Asked how he writes his stories, Neil Gaiman, author of the Sandman graphic novel series, told Tim Ferriss that he forces himself to become bored. He goes down to the “lovely little gazebo” at the bottom of his garden, sits down with his fountain pen and his notebook, and forbids himself to do anything but write. He can look out at the world but he can’t go online or try to complete a crossword...
Federico Jorge’s career as a copywriter started in creative agencies. Like many creative workers he moved from one agency to another before deciding he’d gained enough experience to work for himself. He set up his own agency in his small town in Argentina and soon found that business thrived. He served small businesses with simple needs, delivering the copy they required to build their companies...
In November 2022, shortly after Elon Musk became the new owner of Twitter, Robert Reich listed three things Musk didn’t understand. He suggested that first Musk didn’t recognize the value of the platform’s workers. So, second, when “he fired half” of them and “drove off even more, he wasn’t cutting costs.” And third, he didn’t understand that “he was actively destroying what he bought.” Musk...
In 2001, Dennis Tito, a financial analyst with a background in aerospace engineering, became the world’s first space tourist. He bought a seat on a Soyuz spacecraft and spent a week cruising in the weightless environment of the International Space Station. He paid $20 million for the trip. It sounds like a dream vacation, a chance to experience zero-gravity and enjoy an alien’s eye view of the...
Last June, six women came together on Zoom to create a magazine cover. The women included editors from Cosmopolitan, members of OpenAI, and digital artist Karen X. Cheng. They typed prompts into a field, tested different ideas and eventually produced a magazine cover for one the world’s most popular fashion magazines. The image was made by DALL-E, a digital imaging service powered by artificial...
In an experiment conducted more than thirty years ago, volunteers were presented with two bowls of different sizes. The large bowl contained ten red jelly beans mixed with 90 white jelly beans. The small bowl held just one red bean and nine white beans. If the volunteers closed their eyes and picked the red bean from one of the bowls, they’d win four dollars. The bean selection would be random...
ETH Denver was the place to be at the start of March. At least if you’re a crypto enthusiast worried about the direction of the industry. The event began with a five-person band singing a protest song. They belted out rude lyrics about Sam Bankman-Fried and Do Kwon, and promised “not to use centralized exchanges run by these toxic dudes.” It’s a far cry from the days when the crypto industry...
When Apple released iOS 14.5 in 2021, the Cupertino hardware and software company dropped a bomb on the Internet’s advertising industry. The update for iPhones and iPads included a new privacy tool. App Tracking Transparency requires app-makers who want to track activity across apps to ask their users’ permission before they can collect that data. For advertisers and marketers, that need to...
For a company that receives almost half its revenue from customers aged between 25 and 40, Starbucks has been surprisingly successful at marketing on TikTok, a platform aimed at teenagers. The coffee firm’s TikTok account has almost two million followers, more than ten million likes and is packed with clips of customers talking up their drinks and shots of baristas going the extra mile. One...
Kevin Roose won’t be leaving his wife for Sydney. The New York Times technology correspondent spent a couple of hours in mid-February chatting with Bing’s new AI feature. Over the course of the conversation, Roose reported, Bing displayed what he called “a kind of split personality.” Search Bing acted like a librarian, sourcing information, summarizing news articles and looking for deals. It...
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