In-House Universities, the Weird Girl Aesthetic and Saudi Arabia's City of the Future

Will In-House Universities Take the Place of Trade Schools?

An article in Adweek suggests in-house universities might be the future of creative learning. For years, employers have offered benefits to allow their most talented team members to go back to school to improve their skills. Typically those programs have been funded individually, so each new team member that requests the benefit has an incremental cost. What if that learning could be brought in-house and offered to an entire team instead?

This concept of an "In-House University" is an intriguing idea that may start taking off as not only a timely response to the common employee desire for constant learning but also a unique benefit that might help companies retain their best people in a competitive job market.

Google's Street View Is Changing How We Understand the History of Places

Google's Street View has long-offered a "time travel" feature to allow anyone to go back in time to see what a place used to look like. Of course, the service only just hit their 15 year anniversary, but new camera rigs will allow the ambitious project to go far beyond where cars can take them. Future expeditions can hike up mountains, through deserts and all sorts of other unique places.

In coming years these captured images will offer a detailed record of how places are being shaped by weather as well as how grand scale projects like The Mirror Line and Saudi Arabia's grand plans for the wildly ambitious $500B new desert city of Neom are transforming the Earth. It is a record of our planet as it is, archived for our future selves as a way to understand where we were and how it changed over time.

It's not perfect, but I would argue that it certainly deserves more attention than an addictive metaverse designed to drain our time and empty our wallets.

"Zoe" is the World's First Named Heat Wave, Like Tornado

Scientists in Seville, Spain recently decided to start naming deadly heat waves, much like we already name Tornados. This latest heat wave is named Zoe. It's not a bad idea, but the execution seems like a missed opportunity. Instead of using random names, why not name each heat wave after a politician who has refused to take action to support pro-environmental legislation?

Given the recent study warning that extreme heatwaves will increase by more than 30 percent in the coming year, the negative publicity from a little bit of blaming and shaming could spark some much needed action. At the very least, I'm sure anyone named Zoe would agree.

Inside the Weird Girl Aesthetic That Is "Dominating Fashion" Right Now

It is alternately being described as an "organized chaotic mess," a preferred style for "eclectic cuties," and an anti-fashion movement by a new generation that sometimes seems like they are "trying to look ugly."

Welcome to the "weird girl aesthetic" - a fashion wave that some are predicting will dominate fashion over the coming year. As one insights analyst describes, the core of the trend "encourages us to style ourselves however we want and not subscribe to rules or codes of dressing."

Sustainability, reuse, thrifting, vintage, DIY and mismatched or clashing items are all core to this new style which all seems to describe the same sort of backlash against conventional choices that most counter culture movements have at their core. Ultimately, it's the latest version of a megatrend that I called Amplified Identity - to describe the ongoing desire for all of us to display our individuality in new and unique ways.