One evening, Leah Busque realised she had run out of dog food and was worried all the shops would be closed. “We were certain that there was someone in our own neighbourhood that would be willing to help us out, and it was just a matter of connecting with them.” A few months later, she created TaskRabbit.
All Threads
How do you add £1 billion to the UK economy? Ask Taylor Swift to perform live. The UK leg of her 2024 Eras tour was attended by 1.2 million people, leading to a huge spike in spending on accommodation, food, transportation and entertainment.
Team sky
When a journalist watched the world’s best at Wimbledon, he noticed the differences in their warm ups. Nadal was aggressive, sprinting up and down like a man possessed. Djokovic was calm, measured and scientific with every shot. And when Federer warmed up, he was giggling, doing trick shots and exploring his own creativity. There is no right way of doing it – each style worked for the individual.
It conjures imagery of macho men, road rage, and violence, but there is no direct link between the hormone and aggression. Instead, testosterone causes us to seek social status. This is why studies find a link between testosterone and pro-social behaviour, like generosity.
If you ask consumers, there is almost nothing they apparently won’t pay more for. But in reality many of these add ons don’t change behaviour. Tip: don’t use a simple yes / no format in surveys. Instead ask consumers to trade off an offer versus something else.
It set out to destroy newspapers. “We will wait every local paper out and let them continuously bleed until we are the last ones standing,” said founder Alex Mather in 2017. Then, in 2022, it became one. The New York Times acquired it, promising unparalled reach and greater user retention.
In the bestselling thriller, an assassin uses the birth certificates of dead babies to obtain fake passports. Unfortunately for the authorities, this publicised a genuine loophole in the system – the Identity and Passport Service (IPS) uncovered 1,200 cases involving the use of dead people’s identities, and it was only in 2012 (35 years after the book was released) that the loophole was closed.
In one of the film’s most iconic scenes, Don Corleone scolds a man for visiting him on the day of his daughter’s wedding – while petting a cat. Was the cat a metaphor for Vito’s cunning nature, or perhaps his soft and calm exterior that bellies his brutal acts? Neither. According to director Francis Ford Coppola, “the cat was not planned for, I saw the cat running around the studio, and took it and put it in his hands without a word.”
The newspaper recently released a new way of showing content popularity: the articles people are spending the most time with. A nice way of demonstrating quality, and an antidote to clickbait headlines.
The Holocaust – perhaps the ultimate symbol of human evil – wouldn’t have been possible without a highly advanced railway system (Reichsbahn). At its peak, 1.6 million workers were employed to develop the network – the main transportation to concentration camps. One historian called the Reichsbahn “the largest enterprise in the capitalist world between 1920 and 1945.”
It’s certainly a societal issue, but it’s not getting worse. Research from Brunel University has shown that the proportion of people experiencing chronic loneliness has remained steady for 70 years, with 6-13% saying they feel lonely all or most of the time. Yes, it’s true that more people are living alone around the world, but loneliness and aloneness are not the same – the most restful activities, like reading and listening to music, are all done alone.
TikTok is more than a video platform – it’s a place for discovery. An Adobe report suggests that 40% of consumers use it as a search engine: looking for new recipes, fashion advice, workout routines and much more. For brands, TikTok is becoming a vital battleground for promoting their products.
TikTok has started to upload full episodes of TV shows. The pilot of Killing it, a new comedy show, racked up 4.5M views in 3 days. Is this TV in disguise?
The author of five #1 New York Times bestsellers says this about writing: “I started out basically imagining I was writing for a stadium full of replicas of myself—which made things easy because I already knew exactly what topics interested them, what writing style they liked, what their sense of humor was.” In short, focus on what you want to read, not what you think others will want to read.