Why Rage Isn’t As Useful As Anger

The truth can seem hard to find these days. One of my biggest challenges in putting this weekly email together to share with you is finding some perspective, particularly when it comes to Trump. As you might expect, many of the news sources that I subscribe to and use to compile this report are far

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Amy Winehouse And How Dead Artists Might Come Back On Tour A ...

This week the father of Amy Winehouse announced a world tour in 2019 featuring a “hologram” of his daughter on stage. A digital avatar of Winehouse, who died in 2011 from alcohol poisoning at the age of 27, will “perform” some of her most popular songs in a concert accompanied by a live band, real backup

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Do Fantasy Sports Dehumanize Athletes And Make Us Worse Peop ...

As Washington Redskin’s running back Chris Thompson shares, “Fantasy football, it makes us not human. It’s almost like people think we’re just robots out there, performing for you.” In a sport sometimes described as our modern day gladiator ring due to how often the sport causes long term inury and even death among its participants, Thompson has a

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Most Online Content Is Crap. How Will We Decide What To Save ...

This week the Library of Congress mapped out an ambitious vision to expand its collection of digital content and broaden access to all of it. On the surface, cataloging all of this data seems like the ultimate impossible task because of how exponentially it is growing. It’s hard to imagine how any one group will be able

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How Black Mirror Might Predict The Future Of Storytelling

This week I made my annual trek to Snug Harbor on Staten Island for the Future of Storytelling conference. I make it a point to come every year, and this year I was lucky to moderate a session with Jill Cress, the CMO of National Geographic, who is helping the brand move from “reverence to relevance.” At the

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How To Separate Meaningful Data From Quantified Bullshit

Last year I got my test results from the 23andMe genetic testing and found it to be fascinatingly useless. The numbers told me I was 99% South Asian and offered head-scratching “insights” like that I have an “average chance of hating chewing sounds.” This week an excerpt from a new book called A Brief History of

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