It’s easy to poke fun at scientists studying the effects of burying underwear. Or the team exploring the nutrition density of cockroach milk. The Ig Nobel awards are known as the “silliest awards in science” where researchers are chosen for ridicule based on their obscure or seemingly ill-advised research quests. Taunting venomous snakes to study why they bite or asking why bedsheets get wrinkled isn’t for everyone. Though these sorts of questions may not seem useful, there is an underlying truth about what these awards expose year after year that I find intriguing.

There are people who ask questions that others don’t. Some, like Dr. William B. Bean (yes, real name), famously tracked the growth rate of his own fingernails for 35 years. His conclusion? Human nail growth rates slow down over time and middle fingernails grow faster than the others. Will this knowledge change your life? Perhaps not, but there may be an unexpected upside:

While, on the surface, the Ig Nobels might seem like a silly, good time, there is a point to the zaniness: the awards’ twofold purpose is to make people laugh and then think. Scientific advancements don’t proceed in linear fashion; they usually zig and zag before reaching any point of significance for everyday people’s lives. Take, for instance, research honored in 2012 in which scientists used a functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) machine to find dubious signs of “brain activity” in a stone-dead Atlantic salmon. That seemingly laughable result ultimately led neuroscientists to rethink how they analyze their data.

Along with the fun and quirkiness, the awards also show that listening to people who are bold enough to ask and study the questions that others never think to ask might also offer an underappreciated roadmap to innovation too.

There’s a new Ali G movie coming, and not everyone is happy about it. For those who are unfamiliar with the character that launched actor Sacha Baron Cohen’s career; Ali G was a satirical portrayal of “a dim-witted white man imitating urban British hip-hop and Jamaican culture.” His character routinely played up stereotypes about other cultures, insulted people and offered a “faux rude boy” persona that amassed him lots of fans. Other comedians too have portrayed satirical versions of stereotypical characters like Stephen Colbert with his right-wing pundit portrayal or Paul Sun-Hyung Lee’s brilliantly stubborn Korean patriarch “Appa” in Kim’s Convenience. The question they all seem to pose is one that has become more central to humor itself: what topics are acceptable to satirize and who should do it? Should Cohen’s portrayal of Ali G be treated one way because he is portraying a different race versus Lee’s Appa because he is ethnically Korean? Or should being funny be the only test, and if they can deliver humor then all else is ok? These are the sorts of questions that some people spend a lot of time thinking about while others never do. Maybe you’re somewhere in between. If the question strikes a chord for you, I’d love to hear what you think about it. Let me know and share a comment with me by email.

A little over a hundred years ago, the iconic American Route 66 was first commissioned with the big idea of stretching a national highway from Chicago to LA. Since then, it’s been a part of American history and continually featured in movies, books and art. The moniker “Main Street of America” had, in fact, been applied to other highways before, so the marketing idea wasn’t entirely original. But to stretch it across 2,400 miles, from Chicago to Los Angeles, was to attempt something more ambitious: a nationalization of America’s most idealized civic space.

It has also inspired some fascinating cultural stories like one this week about the complicated relationship some Native American communities have with the road. The easy money method of capitalizing on stereotypical depictions like feathers surrounding a street sign are exactly the sort of thing that some shop owners are staying away from. Instead, they are using their spaces to say something more authentic:

Now, tribal governments and tourism groups are using the centennial to tell another story: Native nations as founders of towns, owners of land, and as sovereign governments, while directing travelers toward tribal museums and Native-owned businesses. This is reclamation, but also commerce. Gail Chehak, a Klamath citizen and the community relations director of the American Indigenous Tourism Association says Native nations are using the centennial “to remind people, you know, we were here long before the route, and the route follows a lot of our traditional trails, and that we’re still here.” Many tribe members have “both fond and not-so-fond memories” of the road. It crossed Native land and helped market a generic Hollywood Indian. But it also connected Native communities, carried families along the Powwow Trail, and opened new markets for Native artists, she says.

