There’s a phenomenon happening in advertising and marketing. If you’ve been on LinkedIn lately, you’ve experienced it in the endless scroll of bland thought leadership posts. Your inbox is filled with decks and documents that your coworkers and vendors are churning out, expecting you to decipher. The verbose, garishly-designed, and ultimately meaningless content you now have to wade through daily has a name: “enslopification.” It’s a variation on Cory Doctorow’s coined term “enshittification.” He used it to describe the inevitable decay of a digital platform (in his example, TikTok) as it abandons user experience in a relentless pursuit to squeeze…
Author: Staff Writer
How much do you really know about the world right outside your door? A trending tool has the answers, highlighting all there is to see, do, and discover within a 30-minute walk of your location. On Local Wiki, users can input their location—either directly or through a postal code, town, area, or nearby landmark—and see a color-coded map of every Wikipedia article geotagged within 30 minutes on foot. The so-called “encyclopedia for round here” includes everything from local parks to cultural hot spots and even historical events. If it has a Wikipedia entry, it will show up on the map,…
We’ve got two competing realities when it comes to tracking down info online these days: Getting answers has never been easier, between all the artificial intelligence chatbots in front of us and the unavoidable smearing of “AI Overview” answers at the top of regular Google search results. Getting accurate information has never been more challenging—thanks to the fact that all that AI-generated gobbledygook is flat-out wrong a shockingly high amount of the time (anywhere from 10% on the lower end to 50% and up, when it comes to more niche and specialized info). To use some highly technical terminology, that…
If you’re in a public-facing role, you are likely to get caught up in some kind of “hot mic” event in which an offhand remark said in private gets aired publicly. (Indeed, this piece was inspired by the recent experience of a former colleague.) These events are embarrassing, and they almost always end with a standard—and unsatisfying—apology in which the speaker regrets the remarks and says that they did not mean them. There are cases in which a leader really ought to apologize, or even step down, because of private-turned-public comments they make. Racist and sexist remarks undermine a leader’s…
With the midterm elections around the corner, political anxiety is in season—and productivity could pay the price. A new study from researchers at Texas A&M University shows that consuming political news and social media outside of work affects employees’ emotional states and workplace behavior, even if they aren’t discussing politics at the water cooler. Researchers tracked more than 300 workers over nine weeks during the 2024 presidential primary season, asking them to report how often they consumed political information, whether they viewed it as positive or negative, and how engaged, anxious, hopeful, and helpful they felt at work. During weeks…
Below, Seth Godin shares five key insights from his new book, The Knot: Problems Can Be Solved. Seth is a best-selling author, an entrepreneur, and one of the world’s most influential thinkers on marketing, leadership, and creativity. He has written more than 20 books, including The Dip, Purple Cow, and This Is Marketing, and has published thousands of posts on his widely read daily blog. What’s the Big Idea? We often stay stuck because we confuse situations we must accept with problems we can solve, while dragging along old identities, imagined expectations, and sunk costs. Getting unstuck means seeing the problem clearly, deciding what…
As anyone who travels frequently knows, airfare costs around the Thanksgiving and Christmas holidays can be significantly higher than those for the same route at other times of the year. It’s little surprise why: the year-end holiday period sees millions traveling to visit family and friends, creating demand for flights; the more demand, the more airlines can charge. The good news, according to travel experts at Google Flights, is that if you are planning to fly for Thanksgiving or Christmas, you still have a small window of time to get the lowest airfare possible for the winter holiday 2026 period…
For its 2026 After Dark Tour, a nighttime race series of 10Ks and half-marathons for women, Nike designed a multipurpose medal that’s meant to be worn long after race day as a necklace, bracelet, keychain loop, or belt chain. It features a Nike Swoosh and chain adorned with miniature laser-engraved Swooshes that can fit in the palm of your hand. Each comes with a city-specific carabiner for the places where the races take place: London; Shanghai; Los Angeles; Mexico City; Sydney; Manila, Philippines; and Mumbai, India. Most finisher medals end up in a drawer, the thinking goes, but this medal was…
Back in 2022, when the auto industry was fixated on autonomous vehicles, I was cofounder and chief technology officer at Luminar, where our lidar technology was helping enable the next generation of self-driving cars. Speaking at an automotive conference, I remarked how exciting it was to have a front-row seat to one of the most significant technological transformations in the industry’s history. Afterward, an automotive executive pulled me aside. “Jason,” he said, “you don’t have a front-row seat. You’re part of the show. What you’re doing for autonomy, and how you’re forcing us to think, is exactly what’s needed.” That…
Netflix has been pumping out original content for so long and at such an immense scale that it recently released its second original movie entitled War Machine. Although the Brad Pitt-starring first iteration sank like a stone in 2017, the unrelated new War Machine, led by Reacher’s Alan Ritchson, was reportedly a ratings smash, hitting 10th on Netflix’s all-time most-watched movies list, with 140 million views. So far, it’s the platform’s biggest movie this year. If the dearth of online chatter around it is any indication, though, it’s gotten all too easy to have zero interest in or opinions about…