Tuesday was the day we’d all been waiting for, our second, better Black Friday: Prime Day. The day Amazon puts limited amounts of random items on sale for a limited time. The day internet frenzy rivals the famed casual violence of Black Friday. It’s practically a holiday, and it’s only three years old. It's a brilliant marketing plan, and I – and you – benefited from Amazon's unprecedented success.
It’s Peak Reading Season: too hot to go outside, too lethargic to do much inside, no holidays coming up for a while. Polls and anecdotes are probably telling you that reading is on the decline – people just don’t read like they used to! – but it turns out that reading is still popular. And that would've been terrible news a century ago, and in the century before that, and all the way back to the ancient Greeks.
Even some 20-odd years after the invention of the internet, when social media is up there with online shopping, people still think it's bad for society. And maybe it’s true, in some ways, to an extent. But this isn’t the first time people have thought community was on the brink of extinction, and it won’t be the last. “Kids these days, sitting inside instead of reading like we did!” people said about television. “That infernal contraption will be the death of society.” But we can go back even further. All the way to the beginning of humanity, in fact.
No one should be shy about the need to love entrepreneurs, startups, big ideas, wanting to make a change, and striking out into the world to fill an identified hole. There's a lot of risk involved in that, and it can still work, but you have to do it right. In other words, you can't found what the New York Times dubbed a "bro co." and expect it to be sustainable.
Enter the infamous Fyre Festival and, now, Uber.
The Wall Street Journal published an article the other day about how “old-fashioned” manual labor jobs are resurging among millennials: jobs like bartenders, butchers, bookbinders, craft brewers, furniture-makers, and fishmongers. The idea of a young adult in the private sector hunched over old manuscripts is a bit of a foreign image to me. So I decided to test this whole young-people-at-old-fashioned-jobs theory by going to a local bar.
No one loves the TSA. At all. It’s totally inefficient, very badly managed, and would be much better if it was privatized. It is the worst part of traveling, even more so than flying with a crying baby and a snoring man (which was my last flight). But this is the way it is right now, and it doesn’t look like it’ll change soon. So, without giving up the fight to make big strides to improve the TSA, perhaps we should also look at the little ways some airports are taking entrepreneurship as far as they can on their own.
You’re going along, living your life, buried under blankets in your winter nest, until suddenly you realize: summer is coming. Like, next week. After strategic internet research for inspiration, your mental state switches from chestnuts roasting on an open fire to marshmallows toasting in the embers under the stars (and then catching on fire). You are ready to prepare for summer.
Entrepreneurship doesn't just mean inventing something new. Sometimes it's when an entrepreneur looks at successful businesses and says, “I can put these together and make something new.” That's how cat cafés started, and they've spread across the world from Asia to Atlanta. So I went to see one.
I started watching Rick and Morty when the pilot episode of Season 3 came out a few weeks ago. I began with that episode, then went back to the beginning and watched almost the entire thing in an afternoon. And just like that, I was a member of one of the most eccentric, bubbly fan clubs currently active.
Imagine my excitement when I found out the Rickmobile is a thing, and that it was coming to Atlanta.
The problem with food is that it disappears every time you eat. In my eternal search for food, I've become one of those people who goes to different grocery stores for different things. But in the process, I've realized that each store not only offers different things, but also makes me feel totally different and even approach the items differently. If you're planning on opening a business, ask yourself the same questions grocery stores ask themselves before decorating.