As we head towards a long weekend here in the US, this is a reminder that we all have a traveler’s choice of whether to accept the mass-produced tourism version of the world that we encounter, or to go further. The idea is also at the heart of The Unwondering Project. Among the collection of spaces are some top Native American destinations along Route 66 that you can see here.

One of the consequences of AI content generation tools combined with a push from recruiting platforms to make it easier for applicants to put in their resume for a job is that the market is getting flooded. Several years ago, a posting might have attracted 100 or so applicants if they were lucky. Now it can number in the thousands:

“A year ago, every recruiter would tell me: We want to make it as easy as possible to apply for jobs,” offering candidates a “seamless experience,” Ophir Samson, the head of voice AI for Greenhouse, tells WIRED. Samson joined the recruiting platform earlier this year, when it acquired his startup, which used AI to conduct job interviews. “What they got was 2,000 applicants in 24 hours for a job. That is a shitty experience for everyone.” Good applicants can’t stand out, while bad candidates slip through the cracks.

The growing conclusion from hiring professionals and job seekers alike is that the process of searching for a job is fundamentally broken. The solution seems obvious: add more friction into the process. So how can anyone recruiting for a new position do this? One solution is to use job listing boards created by people within an industry. For example, Mandy Hofmockel is a journalist who created a postings board and Substack for journalism jobs. It is the sort of resource that is passed from one person to another by word of mouth - and therefore unlikely to be a target for bot farms or for mass submissions of resumes. I’ll be on the lookout for other solutions to this challenge and if you can suggest any, let me know.

If you work in any sort of role that requires creative thinking, chances are you have already started to use AI as a brainstorming partner. Whether you consider it a guilty indulgence or a necessary productivity hack, there is some emerging science that this may actually be one of the most common and powerful ways to use AI tools to challenge your thinking and take it in new directions:

Artificial intelligence can develop solutions that humans would be unlikely to discover on their own. But what happens when machines do more than solve individual problems and actually discover entirely new solution strategies? And can such discoveries become part of human knowledge? If machine discoveries are comprehensible, they can empower people to develop new skills, preserve them over time, and expand our cultural repertoire.

The study not only looked at whether AI could provide these sorts of “novel solutions,” but more importantly it considered what would need to happen in order for those solutions to become part of shared human knowledge instead of just a situation where AI does the work on our behalf but we never really increase our own capability as a result. The key, it seems, is that the output needs to be “comprehensible.” In other words, if we don’t understand what AI has done or what it suggested, then we risk becoming overly reliant on it. It’s hard to imagine a more critical lesson about AI usage that we should all remember and also integrate into every classroom or workplace situation. It’s not enough to use AI to come up with the right answer. We have to continually have the discipline and curiosity to ask the question of how it did that and understand the thinking behind the answer. AI doesn’t have to make us dumber, but we have to remember to ask the right questions instead just asking detailed questions and blindly copying and pasting the answers.

The Concours d’Elegance is a car show that has been happening every August in California since 1950. Owners and enthusiasts alike gather to share their love of mostly vintage cars and the joy of driving. There’s a less talked about feature of the show, though, that has been attracting some growing attention: the Concours d’Lemons which celebrates the “un-best of the automotive world.”

From disastrously vandalized old cars to models that were probably a bad idea to build in the first place, the show within the show offers a fun and unique way to appreciate the history of the automotive industry that many would rather forget. It also offers a brilliant marketing hook for a car show that otherwise might only appeal to a smaller group of enthusiasts. This quirky corner of the experience is for everyone else, and offers a perfect reminder that sometimes the best way to add to an experience might be to offer exactly the opposite of what people came there for as a sideshow attraction.

Usually most of us would describe our values as a combination of what we have learned from our families and what we have built from our own experiences. What we don’t usually appreciate is just how much the legality of some things might affect how we see them. A new study published in the Journal of Experimental Social Psychology focused on this intersection and offered these insights:

Participants read ten scenarios describing morally relevant behaviors carried out in fictitious countries, such as burning a national flag, using a racial slur, hunting deer, or abandoning a shopping cart, among others. Depending on the experiment and condition, the same behaviors were described as illegal or “not illegal.” Participants rated identical actions as more morally wrong when they were described as illegal rather than not illegal, and they also evaluated the people performing those actions as less moral. Taken together, our findings suggest that laws may do more than regulate behavior or reflect existing moral values: legal status itself can become part of the information people use to decide what is morally right or wrong and how they evaluate the people involved.

