Morgan Housel: “I have a theory about nostalgia: It happens because the best survival strategy in an uncertain world is to overworry. When you look back, you forget about all the things you worried about that never came true. So life appears better in the past because in hindsight there wasn’t as much to worry about as you were actually worrying about at the time.”
David Deming: “Unlike simple laptop or internet access, AI enables personalized learning at scale. With traditional web search the inputs are personalized, but the outputs are not. You can type anything you want into a Google search bar, and it will give you a ranked list of webpages containing the information you are seeking. The list depends on your exact query, but the webpages you click through to see look the same to you as they do to everyone else. With generative AI, both the inputs and the outputs are fully personalized. Every time you ask ChatGPT a question, you get a unique response that reflects your conversation history and what the chatbot knows about you. The personalization is what makes AI feel like magic. And yet personalization also creates temptation. Generative AI tools are so flexible, you can ask them anything, and they’ll never tell you to stop messing around and get back to work.”
Adam Kelly: If you look at the bigger picture, I think we’re in a golden age for sport. Through 2025, and in the couple of years before that too, we’ve consistently seen audience records broken: the Euros, the Olympics, NFL games and big boxing. That’s a great context for looking across the industry. We’re seeing metrics, across multiple markets, hit new highs. When I think about what that means for the media landscape, I try to step back and ask what the real driver is. Sport has this unique ability to tap into the highest-value part of the attention economy, and also into the experience economy, with the same core product. Nothing else really does that. It drives additional value through scarcity, but the underlying factors are deeper: it taps into community and passion, and it requires an extra commitment from audiences to make a positive decision to engage, to make that appointment to view. That’s why sport is delivering, and why we’re seeing platforms across the industry competing to play a part in it, competing to gather attention they can convert.”
NYTimes: “Do an attention audit. In general, people underestimate how much they use their phones and how often their minds wander, Dr. Smilek said. But spotting these little detours can blunt their impact and make them easier to defend against, he added. Next time you start a task, keep a tally of every time your attention slips, whether your mind is wandering or there’s an external distraction — including what exactly distracted you. Also try mapping out your attentional rhythm — the natural peaks and valleys of focus — by checking in with yourself every hour and reflecting on how well you have been focusing, suggested Gloria Mark, a professor of informatics at the University of California, Irvine.”
