10 2025 October
What I Learned About Events from IMEX America
I’ve spent the early part of this week at the IMEX America Trade Show here in Vegas, which is the largest trade show for the...
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 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 Now15 2025 September
Anonymity Is Dead. Are We All Really Content Now?
A CEO caught on a kiss cam having an affair isn’t just the latest social media story gone unexpectedly viral. It’s also an indication of...
Read Now05 2025 September
The Curious Modern Popularity of Pumpkin Spice
It’s September and pumpkin spice everything is there. Coffee, candles, cereals, Oreos, dog treats, gum, hummus and even butt wipes (entertainingly rebranded as “Dumpkin Spice”)....
Read Now02 2025 September
The Non-Obvious Book of the Week: Careless People by Sarah Wynn-Williams
If you thought, like I did, that many of the negative impacts that Facebook has had on our culture from failing to curb the spread...
Read Now29 2025 August
How “Dumbification” May Be the Next Hot Technology Trend
What happens when all the good TVs that you can buy in the market are automatically programed as “smart” TVs, ready to connect to the...
Read Now14 2025 August
The “Anna Karenina Principle” That Explains How Optimists Differ from Pessimists
The first line of Leo Tolstoy’s famous novel Anna Karenina offers this observation: “All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its...
Read Now25 2025 July
The U.S. Postal Service Turns 250—So Let’s Celebrate the Innovations They Have Given the World
For over 100 years in the early days of the U.S. Postal Service, the way mail would get sent from small towns involved a crazy...
Read Now17 2025 July
An Important Lesson About Youth Culture from the Smithsonian Folklife Festival
Every summer on the National Mall in DC the Smithsonian hosts their Folklife Festival. Typically, the weekend-long event brings craftspeople from around the world to...
Read Now15 2025 July
The Non-Obvious Book of the Week: Afrofuturism by Kevin M. Strait and Kinshasha Holman Conwill
“There are Black people in the future.” That’s the brilliant reminder on the back cover of this book I recall reading and selecting for our...
Read Now08 2025 July
The Non-Obvious Book of the Week: Generations by Jean M. Twenge
If there was ever a book that could demystify and explain the differences between these generational labels we assign to one another, this is it....
Read Now16 2025 June
How To See Through a Manipulated Headline (A Retailwire Case Study)
One thing I often talk about in this newsletter is honing our media literacy. This week I found a perfect case study to illustrate how...
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