The findings offer an interesting explanation for the diverging way that some people see similar actions and judge them as more or less moral. For example, for years it was not illegal to create social media platforms that were proven to be addictive. Then countries started banning social media for teens and the recent landmark settlement from Meta agreeing to pay up to $16.7B to settle its social media harms case illustrates the shift. In a relatively short period of time, something that was long considered a personal choice (how long to use social media for) has now become legislated and forced a huge change in public perception AND policy from Meta. Perhaps more significant than the financial settlement itself are the anticipated platform changes that may result from the case:

Pending judicial approval, teens on Instagram and Facebook will have a two-hour time limit by default across both platforms; they’ll need parental approval to turn it off. Parents will also have more control over how teens interact with Instagram and Facebook. They can set the default experience to a chronological feed rather than algorithmic and can similarly turn off autoplay by default. Similarly, Meta won’t display the number of likes and reactions on posts by default for teen users.

Taken together, these stories show the powerful connection between laws and perception ... and demonstrate that one of the most effective ways to change our cultural norms around what is considered wrong or right might be to pass some laws quantifying it.

In Northern Italy, one of the world’s most unique banks is accepting wheels of cheese as collateral. Credem Bank has been in operation for more than 100 years and in that time, they have taken wheels of the world-famous Parmigiano Reggiano cheese and stored it for farmers in exchange for giving them money earlier to cover their expenses. It’s just one of many unique banking systems around the world. As the CNN article about this system notes, the reason the system works is simple: cheese gets more valuable over time. It’s the same reason why it may not work for other emerging sectors:

The value of collateral is actually one of the biggest questions in finance right now. Increasingly, GPUs, the chips that are the backbone of AI processing, are being used as collateral for enormous amounts of debt. But it’s not clear that GPUs hold their value because when technology improves, the older versions typically are worth less.

The questions I started thinking about, inspired by this cheese wheel bank, were about the nature of what is considered collateral now and what could be in the future. This is particularly interesting when you consider how the debate may apply to the value of our own likeness. In China, groups of normal people (not celebrities) are already experimenting with licensing their own likeness. Hollywood is getting more aggressive about resurrecting dead personalities to put their faces or voices back on screen. The more value we assign to ourselves, the more those selves could become just as unique a form of collateral as wheels of cheese.

India drinks almost 80% of the tea it grows. But this obsession was manufactured. Locals ignored tea for years until free cups at train stations created the craving. Expensive leaves pushed vendors to add milk and spices, and that's how masala chai happened. One tip for your trip: it's chai, never chai tea, since that means tea tea. #Chai #India #Tea #TravelVibes #FoodHistory

Most people walk around ancient forts to see them. At Mehrangarh Fort, you launch from one. A secret tunnel leads to a battlement, and then you're flying over the fort itself. Six lines cross 1.2km, with the longest, the Magnificent Marwar, dropping 300 meters over twin lakes. Jodhpur's blue city and the fort's massive walls shrink beneath you. The whole thing feels less like an adventure course and more like you've been invited into something ancient. Would you go? #MehrangarhFort #JodhpurTrav

I’ll start this story with some good news: the wearable AI grandfather isn’t a real product. Two NY comedians, Harris Alterman and Dave Ross, created a series of fake ads for AI companies and products that don’t actually exist and recorded a video of themselves posting these ads in NY Subway locations. Though they took them down right after recording the videos, the plausible ridiculousness of many got people commenting and sharing. Among their best:

Grandfather - The world’s first wearable AI grandfather.
Cutlery.ai - What if forks were spoons?
Wireflow - You pay us, we pay you.
Thoughts.com - Thinking just got a big upgrade.

Life seems to have blown way past imitating art these days and veering consistently toward imitating satire. Some real stories, like a sitting President trying to sell early access to his social media posts for $100k before they move financial markets, feel like they could be the punchlines to jokes only to turn out to be true.

