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In an email from Stacked Marketer from October 2022, one of many newsletters I’ve been subscribed to over the past year… Saw this interesting bit about “Zero Drafts,” but the original source is a Twitter thread (yuck). Originally I just did a copy/paste job of the entire section of the email, but here are the…
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“Cultural Moneyballism, in this light, sacrifices exuberance for the sake of formulaic symmetry. It sacrifices diversity for the sake of familiarity. It solves finite games at the expense of infinite games. Its genius dulls the rough edges of entertainment. I think that’s worth caring about. It is definitely worth asking the question: In a world…
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A 100-year-old railroad dining car sandwich bag? A 100-year-old Halloween napkin? Again, artifacts of history, who cares if they were used, right? They do turn up if you know where to look, and they were intended for the trash. Who knows why they survived, but let’s be glad that they did, and not just to…
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This Auction Professor video about rubber duck bath toys got the Rubber Ducky song from Sesame Street stuck in my head. You know, “Rubber ducky, you’re the one who makes bath time so much fun. Oh rubber ducky, I’m awfully fond of you, doo doo dee doo.” Apparently, there are collectors of these shameless marketing…
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Written October 3, 2022 Today’s piece by Ted Gioia, “The Nostalgic Turn in Music Writing,” gave me pause – actually several pauses. There are three points from this article that I want to examine. The first is the dearth of coverage for new music artists, the second is dominant streaming platforms “rewarding technocrats at the…
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When I stumbled upon an early draft of what I titled “Hierarchy of Ideas” I realized this was perfect Obscure Curiosities material. In just a few paragraphs, I had the bones of a schema that can sit alongside my CRAP framework as a kind of “compass” for orienting ideas. So, I decided to sketch this…
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Finally got around to parsing my notes from this solid book on writing. Here are the 11 points that I made sure to write down, reshaped and summarized for your reading pleasure. 1. Write short (and prune without mercy) Bernoff’s “write short” advice stings, because I’m allergic to brevity. Still, pruning works; like trimming a…
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Quasi-Rational Minds and the Myth of Perfect AI “Bygones are forever bygones,” Jevons once wrote. But human minds are not blank ledgers wiped clean at each decision. We’re accumulators — of sensations, biases, and half-baked rules of thumb — and we act on them whether or not they’re still relevant. In 1996, Louis Lévy-Garboua and…
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Labubu isn’t just the next blind box toy collectible. It serves as a perfect specimen of a broken economy — where the only game most people can play is speculation, and everything is for sale. Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky figured out the psychology behind why people do such bizarre things with their money decades…
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“What an astonishing thing a book is. It’s a flat object made from a tree with flexible parts on which are imprinted lots of funny dark squiggles. But one glance at it and you’re inside the mind of another person, maybe somebody dead for thousands of years. Across the millennia, an author is speaking clearly…