Find a half-remembered link or follow a subject through years of Sunday notes.
7,487 posts
Consider the legacy model of apparel: Months-long design followed by manufacturing to build up inventory, topped off with a markdown cadence at at the end of the cycle. Repeat seasonally. Much about retail apparel has started to change… consider Zara and H&M’s fast fashion success, Rent the Runway…
It’s fairly obvious by now that the food industry is undergoing a radical shift from decades past. Before too long, we’ll see the grocery and restaurant businesses upended. This profile of the leading meal kit company highlights their spectacular growth and the serious operational challenges they’ve faced along…
Daniel Patterson, a famed San Francisco chef restaurateur with 2 Michelin stars, partnered with Roy Choi, the LA “King of Food Trucks”, to try and bring a fast food brand to the under-served neighborhoods of big cities. They started in Watts, a place where the only two sit-down…
“The only Finnish word to make it into everyday English is sauna. But what it is, and how much it means to Finns, is often misunderstood - and it’s definitely not about flirtation or sex.” | learn more
Maybe this fact isn’t so fun, but holy crap! What does a lady have to do to get some respect around here? | lean more
What happens when you let the internet place unlimited pixels on a canvas, but only one every five minutes? Reddit’s april fools joke lasted 3 days, and the result is worth looking at. “Somehow, someway, what happened in Reddit over those 72 hours was the birth of Art.” | learn…
Want to be in the water business? Maybe Chicago isn’t the best place to start. Since we have an abundant supply of water in Lake Michigan, Chicagoans really don’t think twice about using too much. These two projects aren’t letting that slow them down, as they work toward…
Water is essential to our survival, and it covers much of the earth. The only pesky issue is that most of that water is saltwater. Naturally, desalinization is a big deal. Unfortunately it’s still very expensive process, so water scarcity continues to be an issue in much of…
A recent study by researchers at the University of Southern California has found that fasting for three days triggers your body to regenerate immune systems cells. “Prolonged fasting forces the body to use stores of glucose and fat but also breaks down a significant portion of white blood…
Jeff Bezos’s letter to shareholders puts a spotlight on his famous “It’s Day 1 for the Internet” philosophy, and lays out a framework for how he intends to keep Amazon from falling into Day 2. I especially like his concept of High-Velocity Decision Making and Disagree and Commit. | learn more
DFJ Ventures, foundedin 1985, has been one of the most successful VC firms. Jurvetson, the J in DFJ, sits on the boards of Tesla, SpaceX, Planet, D-Wave, and Synthetic Genomics. He answers questions about self-driving cars, nanotechnology, and other interesting topics. | learn more
You need to read this. In The Oatmeal’s usual (excellent) style, the comic explains the backfire effect - why offering facts that contradict a deeply held belief doesn’t produce the desired result. | learn more
How do you get what you want? Ask. | learn more
How to choose and form the habits you want. | learn more
“Back in 2013, Google’s People Operations Group conducted a rigorous analysis deemed Project Aristotle to identify what underlying factors led to the most effective Google teams.” | learn more
A Chicago Tribune investigation finds more than a dozen disciplinary suspensions that weren’t served because officials lost track of cases. | learn more
Shortly after Marc Lore earned publicity for rapid-fire acquisitions as the head of e-commerce at Wal-Mart, Jeff Bezos declares they’re going to shut down the sites they bought from Lore in 2011 - diapers.com and others. The stated reason is that they couldn’t turn a profit, but execs…
Amazon and Wal-Mart are in a price war in grocery and CPG, with the latter renewing its drive for “Everyday Low Prices” to double down on its successful discount retailing strategy. Amazon’s pricing algorithm is following them down. Brands are nervous. | learn more
Ever wonder what happens to all of the unused and partially used tiny bars of soap at hotels? A nonprofit called Clean the World melts them down to provide soap for impoverished countries. | learn more
“Hot Hand”, “On Fire”, “In The Zone”. In 1985, a group including Amos Tversky (one of the fathers of behavioral economics) published a paper concluding it didn’t exist - it was a myth. After 30 years, Joshua Miller fires back, highlighting flaws in the original research that invalidate…
Monica Jain runs Fish 2.0, described as the “shark tank of sustainable seafood.” She lays out a vision of 10 years in the future where seafood and fish options are more diverse, traceable, and sustainable. | learn more
Thanks to a new study, humans are one step closer to being able to live forever. When cells accumulate too much DNA damage from aging, they can enter a semi-dormant state, becoming senescent cells. Mice treated with a substance that purges these cells saw regrowth of fur, kidney function improvement, and…
Okay maybe not quite yet, but we’ve hit an inflection point in natural language processing (NLP) technology. You can finally call it pretty good. Facebook, Microsoft, and others are now releasing bot frameworks and opening up their messaging platforms to bots. | learn more
About 2 years ago, Jonathan Libov wrote about the state of current innovation in “text” as an interaction medium. He predicted the arrival of chat-based bots early on. “Messaging is the only interface in which the machine communicates with you much the same as the way you communicate…