So jokes like these posters are fun to watch, but also come with a potential downside. What if some future tech entrepreneur takes the ad as inspiration to create the exact thing the ad was meant to critique? The most famous example from more than 100 years ago was the story of inventor Elizabeth Magie, who originally created the game that inspired Monopoly as a way to warn the world against the problems of wealth inequality and monopolies. Then decades later the game was purchased and reinvented into a celebration of capitalism with the objective becoming to create your own monopoly. The pattern is one we will probably see repeating more often as the cautions shared through pranks like these posters end up becoming inspiration for myopic founders who only see the positive potential of their inventions ... and none of the likely disasters. On second thought, maybe we do need some of those AI startups those two comedians invented. Some people’s thinking could indeed use an upgrade.

As we head into the back-to-school season, one of the big stories you’ll see plenty of coverage about is how many school systems are reacting to the rise of AI and growing awareness of the adverse mental health effects of social media by either banning phones in schools, banning AI, or both. Getting less attention, though, is the huge role AI is likely to take in teachers’ lives as well.

From immediately being able to generate lesson plans to creating visuals more simply, the temptation to turn to AI for all sorts of teaching materials is going to be impossible to resist. Along the way, there will of course be embarrassing missteps. Teachers, like their students, will be figuring out the right and wrong ways to use AI in their classrooms and in their preparation for lessons too.

As they do, it’s going to now be up to parents to help fill the gap and make sure that the materials kids are bringing home are not literally AI slop that was mistakenly generated by a well-intentioned teacher just trying to create materials more easily. The only thing I might suggest here (and will try to do myself) is to offer some understanding if and when it does happen. Not every moment of accidental slop was ill intentioned or complete laziness. Perhaps more often, it’s an overworked and under-resourced teacher just trying their best to help kids learn. If anyone deserves a little empathy, it’s surely teachers who are sometimes quite literally community heroes.

There's no tier on any platform that removes ads completely. Premium flyers still get credit card pitches. Netflix did the opposite and made it simple. Pay less, see ads, pay more, see none. People stop resenting ads once they understand the trade. #Netflix #CustomerTrust #Marketing #Business #NonObvious

There are people whose life's work is making sure the past doesn't vanish, and most of us will never hear their story. Custodians of Wonder by Eliot Stein is about them. He traveled the world to find the lost practitioners of dying traditions and documented them before they disappear. What I love is that it reframes innovation. If you care about culture, creativity, or just want to feel something real, would you read this? #BookRecommendation #Culture #Craftsmanship #CustodiansOfWonder #Reading

Would you pay more for less? Or consider something indulgent because of what it leaves out of its experience? When we have so many options for the latest products that “do it all” for us, one of the counter trends we have been tracking for years is the wholehearted embrace of the less automated, less comfortable and sometimes less useful. From this week’s story about the messaging app that delivers messages literally at the speed of an actual carrier pigeon – to the latest version of the popular Light phone, these are all examples of a phenomenon we call nopium.

In urban planning, the idea of the “desired path” is the one that people will take and often create for themselves, which differs from the one that was planned for them. It’s a useful analogy to describe lots of other moments from human history too, if you consider how often humans have implemented solutions to problems that quickly backfired. Introducing one invasive species to control the problem of another rarely turns out well, for example. No matter how often we see it, someone always seems to be coming up with another dumb solution just around the next corner.

Last week’s immediately backfiring idea comes from Anthropic’s announcement, in response to new EU regulation requiring content be flagged as having been created with AI, that they have added watermarking for images and for text to indicate that it was created by AI. This means that not only will images be tagged as having been generated (which is mostly a good thing), but any text created or edited by Claude in any way will also carry the same watermark, regardless of who first created it. So if you write a piece of work and run it through AI tools at the end of a proofread or grammar check or some other type of editing, the watermark will show up and tag the text as AI generated.

