Dear Newsletterest,

In the process of curating this newsletter every week, I have to make it through a fair share of misinformation from disreputable media sources. When I find one that has recurring poor quality headlines or information, I add it to a personal media blacklist to avoid referencing and make sure to double or triple check any information I see there.

The first story focuses on this idea, along with a poll about whether you have a similar method of blacklisting news sources to avoid. In other stories, you’ll read about an intriguing idea to make award winning advertising ideas open source, why political pollsters are turning to AI that can offer human-sounding opinions and a gallery of award winners from the 12th annual Core 77 design awards. Finally, the first in a new series featuring a new non-obvious book selection every week worth reading.

Enjoy and stay curious!

Rohit

Do We All Need A Media Blacklist?

Back in April, a reporter from the NY Times hiked 50 miles through the Amazon rainforest in order to visit and report on a story about the remote Marubo tribe getting access to the Internet for the first time. The original story published two weeks ago told the story of what happened next in multiple dimensions, from how education shifted to what different generations thought. One element of that story noted that some elders complained about how minors could now easily access pornography (a concern shared by parents everywhere else in the world as well).

Unfortunately, this one detail fueled a week of damaging Internet rumors that the Marubo people were “addicted to porn.” The story went viral, reported in hundreds of other publications across the world. This weekend, the NY Times published a follow up story declaring that “No, a Remote Amazon Tribe Did Not Get Addicted To Porn,” and pointed a forensic finger at media outlets like the New York Post and TMZ at fueling the acceleration of this rumor across the Internet.

None of this probably seems new or even surprising. And it does offer an ironic introduction to the reality of the Internet to the Marubo tribe and just how quickly misinformation can spread. The story reminded me of a habit I have adopted for myself but don’t talk about nearly enough: my own media blacklist. Anytime I see a story like this, propelled by a click-hungry media outlet, they go on the list. I don’t click on or promote stories from New York Post, for example, and I will never link to them. I wonder how many of you do the same?

The Next Generation of Political Polling Is Asking AI To Simulate Human Voters

Have you ever picked up the phone to answer a call from a pollster? I can probably guess your answer, and that’s not uncommon. A tiny fraction of people actually answer those calls, which creates a predictably skewed result if political campaigns are actually relying on those calls to generate any useful insight. The modern solution to this that some researchers are advocating is to just have pollsters “call” artificial intelligence simulations of voters instead.

In early testing, these simulations seem to be largely accurate in depicting human responses to open ended questions. Given the notorious unreliability of information from polls already, many are arguing that doing polling this way can hardly be worse. And perhaps it could be even better because pollsters might finally get some insight about how “regular” people think rather than those at the fringes who hold the most radical opinions, or those who happen to have the most free time to answer polling calls in the first place.

What If Award Winning Ads From Cannes Became Open Source For Anyone To Use?

This week is the Cannes Creative Festival and so there are plenty of the usual healthy jokes about how Cannes being a yacht-party fueled satire of itself. Criticism aside, awards have always been meaningful to celebrate great work and motivate creative people … but the problem is that in past years most Cannes award-winning campaigns quickly seem to disappear. As McCann Worldgroup Chief Strategy Officer Jitender Dabas explains:

“Celebrated ideas frequently get shelved. Creators chase the next big award-winning concept, while others hesitate to touch existing campaigns for fear of appearing unoriginal. This is a colossal waste. Powerful ideas, lauded on the grandest stage, shouldn’t fade away. It’s a missed opportunity for humanity.”

The solution Dabas proposes is to suggest that perhaps some of these world changing ideas should go open source—made available to non-profits, small businesses and anyone else who might benefit from trying to recreate their own versions. It’s a fascinatingly non-obvious idea precisely because it seems to counter exactly the narrative we hear when it comes to celebrating creativity.

What happens to IP rights or creativity itself if we think about open sourcing great ideas? Yet the dirty truth about advertising is that great ideas rarely belong to the creator. They are owned by whatever client paid for them. And those clients tend to be fickle, rarely sustaining their investment or support even for impactful award-winning ideas beyond a typical campaign season.

So ideas get retired, shelved, forgotten and lost. In this world, the idea of making these ideas open source so they might have sustained life makes a lot of sense. Having Cannes be the catalyst to make this happen is perfectly logical. If there was ever a big idea worth funding a yacht party to share with the industry insiders at Cannes right now, this might be it.

Scent Camera Recreates Travel Smells and More Core77 Design Award Winners

For the 12th year the Core 77 Design Awards have spanned 22 categories and showcased product, branding and conceptual ideas from students and professionals imagining solutions to global challenges. This year’s range of winners span from shape shifting fabric concepts to speculative design of a dystopian capitalist future. The entire site and descriptions of winners is the very definition of a rabbit hole so beware of the full list of award winners as it can very quickly turn into a time consuming diversion.

Clearly, I’m speaking from personal experience as I spent about an hour browsing all the ideas there. One that stood out for me, perhaps because I continue to be fascinated by the possibilities of saved scent-based memory, was the concept of a scent camera submitted by a student from Loughborough University. I love the idea of being able to buy a scent recreation as a souvenir from a holiday destination and then use it in the future to recall your journey. If you do spend a bit of time browsing the rest of the winners, let me know what stood out for you too!

The Non-Obvious Book of the Week:

Rare Trees - The Fascinating Stories of the World’s Most Threatened Species

From the cinnamon trees of the Philippines to the Patagonian cypress that lives for over 3000 years, this is the ultimate coffee table book about trees. More interestingly, though, it’s a fascinating way to read about the history of humanity through the trees that have sustained and carried us. Published in partnership with the Global Trees Campaign, the book features more than 300 color photos of the most spectacular and most threatened tree species in the world. I’ve already used it as a non-obvious graduation gift, and as a source for interesting content ideas and stories to explore and write about. You might find it similarly useful in unexpected ways too.

About the Non-Obvious Book Selection of the Week:

Every week I will be featuring a new “non-obvious” book selection worth sharing. Titles featured here may be new or from the backlist, but they will rarely be bestsellers. My goal is to elevate great books that perhaps deserve a second look which you might have otherwise missed.

Even More Non-Obvious Stories …

Every week I always curate more stories than I'm able to explore in detail. Instead of skipping those stories, I started to share them in this section so you can skim the headlines and click on any that spark your interest:

How are these stories curated?