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The annual spending on men’s wear is up 70 percent since 1998. Here we go…

Check out the chart above, via here. There are other charts of interest in said post, but essentially, here’s a quick takeaway: around 1998, the total market for menswear was about $270 billion. This year? It’s going to approach $500 billion.… Continue Reading

In this era of Amazon and Google, could we finally drastically lower the cost of textbooks?

Check out the chart above. It’s from here (AEI) via here (The Atlantic), and basically it captures this idea: since 1978, the cost for college textbooks has exceeded the rising rate for medical services, new home prices, and even inflation. While… Continue Reading

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Transparent, a new Amazon Prime show from Jill Soloway (and starring Mark Duplass, Jeffrey Tambor and Judith Light) could be the next big thing

Amazon Prime had two original shows (well, two main ones) come out in this past cycle — Alpha House and Betas — and while both were pretty good (IMHO), neither had a cultural resonance on par with something like House of Cards (Netflix) or, let’s face… Continue Reading

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McDonald’s and Starbucks, two staples of the busy Saturday running errands, are both experiencing a couple of problems

Start on the Starbucks front: holiday foot traffic (i.e. people out-and-about in stores) was 1/2 in 2013 what it was in 2010; phrased another way, more people are shopping online — and that’s hurting adjacent stores in malls (i.e. Starbucks… Continue Reading

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Ah, the future of social media as local social? Meet Nextdoor

Even though I’m a reprehensible snob about it, Facebook is a good way to keep track of what’s going on in the lives of your far-flung friends. Twitter is less so for that (unless all your friends happen to be… Continue Reading

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HBO’s True Detective, through two episodes, might be the best show on TV — and it’s all about the approach they used

True Detective, the new Sunday night HBO show, has only aired two episodes — which is 25 percent of its Season 1 run — and might already be the best show on TV (currently; at this moment things like Mad Men and The… Continue Reading

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On Eli Pariser and the algorithm bubble

Eli Pariser, who’s currently the chief executive of Upworthy, wrote a book in 2011 called The Filter Bubble. A nine-minute TED Talk on many of the same topics is embedded above, but essentially, the idea is that personalized search — i.e. the… Continue Reading

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How Google, Mercedes Benz and other top companies become “the best places to work”

I’m endlessly interested in how people are engaged and motivated by their work in the absence of insane compensation packages, so this new post from Fast Company was intriguing. It starts with the ‘100 Best Places To Work’ list, which is released… Continue Reading