Deep vs Shallow Connections Read online A few weeks back, the world's best-known YouTuber (MrBeast) wrote a book with one of the world's most successful authors (James Patterson). The book is called "The Most Dangerous Games". It creates a fictionalised version of MrBeast's YouTube videos except with more death, romance, and other topics that publishers hope will keep people reading. I'd have wagered a pretty large bet that this book would succeed. James Patterson has sold 425 million books....

Isolation Effect Read online This viral paper on AI revealed something I've presumed but never had evidence for. AI makes us all sound the same. The authors collected 318,490 stories on Reddit's r/WritingPrompts from January 2018 to November 2024¹. They only analysed posts over 200 words. They measured how unique the posts were over time, and the results are fairly shocking. 2018, 2019, 2020, 2021: All posts contain a unique writing style. 2022, 2023: Writing styles started to converge. 2024:...

Idolising the Individual Read online I've never been to Japan, but I've read that this ⬇️ is commonplace in nearly every Japanese food store. Thanks to Kevin May for sharing It's called kao-no-mieru-kankei, which translates to face-to-face relationship. Walk into most Japanese supermarkets, and the produce section has a local-grower corner with photos of the farmers who harvested the food. I love it. It's great to see the individual who picked your food. And strangely, it probably makes that...