...
Read Now08 2025 April
The Non-Obvious Book of the Week: Imaginable by Jane McGonigal
If you are a fan of thought exercises and a visual process to help you imagine the future, this is the perfect book for you....
Read Now07 2025 April
How NFL’s New 8k “Hawk Eye” Cameras Offer an Interesting Model for Truth and Verification
Rather than relying on chains and the human eye to measure whether teams have achieved a first down in NFL football games next season, the...
Read Now04 2025 April
The Sad Retreat of April Fool’s Day and What It Reveals About Our Culture
The week of April Fool’s Day, I regularly look forward to reading about all the brands taking risks, exploring their fun sides and doing something...
Read Now03 2025 April
Artificial Naps, Precognitive Dreams and the Evolving Science of Sleep
What if you could get the restful benefits of taking a nap without actually taking a nap? Researchers studying the health effects of “power naps”...
Read Now02 2025 April
Rimowa Sells Old, Beat-Up Suitcases and Demand Is Off the Charts
Buyback programs are getting popular among retailers in many categories but usually they are for products that are still in “sellable” condition that can be...
Read Now01 2025 April
The Non-Obvious Book of the Week: Who Is Government? by Michael Lewis
In the words of bestselling author Garrett Graff who recently wrote a review for The Washington Post, this book “examines some of the remarkable people who...
Read Now31 2025 March
The Wild Theory of the “Mar-a-Lago Accord” That Aims to Explain Everything Trump Is Doing
There is a theory circulating Wall Street and other circles that aims to take all the chaos of the first several months of the new...
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