Rohit Bhargava's Blog, page 66
January 3, 2019
Japanese Immigration, Tesla Time Lapse and the Best New Year’s Resolution | Non-Obvious Insights 01.03.19
Can Japan find an antidote for their aging population crisis through immigration? The country is notorious for how difficult it is for outsiders to live and prosper, so it will be interesting to see if this new policy works. The First Major US Copyright Expiration In 20 Years Is Here
Back in 1998 the US approved a copyright extension for 20 years, which just ended. As a result there is quite a bit of recognizable literature, mu...
December 31, 2018
The Ultimate Recap of the Best Stories of 2018
You know that moment in most long running TV shows when they do that recap show filled with all the greatest scenes from past episodes? Reading stories this week was a bit like watching one of those shows, with lots of recaps of the past year. So this week’s “holiday edition” of the Non-Obvious newsletter will feature the best of those collections along with my picks for the best stories of the year. Enjoy the stories and happy new year!
10 Most Interesting Non-Obvious Stories Of The Year: W...December 7, 2018
5 Non-Obvious Trends Changing Business In 2019
For the past six months I have been curating stories and insights for the upcoming 2019 edition of Non-Obvious, and it will be out in just a few weeks. This post offers a sneak peek at five of the trends from the upcoming report this year. If you’d like to read the full report, you can join the waitlist for my early reader list with the link below (available until December 15th, 2018) or preorder your copy with the link below:
Preorder your copy of Non-Obvious 2019 here >>
Join the waiting li...
November 8, 2018
Why Do Critics Hate Movies That Real People Love?
The Queen-inspired film Bohemian Rhapsody film was poorly rated by critics, yet became a big box office hit. Earlier this year, the same thing happened to Hugh Jackman’s The Greatest Show musical film about the life of PT Barnum. Why are critics so out of touch with what real people like? And why do we love the movies that “experts” (who presumably understand film) rate so badly?
As this article suggests, “one thing many critic-proof hits have in common is brand recognition. You know what you...
November 1, 2018
How To Cure Your Social Media Addiction
This was a week filled with more social media stupidity than usual. In a single day I read two disturbing stories that got me thinking about the dangers of our social media addiction.
In one, an excited baseball fan posted a picture of his World Series ticket (with the bar code visible) only to an observant thief take the bar code off his post and use it to steal his ticket and get into the game instead. In another, a couple fell to their deaths off a cliff in Yosemite National Park while try...
October 26, 2018
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 too fixated on Trump dutifully reporting stories that stoke the exact outrage that benefits only him. Yet a big part of what I teach in my talks and workshops is the need for being more open minded...
October 17, 2018
Amy Winehouse And How Dead Artists Might Come Back On Tour As Holograms
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 singers and lots of special effects. In a world where thousands of people are already paying to see concerts of a completely fabricated digital personality, it’s not a leap to think they migh...
October 15, 2018
Do Fantasy Sports Dehumanize Athletes And Make Us Worse People?
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 fair complaint. Back in the time of the gladiators, when people saw those competitors as less than human — it wasn’t long before they started seein...
October 8, 2018
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 to make sense of it all.
Yet this week there were also stories of a tool developed at MIT that can help automatically erase anyone or anything from a photo and Dropbox introdu...
October 3, 2018
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 event, there was a combination of fascinating performances from a rapper about consciousness, a virtual baby simulator, a futuristic Irish dancing troupe, and all sorts of other artists d...