“Once again, regulators have forced a solution that creates far more problems than it can ever solve. It will flag the innocent and miss the determined. Worse, it hands institutions a probabilistic signal they will treat as proof. From now on, the text and images you generate or simply pass through Claude will carry an invisible watermark. Anthropic says detection tools are “forthcoming.” That’ll be when the fun really starts. We might as well just call this “False Positives for Everyone.”

Now the next race is on to find tools that allow users to bypass these protections, and perhaps there will be a surge in hiring typists off Fiverr to take AI-edited work and retype it without the watermarks. Regardless, the point is we’re now in the technology era of dumb solutions – and those won’t be so easy to just walk around.

Online dating, in one way or another, has always been about swiping right or left. You go through lots of profiles, choose some that seem appealing and then try to make a connection from there. Like a lot of other networking, it feels like a numbers game. You have to go on a certain number of dates or swipe right on the right number of profiles before you find the one … or at least one that you like enough to spend time with. Ditto has a different approach, using algorithmic scarcity as a differentiator.

“It comes with the person, it comes with a time, it comes with a location, and the users simply just need to show up and date each other and come back. We’ll collect more feedback about the date, and then improve our understanding of the user, and send them to a better next date,” Wang said. “Right now, people’s goal is really just to go out there and meet each other, so it’s actually removing a lot of friction for our users, so that we are doing the heavy lifting for them, and they just simply go there and then meet whoever.”

Like most platforms, the founder believes in the power of the algorithm to predict chemistry between two people. What’s more interesting about the platform, though, is how much friction it removes from the process of meeting up altogether. They pick the person, the time, the day, and the location. You just show up. The ease of use combined with some pretty creative marketing (like their search for a Chief Yacht Officer to throw parties for them), is already getting some attention. If it works, we may see more apps and tools that also tailor their offerings to this sort of narrow casting where you’re not left with search results or a list of recommendations but rather a single option as your choice – take it or leave it.

This month, one of the free channels rolled out on Roku (which comes pre-loaded on all new Smart TVs) promises to offer a 24/7 feed of AI generated content The launch generated plenty of the sort of criticism you would expect from journalists and reviewers alike:

“It sounds more like a concept for a sci-fi torture device than it does a source of genuine entertainment, but it is, unfortunately, real. In one clip that gives an idea of the bottom-of-the-barrel slop that it’s force-feeding viewers.”

“If there is a plot, it’s masterfully hidden underneath the bizarre way it cuts to different scenes, not to mention dialog that’s delivered with the cadence and awkward pauses of a mid-2000s video game cutscene. No one blinks when they talk.”

“Finally, AI can unleash the creative potential of people who can’t write, don’t understand pacing or transitions, are unfamiliar with human facial expressions, etc,” one observer joked.

Here’s what no one was saying: even with its flaws, there are early signs that this could be a brilliant idea. The pitch for creators from channel creator Fairground AI promises AI filmmakers “the biggest stage you’ve never had” by uploading their content and there is apparently some sort of curation to decide what gets aired. Unfortunately, most of the content is made up of AI-generated micro-dramas like Liminal Land that veer into the uncanny valley of AI slop with no real plot and noticeably robotic “acting.”

In contrast, the best content on the platform is from masterful creators who use AI to make entirely new forms of art, like the work of Kelly Boesch. Her surreal visionary videos and original songs are addicting and unlike anything else you’ll find on TV. This channel could have had more of that. Their mission could have been dedicated to finding and showcasing new forms of art and storytelling. If they had done that, this channel could have offered something you really can’t get anywhere else. In other words, a 24/7 stream of AI generated content doesn’t have to suck … but it will if you choose to mostly fill it with things created by untalented people trying to use AI to do things people are still better at doing themselves.

