Things worth reading.
A growing shelf of essays, field notes, and retrospectives. The ideas that keep paying off, kept somewhere we can find them.
The Death of Spotify: why streaming is minutes away from being obsolete.
Jimmy Iovine just called the death of Spotify. He might be right. Joel Gouveia on why the DSP era is quietly ending, and what artists are building instead.
Read the essay
Growth Is Now a Trust Problem
Elena Verna on why the old growth playbook is failing. Channels are collapsing, AI is commoditizing capabilities, and trust now drives both acquisition and retention.
Is Ubiquitous AI Writing “Inevitable”?
Max Read on a run of AI writing scandals and why machine text follows from the logic of the media system that came before it. Inevitable precisely because it is not revolutionary.
On Agency
Henrik Karlsson on the gentle side of agency. Why most problems are solvable, why the default path is usually the costly one, and what Werner Herzog understood at fourteen.
The Year Creativity Got Its Backbone Back
Pete Blackshaw on Cannes Lions 2026, where AI officially became media, judgment became the scarce resource, and the best work earned trust with proof instead of polish.
Is Brand More Important Than Service?
Sanchita of The Other HAFH on why luxury hotel service is declining while the properties look better than ever. The asset-light model, brand proliferation, and what hotels stopped paying for.
Everyone Wants to Be a DJ, No One Wants to Dance
Dani Offline on what happens to culture when everyone wants to make and nobody wants to watch, listen, or dance. A case for the discerning audience.
Can AI Make an iPhone?
Benn Stancil on why great products come from subtraction and discipline, and whether a model built to please us can ever say no.
12 Outlooks for the Future: 2026+
Scott Belsky on talent arbitrage, proof of craft, hardware moats, ambient listening, and why the coming year rewards builders who move early.
Is AI Going to Destroy Our Lives or Not?
Kyla Scanlon on why jobs are bundles of tasks rather than single lines of work, why AI is still expensive to run, and how to build a career while the rules are being rewritten.
Rethink Your Personal Brand
Jasmine Bina on why a real personal brand is a service to an audience, built on growth, vulnerability, and skin in the game.
Positioning in the Age of AI
April Dunford on how to shift your positioning when AI is changing your product, your competitors, and your market at the same time.
Text Is King
Adam Mastroianni on why the panic about a post-literate society is overblown, and why the written word still outlasts every new format.
We Need to Talk About AI Branding
Kira Klaas on why "AI-powered" stopped being a differentiator, and how to brand AI around utility and trust instead of the technology itself.
Marketing Lost Its Nerve
Adam Singer on why brands keep sanding themselves into a soulless blandscape, why the backlash to bland rebrands is aesthetic rather than political, and what courageous marketing actually looks like.
General-Purpose Products Are Coming Back
Dan Hockenmaier on why being pretty good at many things stopped working, how the internet split every industry into specialists, and why AI may rebuild the products that try to do everything at once.
Creativity in an Age of AI
Rishad Tobaccowala on Sir John Hegarty's view of AI as a creative collaborator, the two kinds of creativity, and why machines unleash human creativity rather than replace it.
Go Direct: The Manifesto
Lulu Cheng Meservey on why traditional PR is dead, why communication is the founder's job, and how to own your narrative by going direct.
Everyone Coded. Nobody Curated.
Daniel Farrell on how AI raised the floor of web design, why competent is no longer the moat, and what it means to be a designer when code becomes the medium.
The Last People Before the Internet.
Drew Austin on the AOL Instant Messenger era, why the early 2000s feel both close and impossible to place, and how the internet flattened our sense of cultural time.
When Intelligence Gets Cheap.
Sangeet Paul Choudary on why the contest to build the smartest AI models may be the wrong race, and how durable advantage shifts to whoever can turn cheap intelligence into coordinated, real-world execution.
Don't Take the Bait.
Jasmine Sun on a new generation of AI companies that treat distribution as the product, the rise of vice signaling, and why the smartest response is to not take the bait.
Why Coase Needs Hayek.
Rohit Krishnan ran an experiment: when a frontier model manages other models, it costs four times as much and does worse than just letting them compete. A look at why markets can beat managers for AI agents.
Everything Is Technology.
Packy McCormick on why technology companies keep displacing old incumbents, and why the value that moves to them is bigger than almost anyone expects.
Post-social media.
Rachel Karten on why the follower-based feed is gone, and how brands should split social into reaching new audiences and nurturing the fans they already have.
Make Something Heavy.
Anu Atluru on why we create more than ever yet it weighs nothing, and what it takes to make work that lasts.
