Fauxstalgia, Reconstructing Pelé’s Lost Goal, the Mississippi Miracle and Self-Destructing Plastic

Dear Fellow Non-Obvious Thinker,

I’m back from journeys through Turkey and there’s lots of news to share this week. You’ll find the usual non-obvious compilation of stories, of course … including stories about the “Mississippi Miracle,” the glorious second life of decommissioned buses, the plague of AI generated bird photos and a bonus story about self-destructing plastic. Beyond the stories, there’s a new feature in this week’s newsletter that you’ll find every week moving forward: the Non-Obvious Future Word of the Week. My new book, Future Words will be coming out in October this year and so every week I’ll share a new word from the book along with a relevant story that brings it to life.

This week’s Future Word is fauxstalgia and the corresponding story is a fascinating new project to create a video of a lost goal from the world’s most legendary soccer player that was never filmed. Perfect timing as the soccer fans amongst us suffer through a bit of World Cup withdrawal this week!

Enjoy the stories this week and stay curious!

This Week’s New Videos …

The Beautiful Second Life of Decommissioned Buses

When London’s decommissioned New Routemaster buses leave the roads over the next four years, many of them will be repurposed into mobile playgrounds thanks to an award-winning design idea from RUA Studios. The idea was selected as the winner of the Davidson Prize, established to award the best ideas for “rethinking the design of contemporary home and urban spaces.” It’s a smart concept, but it’s not the only repurposing of buses and public transport vehicles that is working.

Across the world, heavy machinery, old military vehicles and subway cars have been used to rebuild coral reefs and provide spare parts for retrofitting or making new products. When we can move huge objects like military tanks and subway cars into the water, to me that’s evidence that we could be thinking bigger about repurposing and reusing more big household things. On a recent visit to our local garbage dump, I saw a tower of discarded appliances and a huge area just for used mattresses. The world needs more design prizes and ideas for how to repurpose all of these things, too.

What AI Generated Bird Photos Can Teach Us About Database Pollution

One of the engaging art concepts from AI artist Kelly Boesch features a collection of birds that don’t exist. The video is hard to stop watching, with mesmerizing creations of otherworldly birds that seem like the backdrop to a science fiction story that hasn’t been written yet. Her birds aren’t real, but the idea of generating real-looking birds is one that has been getting more and more popular … and creating problems along with it. These AI-generated bird images are wreaking havoc with the databases used by birdwatchers and scientists to catalog and study species.

In response, “researchers warned that hundreds of fake images have already been discovered on popular databases for recording species. They said that the true scale of the issue is unknown – as many could go undetected – and could contaminate records collected by the public.” Not to resort to the cliche metaphor of the canary in the coal mine offering an early warning for humans, but there is a similar signal here when it comes to the potential for AI-generated content to “pollute” the databases that existed before these tools became so accessible. The solution to this problem is a tough one. Should we have more quarantined databases locked down to prevent this content from entering? Or create more sophisticated detection tools to spot manipulations upfront? Perhaps both will be required to solve this problem in the future.

The Secret of the Mississippi Miracle and How to Get Kids to Read Again

A featured story from WIRED this month takes a deep dive into the challenges of getting kids to read and how they are increasingly only reading in snippets as opposed to reading for the love of books. It’s a generational problem and one that is receiving a lot of attention from schools, parents, governments and media around the world. The article observes that “in conversations with teachers and literacy experts, nearly everyone diagnoses the problem as one of attention span, not intelligence.” How do you solve a problem of attention span at a time when our devices are hollowing all of our abilities to focus for longer periods of time? The so-called “Mississippi Miracle” where the state moved from next to last place in reading scores into the nationwide top ten within a decade offers some clues:

“So why have elementary school reading scores jumped dramatically in places like Jefferson County, one of the poorest places in the poorest state in the country, at the same time national averages are plummeting? Superintendent Adrian Hammitte believes the third grade “reading gate” is in fact key to his district’s success—but not because it removes the weakest readers from the pool of fourth-grade test takers. Rather, he argues that third graders pass the test because their families see no choice but to pass; no one wants their child to be held back. Students who pass the third-grade state test are likely to repeat their success in fourth grade.”

So peer pressure about being left behind can offer one incentive. The rest of the article, though, offers a sobering and perhaps depressing conclusion: maybe reading is just too boring for modern kids to ever want to do it for fun. I desperately hope that isn’t true, but as the article concludes when it comes to reading assessments and scores, the likeliest outcome is a focus on comprehension at best: “if America is going to pull itself out of this standardized test score slump, it will happen through skill drills, not students losing themselves in novels. Adding a reading gate at the end of eighth grade might make more of them pass the test, she thinks, but it certainly wouldn’t make any of them read books.”

The Non-Obvious Future Word of the Week

Fauxstalgia & The Lost Goal of Pelé

Fauxstalgia – The ache for a memory that was AI-generated and never actually lived through.

The most legendary soccer player in history once shared that the best goal of his career was never captured on video. It was August 2, 1959, in São Paulo, Brazil and of the thousands of goals scored in his career, Pelé always felt this was his best ever. Three sombrero kicks in a row, with a knee flick and a header to beat the keeper … and all that remains apart from the memories of the fans who saw it live is a single black and white photo taken at the end.

Taking the photo and the eyewitness descriptions, Google partnered with an FX agency to use Gemini Omni to recreate that memory. Alongside AI, they actually sent local actors to recreate the scene and even brought a leather ball to match the gear used at the time. The resulting footage is now on display at the Pelé Museum in Santos and the video is live online for anyone to watch.

The story is a perfect example of a feeling that we write about in Future Words and call fauxstalgia. When technology allows us to recreate memories (both real and imagined) that many of us never actually lived through, it creates whole new ways to experience and recall the past.

Want to get a sneak preview of the book before anyone else? ​
​Join our Early Reader Launch Team here >>

The Non-Obvious Media Recommendation of the Week

MIT Technology Review

If you’re a follower of trend and future insights, you might already know this magazine from their flagship “10 Breakthrough Technologies” annual report. This is just one of the reasons why this publication should be on your reading list. The quality of the stories and their ability to surface the latest innovations and talk about their implications is a welcome contrast to many other tech publications that seem overly focused on the hottest startups or technology for its own sake. The prevailing feeling you’ll get after reading a few stories from MIT Technology Review is that they are covering the foundational technologies that will awaken entire industries and propel humanity forward. That seems like a tall order, but it’s what you routinely get through their stories and why it’s been on my must-read list for more than a decade now.

The Non-Obvious Book of the Week

The Ultimate Future Words Collection

This week’s “book of the week” is a bit of an unusual share. For those of you who follow me on Linkedin, you might have already seen a story I posted earlier this week sharing some of the books that were most useful for Henry and myself as we were writing Future Words. The books that fueled our thinking combine futurism, trends, linguistics, etymology, and social commentary with several novels about words, dictionaries and booksellers thrown in too. Rather than pick a single book this week, I thought I’d reshare this post along with the image of all these books (yes, it took me a while to lay them all out nicely!) For the full list of books, check out my original story here >>

About the Non-Obvious Book Selection of the Week:

Every week I share a new “non-obvious” book selection. Titles featured here may be new or classic books, but the date of publication doesn’t really matter. My goal is to elevate great reads 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?

Every week I spend hours going through hundreds of stories in order to curate this email. Looking for a speaker to inspire your team to become non-obvious thinkers through a keynote or workshop? 

Watch my new 2025 speaking reel on YouTube >>

Speaker-reel