Every week my inbox fills with book ideas, startup demos, and mentoring requests. Since I can't address them all, I used to think that meant just ignoring them. That changed the moment I realized that the person reaching out isn't always chasing just a yes. They also want to know someone heard them. A short reply, a little encouragement, a rejection with kindness. You can't always do it, but when you do it's a short time commitment for you but perhaps deeply meaningful for someone else. #Leade

You think you know Coca-Cola until you come here. In Atlanta they've mapped out every element of how their drinks are made and hint at the mystical stuff rumored to be in the secret formula. Vintage ads, rare memorabilia, and flavors from around the world you can't buy anywhere else. Some taste amazing, some not so much. Comment "Coke" if you'd try the global flavors. #WorldOfCocaCola #Atlanta #Travel #HiddenGems #Georgia

Do you know what the 57 on every Heinz bottle stands for? Nothing at all. The founder saw a shoe store advertising 21 styles, liked the idea of a number, and made one up from his lucky five and his wife's favorite seven. The non-obvious lesson is that it doesn't matter the number was invented. Heinz committed so completely it became real. What would you commit to? #Marketing #Branding #Heinz #BusinessLessons

An article in Fortune magazine this week points to the rise in "conspicuous waiting" as the new status symbol as people proudly share images of themselves in line queued up for some sort of experience that is presumably worth the wait. The term comes from the work of economist Thorstein Veblen who we also referenced in Future Words as part of our coinage notes for the term Effortlux:

Effort + luxe. More than a century ago, Thorstein Veblen argued that the wealthy display status through “conspicuous abstention from labour” in The Theory of the Leisure Class (1899). The embrace of non-work used to be the luxury, but now that labor is increasingly automated, the struggle and effort become a status-making, symbolic choice.

Our word was inspired by seeing more examples people choosing to do things the "hard way" like making their own sourdough bread or choosing to add more friction and authenticity back into their travel. Now it seems that the wait itself can also be a signal of this same willingness to spend "unnecessary" time on something as a way to indicate a devotion and embrace of the experience itself.

I speak Spanish averagely well. Yet I would rank the four years I spent "learning" the language as one of the bigger wastes of time in my education. The moment I really learned the language was when I started spending time with Spanish speakers, traveling and conversing in Spanish out loud. Modern language learning courses and apps focus on this type of experiential learning above anything else, based on the insight that the absolute best way to truly learn a language is to speak it out loud. In school I remember learning verb conjugations and taking fill-in-the-blank quizzes about the exceptions to the rule.

This week Pew Research released a study about how American's generally rank the importance of children learning a foreign language in school. Those who agreed it was important were concluded to have a more global perspective. I'm not sure how I would have responded if I had participated. I believe learning a foreign language is important and eye opening for anyone (especially children). But if I had to vote for teaching it to them the way I learned it, I'm not sure I would support that. There are millions of children who complete four years of language learning and can barely converse in that language.

Focusing language learning on grammar is like teaching someone to cook by having them spend hours only chopping vegetables. If you learned a foreign language (in school or afterwards), what do you think?

As the popularity of so-called dumbphones has surged, the use case was pretty simple. It was a phone for anyone who wanted to avoid social media and excessive scrolling or for the extremely tech-averse and elderly who wanted to avoid too much complexity. Nokia's latest dumbphones are changing that calculation with a notable inclusion: a big "AI" button right in the center of the phone. What seems like a contradiction might actually be a sign of what we can all expect in phones of the future.

The question it raises is a fundamental one: how much of what your phone currently shows you visually do you really need to look at? Maps? If AI can track your location and instruct you on making each upcoming turn, you probably don't need that. Email? Probably the same thing if you could get used to dictation. It definitely requires a learning curve and not everyone would want that. The idea of Zero UI, where an interface becomes unnecessary because of how intuitive something works, has been growing over the past decade. This phone is one of the most pronounced signs that we may be getting closer.

After the Trump administration shut down the official government source of weather data at Climate.gov last year, a group of scientists promised to save years of data and make it available again. This past week, Climate.us launched to fulfill that promise. The site presents much of the data that was previously available publicly before being taken down. Their mission is to present independent climate data that is "immune to politics." The fact that this even needs to exist is in itself a scientific tragedy, but the relaunch is a great story of hope.

Among the specific resources they include are climate literacy guides, event trackers, maps and data that show the shifts over time. No matter what silencing forces come to try and hide or obscure data, we will need more scientific bravery like this to keep bringing this kind of information back. There's no way we can anticipate and prepare for the future if we don't have any way to measure and share what's happening among scientists and the rest of us too.