This week, it’s books galore. Three books have been published this week that are worth your attention. First: Future Words. I know Rohit Bhargava from my visits to SXSW over the years, where he’s given keynotes to packed halls, and this week his new book with Henry Coutinho-Mason, Future Words, is available to buy. Future Words is a book for ‘word lovers, trend spotters and anyone who has ever wished for a word that didn’t quite exist’. Some of my favourite words in it are ‘veritax’, ‘sofari’, and ‘anonyphilia’. You’ll have to buy the book to find ouwhat they mean, though some are available on the book’s website if you play around!

Second, someone I also met at SXSW, Henna Pryor’s new book The Signal Gap: How To Boost Believability and Influence In The Age of Doubt is also out now. It talks about how you can learn how to make people trust what you say.

Finally, I attended an event last week where Naureen Mohammed, ex-Meta, Pinterest, Unilever and Johnson & Johnson spoke about how in the age of AI, ‘being found is not the same as being chosen’. Her book The Invisible Buyer also launched this week. It is based on her own research programme, the AI Choice Audit: “6,000 data points on how AI assistants recommend brands across UK consumer categories, gathered month by month. The same pattern turns up in category after category: a household name makes the shortlist constantly and is never the pick.”

On another note, this week is Living Wage Week. Storythings is proud to be a Living Wage-accredited employer, and we’re glad to be part of something that is good for business, individuals and society as a whole.

💻 DATA POINT: Mather Economics released The Price of Intelligence, an independent analysis of the economics of collective content licensing for AI. The potential for revenue for publishers is 15% to 35% of AI company revenue, which could dwarf display advertising revenue in time. The Internet Licensing Collective (ILC), a non-profit, is using this model, and Yahoo is their first licensee. The ILC also worked with Mather Economics to provide data for their research.

100 Unanswered Questions About Ourselves, Our World, And Our Universe (list of questions)

UK By Numbers (data-based website)

A Media History Of The Infinite Feed (15-min read)

AGI Is Coming To Kill Or Save Us All (online comic)

Ian Edgar On Hits & Appeal (52-min listen or 40-min read)

How The Phone Book Taught America To Ask For Answers (15-min read and collection of photos)

Living With A Visionary (15-min watch)

Are.na & Dinamo Partner To Create New Arial-Inspired Font: Areal (5-min read)

Tennis: Six Finger Punch (crazy online game)

📣 Russ Somers Crushes On Guitars (25-min listen) 📣

100 Unanswered Questions About Ourselves, Our World, And Our Universe (list of questions)
I haven’t seen a list based on just questions in a long time, so when Matt shared this I was immediately curious. There are plenty of questions here to which some of the smartest people in the world have no answers - which one is your favourite?

UK By Numbers (data-based website)
Hannah Ritchie, Deputy Editor at Our World in Data, created this independent project that helps us understand the issues that matter in the UK. It’s based on data from official sources, including the Office for National Statistics and the Home Office, and will be added to over time. Well worth clicking around.

A Media History Of The Infinite Feed (15-min read)
Via friend of Storythings Steve Bryant, this long read about how the much-maligned Infinite Feed came into being and has evolved over time. It goes all the way back to the genesis of the World Wide Web, and traces the design and use of the infinite feed by platforms like Facebook and Twitter, noting how it became such a large part of several political movements across the world.

AGI Is Coming To Kill Or Save Us All (online comic)
Emily from the Storythings team shared this with us, and for all the talk of AI, this comic by graphic designer Gillian Levine is a good reminder that we’re living in an AI bubble at the moment, and it will burst at some point, though the size of the bubble and the burst is yet to be determined. I’m no AI sceptic but I still found it amusing to read.

Ian Edgar On Hits & Appeal (52-min listen or 40-min read)
A truly interesting interview with friend of Storythings Ian Edgar, who used to work for Condé Nast, and now consults with leading brands on how to make appealing media. It’s a long listen but worth your time, as Ian traces his life from his time in London to his current life in New York, speaking about the ingredients of hit videos and why YouTube is winning. He even references our own Matt Locke’s Attention Matters series on creative friction while speaking about how good friction can lead to making really good work. If you are a creative, or interested in art and media in any way, listening to this interview is a great use of your time.

How The Phone Book Taught America To Ask For Answers (15-min read and collection of photos)
From JSTOR, the online library/archive, a look at a collection of phone books from Southwestern University in Texas - ‘eighteen volumes spanning 1913 to 1959—charts the evolution of the phone book in fine print and shows how it helped shape a vision of something new: networks people could not merely connect to, but could also ask things of.’ It’ll make you think about the relationship we as a society have with information, how communication now is more text-led, and yet how phones - and people - can do so much if you know whom to ask.

Living With A Visionary (15-min watch)
One of the most beautiful, if heartbreaking, animated documentaries I’ve seen. It is based on a memoir by John Matthias, and chronicles his experience caring for his wife of 50 years - Diana, an art curator grappling with Parkinson’s. You may need a tissue.

Are.na & Dinamo Partner To Create New Arial-Inspired Font: Areal (5-min read)
This is a conversation between the founder of Are.na, a company that creates online software to organise content, and the founder of design type studio Dinamo. The two got together to create an update to the much-used Arial font (that all of us have on our computers) - it’s called Areal. This is the story of Areal’s genesis. Also interesting that the font was launched at a party in New York where people could mass-download it through NFC chips, and they got 10k downloads. Didn’t think those things still had a use, but there you go!

Tennis: Six Finger Punch (crazy online game)
Matt shared this and it is 🤯🤯🤯. Please note: do not click if you are photo-sensitive or prone to epilepsy. This is a truly mental game made by Fable 5.2 that is tennis/pong-inspired. The prompt was apparently to ‘go wild’ making a game. Objective: achieved. Don’t blame us if you lose the next few minutes!

📣 Russ Somers Crushes On Guitars (25-min listen) 📣
In the latest episode of our podcast Creative Crush, serial B2B CMO Russ Somers waxes lyrical about his love for guitars. He focuses on his three favourite guitars, all of which he owns, amongst many others: a 1978 Fender Coronado XII, a Rickenbacker bass with a remarkable family connection, and a Gibson acoustic made the year his daughter was born. I’m not a guitarist, but found the conversation very enjoyable indeed; music, as Russ says, is as much about discovery as invention.

Gustavo Bernier, CRO of corporate learning platform Good Habitz, shares new research from Anthropic that talks about Cognitive Surrender (‘when we defer the decision and adopt it as our own, without recognising the transfer has happened’). Anthropic gave ‘50 professional analysts a realistic analysis for a fictional business challenge, four judgment calls along the way, and an AI agent to help. What the analysts didn’t know: each agent had been secretly set to argue for one side of each call.’

READ GUSTAVO’S POST TO KNOW THE REST OF THE STORY HERE>>

Drop us a line if you have anything you’d like us to share in a future edition of this newsletter, or of course if you have any comments or suggestions for us!

Have a great weekend!

Matt, Anjali, Hugh, and the team