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A long read last week from The Atlantic offered this viral headline – Why Americans Stopped Hanging Out. Around the same time, I came across a leisure study from a bunch of marketers about how people are spending less time at bars and pubs, even as they spend more time running marathons. All of it … Read more
This week Wendy’s unintentionally stirred up some trouble as headlines popped up online that the fast-food chain was testing “surge pricing” similar to Uber where they would charge more for food when demand was highest. The chain quickly backtracked with the relatively bone-headed explanation that they were actually using it to offer “discounts during slower … Read more
We might all be getting addicted to bad news. I was thinking about this point as I considered my own reactions to two other disturbing stories I read this week. The first was about an outbreak of measles in a Broward County Florida school where 11 kids were unvaccinated and over 100 may now be at risk. The … Read more
Welcome to a case study on why facial scanning is a bad idea. Supermarkets in the UK have been experimenting for the past year with technology that estimates the age of shoppers by scanning their faces at checkout. Apparently “Tesco, Asda, Morrisons and Co-op have already successfully trialed the technology which allowed anyone that is estimated to … Read more
For all the research and articles you might have read about the habits and beliefs from one generation to the next, one assumption has remained surprisingly unquestioned: both men and women from any particular generation share a similar mindset. What separates Boomers from Millennials may be extreme but that shift applies relatively equally to anyone … Read more
Given the recent increased usage of AI tools and the story of the ouster of Harvard President Claudine Gay for plagiarism, it seems we hear about it everywhere. In an op-ed piece all about the word, John McWhorter suggests that perhaps we need a second word to describe instances where ideas aren’t truly stolen: “The term … Read more
I have bad news for all of us. The non-stop media coverage of politics has already started and it’s an election year here in the US. Now that the voting for Presidential primaries has started, you’ll likely start seeing a lot of reports about momentum, winners, losers and general predictions about the sentiment of the … Read more
What if the one of the biggest reasons for poverty and homelessness in cities wasn’t a lack of money or ballooning health care costs, but rather the longstanding real estate mandate for ample parking spaces? One of the most eye-opening books I considered for our book awards program this year was Paved Paradise, which suggested that … Read more
In the process of curating this newsletter every week, I read a lot of stories about startups and innovation. Hardly any feature case studies from the continent of Africa. The fact that African innovation is widely ignored probably isn’t much of a surprise to anyone who comes from that ecosystem … but it’s a fact … Read more
Just in time for the end of the year, the team at Information is Beautiful has put together an infographic with all the “positive trends and admirable global breakthroughs of 2023.” On the list is everything from promising new medical treatments to city-wide pronouncements that are likely to make a major impact to improve local … Read more
Non-Obvious Thinking is my upcoming book about the 4 secrets of becoming a non-obvious thinker - coming 09/24!
Rohit Bhargava is a trend curator, founder of the Non-Obvious Company and the 3-time Wall Street Journal bestselling author of ten books.
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Rohit is the author of 10 books on trends, the future of business, building a more human brand with storytelling and how to create a more diverse and inclusive world.
