Rohit Bhargava's Blog, page 28

How the Black List Changed Hollywood, and Might Change Publishing Too

Nearly twenty years ago, Franklin Leonard started publishing his Black List which collected “an annual survey of Hollywood’s best unproduced screenplays.” The goal was to help undiscovered projects find funding and backers. More than 400 of the forgotten works on his list were eventually produced, including blockbusters like Slumdog Millionaire and The King’s Speech. His efforts have had a dramatic effect in helping more diverse projects get made and The Black List even inspired a Harvard case s...

How the Japanese Anime Series One Piece Became One of the Biggest Entertainment Franchises in The World

The Japanese anime series One Piece just hit its milestone 25th anniversary and has run for more than 1,000 episodes. The show has become a worldwide phenomenon and is the most popular manga comic story of all time based on sales, with a Guinness World Record to prove it.

One interesting secret of its success may be its complexity. According to One Piece Podcast host Zach Logan, “One Piece changed the manga industry. When it comes to the sheer number of characters and ideas created by Oda-sen...

This Yogurt Brand Will Pay You $1000 To Stay Off Social Media Until After the Election Is Over

How will you avoid the toxic conversations that often come along with an election cycle? It might start with avoiding social media altogether. Yogurt brand Stonyfield is challenging their customers to do that and rewarding 100 winners with $1000 each if they can do it. The campaign’s website describes the intention of the campaign like this:

It’s election season. No matter what side you’re on, we all know that political conversations on social media can quickly become heated and tension-fille...

This London-based Pharmacy Prescribes Poetry as Treatment

For those of us who love poetry, it really can lift your mood or shift your perspective in a way other written words can’t. Now there’s a place that is offering it literally as a prescription for that effect. The Poetry Pharmacy is a two-location concept in England that is currently looking for a part-time barista and part-time bookseller. That sounds like a dream job.

The vision behind the retail concept is ambitious and beautiful: “We believe that poetry can do so much to match or alter a m...

The Non-Obvious Book of the Week: STFU – The Power of Keeping Your Mouth Shut in An Endlessly Noisy World, by Dan Lyons

Fresh from hours of pundit cross examining and dissecting the first (and probably only) Presidential debate between Kamala Harris and Donald Trump, it’s hard to imagine a timelier read than Dan Lyon’s modern classic STFU all about why we might all be better off if we could just get better at staying silent:

Learning to shut the fuck up will change your life. It will make you smarter, more likable, more creative, and more powerful. It might even help you live longer.

People who talk less ar...

How To Get Hated by AI … and How to Get Someone to Fix It

Reporter Kevin Roose is dealing with a unique problem … AI chatbots hate him. It’s all thanks to an article he wrote back in February 2023 which was focused on the “death” of Sydney—the name that Microsoft had chosen for the AI chatbot they created and paired with their Bing search engine. The article was promptly scraped by AI and used as training data, which associated Roose’s name with the demise of an AI chatbot. The learning model put the pieces together and decided Roose was an enemy of AI...

The New Kids Book That Can Only Be Read While Outside Thanks to Sun-Activated Ink

How can you encourage kids to get outside and off their devices? With a book that can only be read outside! Brazilian food brand Fruitella recently launched a campaign featuring a new book that parents can order which has “retro illustrations” and sun-activated ink so that you need to be outside in order to read it. The effort is a clever campaign to attract attention for the snack brand, but the concept is one that you could imagine being applied in many different situations too. I’m already th...

The Non-Obvious Book of the Week:

Per My Last Email: Witty, Wicked and Wonderfully Weird Workplace Words and Phrases by Stephanie K. Wright

If you’ve ever felt surrounded by wallydrags (feeble or worthless people) or been forced to work for a numpty (a flat-out fool), this book has the antidote. Writer Stephanie K. Wright promises to “reinvigorate your vocabulary” with this fun collection of forgotten but entirely real words from the English language that you’ve probably never heard. Some words, like ultracrepidarian (which d...

3 Insights About the Future of Alcohol

Kantor has a new research summary out about their latest insights into the future of alcohol and there are some surprising takeaways. The report starts with the growing trend of the “sober curious” and explores the popularity of zero-proof drinks as part of a “lifestyle choice” to avoid alcohol. This alcohol-free shift has been causing a lot of angst in the beer, wine and spirits industry but this report paints a more hopeful picture suggesting this is only happening on “certain occasions.” That...

Save the World. Eat More Lionfish and Green Crabs.

Lobster is considered a luxury food today, with high prices to prove it, but it wasn’t always this way. Lobster was once cheap and plentiful, and seen as a poor man’s food. Its evolution to our tables and its prestige are largely thanks to the combined efforts of chefs and marketers. Today there is a large movement underway to try and accomplish something similar with several invasive species of that are threatening local plants and animals. A recent Modern Farmer article points to efforts to pr...