The Attention Economy Ate Big Food.
Mike Lee on why big food companies stopped buying recipes and started buying attention, and how small brands became their research department.
Speculation Nation.
Rex Woodbury on prediction markets, FAFOnomics, and why a new generation is trading its way toward economic mobility.
The new luxury is imperfection.
Rachel Cheeks on why brands are trading high-volume content for print, film, and analog craft, and how imperfection became the proof a human was there.
The slop apocalypse.
ADIN on what happens when AI drives the cost of ad production toward zero while attention stays fixed: oversupply, convergence, and why judgment becomes the moat.
How personal brands are built in the algorithmic era.
Eugene Healey on the path to 400,000 followers: owning a cultural idea bigger than what you sell, treating content as a funnel, and choosing persona over authenticity.
The true meaning of brand positioning.
Rei Inamoto on why different beats better, and the four-step Vector of Differentiation framework. With worked examples from iPhone, Airbnb, and Anthropic.
The return of the weirdo.
Ted Gioia on the smoothness society, the collapse of color, and why the weight of a stagnant past eventually stirs up the rebellion that brings something new.
The latest design problem? Getting a job.
Carly Ayres on why the design hiring bar moved from execution to judgment, what teams now screen for, and why taste, product sense, and shipped outcomes beat polish.
How to think about distribution.
The Startup Guy on why a good product with great distribution beats a great product with poor distribution, and how to build distribution into a product from day one.
In an AI-driven world, taste is the ultimate currency.
Olya Kuryshchuk on why, when machines can make anything, the scarce skill is knowing what is worth making. Taste becomes the differentiator.
The contentification of marketing.
Jaskaran on why most "cult" marketing is a gamble, why products build brands, and what brand strategy needs to survive.
The relentless march of the creator economy.
Doug Shapiro estimates creator media is already a $250 billion business taking share from corporate media, and lays out the technological, cultural and demographic forces that keep moving share its way.
Product, brand, and marketing teams will collapse onto themselves.
Paul Jun on why creative orgs are breaking down, why brand belongs with product rather than under marketing, and what small teams of builders look like next.
From SEO to GEO: how to win distribution in the age of generative engines.
Sandy Diao on why your next 100,000 users won't come from Google, how LLMs decide who to cite, and the five investments growth teams should be making now.
The next decade of design won't look like the last one.
Tasty Magazine on why the studio playbook is splitting in two. After sameness, the field is turning back to research, writing, and systems, and away from pure aesthetic delivery.
Your AI-powered marketing team is going to sound like everyone else's.
Kaylee Edmondson on what gets lost when CEOs compress marketing teams down to a handful of AI-prompters. Taste, distribution, and the tribal knowledge that walks out the door.
On working with wizards.
Ethan Mollick on the shift from co-intelligence to summoning. What changes when AI gives you great output without showing the process.
The founder's guide to blogging.
Evan Armstrong on why AI made prose cheap, and the three habits that separate product writing customers actually read from the cupcake kind.
The attention economy is over.
Jack Myers on what comes after attention. Trust, judgment, and human advantage as the scarce assets of the AI era.
AI-First companies.
Jakob Nielsen on what AI-First actually means inside an organization, why it differs from AI-Native, and the UX problems waiting on the other side of automation.
How AI will reinvent marketing.
Andrew Chen on what happens to marketing when the cost of planning, creating, and executing campaigns goes to zero.
Ten years after growth hacking.
A decade after he predicted growth hackers would replace marketing teams, Andrew Chen scores his own thesis.
Flounder Mode: a critical look at Paul Graham's viral essay.
Matthew Parker pushes back on the founder-as-superhero meme. Not every founder is Steve Jobs. Not every company is Apple.
The Wham Bam era of marketing is over.
Rachel Rodgers on the end of louder-faster-shinier campaigns, and what replaces them.
The rise of the cultural strategist.
Jill Grace on why brands are quietly hiring the role they used to outsource to a deck.
Learning in the age of algorithmic video.
Carl Hendrick on what TikTok-shaped attention is doing to the way we think and remember.
Thirty-five marketing ideas for 2026.
Tom Orbach with a bookmarkable list of the year's most useful, weird, and effective tactics. Read once. Save forever.
Read this instead of fashion school.
Shannon Almeida with a syllabus of books and essays worth more than the tuition.
How AI is impacting the marketing industry.
A short, honest read on the parts that actually changed, the parts that didn't, and the parts everyone is still pretending about.
How to actually write a marketing strategy.
Tom Davies on aligning budget to customer journeys instead of to slide templates.