Rohit Bhargava's Blog, page 9

Tattoorism and the Elusive Quest for the Ultimate Souvenir

How do you remember a trip forever? Last year there was a feature story about “the rise of tattoo tourism” and how more Millennials and Gen Zers were planning vacations around visiting famous artists around the world and coming home with the ultimate souvenir. A boutique hotel in NY opened an in-house tattoo parlor and one hotel chain even had a program where they brought celebrity tattoo artists into the hotel so you could have a more exclusive experience and get inked in style and comfort. All...

The Non-Obvious Book of the Week: The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains by Nicholas Carr

It is perhaps odd to describe a book as both timely and urgent when it was first published more than 15 years ago … but that’s the thing that will probably strike you first about The Shallows. The scenarios and human behaviors it describes are chillingly accurate for right now. Deservedly selected as a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize when it first came out, the book was an interesting read for me this week as I turned back to some of the pages because amidst many of the dated references to innov...

The Gardens of the Future Are on Display

Sometimes a garden show is about more than stopping to smell the roses. At the upcoming Chelsea Flower Show, some of the exhibits will help imagine what the future of gardens and open spaces could be. There’s a concept ADHD Garden that features a central reflection pool and “the plant selection has been chosen to provide a subliminal effect on the senses, inducing a sense of calm and rest from an overactive mind.” Another intriguing concept is the Peace of Mind Garden where the plantings are lai...

3 Powerful Talks from TED This Week That Are Already Available Live to Watch

The TED conference took place this past week and some of the talks have already been released. While most of the year the TED social channels repackage and release talks from past events, this is the one moment when you can actually watch talks close to when they were first presented live. Going through the site and watching some of the talks, here were three that stood out as important to watch along with some of my thoughts:

How would a robot butler actually work? In this fascinating li...

Google Uses AI to Reimagine The Wizard of Oz (and Maybe the Future of Hollywood)

This past week, a closed group of attendees at a private Google event got a first look at an ambitious project that has been in the works for nearly a year to digitally remaster the original 1939 footage from the film The Wizard of Oz and somehow make it fit onto the 16k digital screens of The Sphere in Las Vegas. While the show doesn’t officially open to the public until late August, the fascinating backstory of how the team of technologists and artists managed to do it was just shared on Googl...

The Beautiful and Destructive Potential of Using VR on Prisoners in Jail

This week there were a few stories of questionably ethical uses for virtual reality headsets that raised some new questions about how it can and should be used. In one example, a California-based prison used VR on prisoners placed into solitary confinement as part of a general population reentry program, where incarcerated people “visualize scenarios like their first steps outside the prison walls, before working through their emotional and physical response with volunteers.” It is also being te...

The Non-Obvious Book of the Week: The Sibling Effect by Jeffrey Kluger

As part of the celebration for National Siblings Day, I chose to resurface The Sibling Effect this week—a book written several years ago about the impact that birth order and our siblings have on our personalities and trajectory.

Reading this book, you may not agree with some of the theories inside or you may feel a bit uncomfortable at just how accurately they describe your relationships (either past or present) with your own siblings. Regardless, there is plenty of research today about...

“The Last Pot” Exhibit Reimagines Funeral Urns for Milan Design Week

At Milan Design Week (Salone del Mobile,) you might expect to see new designs for chairs or reimagined interior living spaces. A category that rarely receives any design attention from the most elite European design teams is the funeral urn. This year, The Last Post exhibit, a project curated by Alberto Alessi, “explores the funeral urn as a final container — an object surprisingly overlooked by the design world despite its significance.”

As one critic goes on to write, “The Last Pot refl...

How “Chrono-Nutrition” Could Use Metabolism Science to Change When We Eat Anything

If there is an optimal time to eat a particular type of food, then there are suboptimal times to have it too. The problem is, we don’t usually know this sort of detail about the things we consume. Yet scientists already know that “nutrient sequencing”—the act of eating fiber-rich vegetables first during a meal, followed by protein and fats, and then carbohydrates—is becoming a recognized way for people with Type 2 diabetes to better manage their blood-sugar levels. Now there is a startup called ...

The Backstory of How Dubai’s Museum of the Future Was Imagined Is Worth Reading

Thirty percent of the visitors to the Museum of the Future in Dubai have never been to a museum before. That’s just one of the fascinating insights that emerge from this interview VentureBeat did with the museum’s creative director Brendan McGetrick about the inspiration and creation of the immersive experiences that are inside the museum. I was lucky to visit for the first time back in January and even as someone who has been to many museums and spends a lot of time thinking about and talking a...