#229 Agentic AI x Travel, Designing for TV, Meme <> Comics, How Social Media Shortens Your Life

Why Do We Collect Things, Hindi Cinema, Fitted Sheets, I’m Not a Robot & more

Sep 22, 2025

Hello,

These are interesting times. I have started noticing a clear pattern. Some people and places radiate energy, while others quietly drain it. The ones that excite me most share a common trait: optimism and a deep belief in possibilities.

I am now choosing to devote my time and energy to chase this excitement. Suggestions and opportunities to engage are always welcome.

Today’s curation reflects my current mood, I’m super excited to share it with you. Here take a quick look:

I’ve enjoyed each of these pieces and really hope you will find them equally exciting! Let’s go…

✈️ Agentic AI x Travel

In The Agentic AI Adoption Matrix: Consumer & Travel, Thomas Reiner explores the adoption challenges of Agentic AI through the lens of trust and technical difficulty, with a deep dive into travel.

He starts with a broad mapping of common consumer product and service categories.

From there, Reiner picks use cases from travel across these dimensions and explores the possibilities. The list covers a wide range of products and services in this category. His expansions are clear and make the idea easy to grasp.

📺 Designing for TV: Principles, Patterns And Practical Guidance

We recently upgraded to a smart TV. Our old one was from the last decade, and the only smart features it offered were a remote and Chromecast support. So handling this new intelligent beast has been a real challenge. Voice search works sometimes, though I am not sure when. The endless apps on the home screen and the flood of recommendations can feel overwhelming. I am still in transition, but I know I will get used to it. I managed the jump from feature phones to smartphones, and became a pro with them, so this cannot be any harder.

Smart TVs mark a different kind of interaction design. The surface and the way we use it are unlike any other screen we have made smarter.

This two part series (part 1 and part 2) from Smashing Magazine is a great primer on the subject. It breaks down the patterns that shape our TV experience and shows how design keeps reinventing itself to stay relevant and useful.

From the TV remote to the home screen, every element has a story, and this series does a fantastic job bringing those out. A great read if you enjoy learning about interaction design.

💬 Meme as a New Form of Comics

Jennifer Ouellette makes a case for memes as a new form of comics. She argues that both rely on the same mix of visuals and words to land their humor. Her explanation gives a very good reference to think about both comics & memes.

Granted, comic artists usually create both the image and the text, whereas memes adapt preexisting visuals with new text. Some might consider this poaching, but Abate points out that cartoonists like Charles Schulz have long used stencil templates (a static prefabricated element) to replicate images, a practice that is also used effectively in, say, Dinosaur Comics. And meme humor depends on people connecting the image to its origin rather than obscuring it. She compares the practice to sampling in music; the end result is still an original piece of art.

This framework feels obvious once you see it, yet it often goes unnoticed. I loved this articulation.

Just what makes a good meme image? Abate has some thoughts about that, too. "It has to be not just the image, but the ability for the image to be paired with a caption, a text," she said. "It has to lend itself to some kind of verbal element as well. And it also has to have some elasticity of being specific enough that it's recognizable, but also being malleable enough that it can be adapted to different forms."

👍 How Social Media Shortens Your Life

Gurwinder’s How Social Media Shortens Your Life landed on my reading stack through multiple recommendations. It lived up to the hype.

Sometimes an experience can seem brief in the moment but long in memory, and vice versa. A classic example is the “holiday paradox”: while on vacation, time speeds by because you’re so overwhelmed by new experiences that you don’t keep track of time. But when you return from your vacation, it suddenly feels longer in retrospect, because you made many strong memories, and each adds depth to the past.
Conversely, when you’re waiting at a boring airport, you keep checking the clock, and this acute awareness of time causes it to pass slowly in the moment. But since the wait is uneventful, you don’t make strong memories of the experience, and so in retrospect it seems brief.
Now, a sinister thing about social media is that it speeds up your time both in the moment and in retrospect. It does this by simultaneously impairing your awareness of the present and your memory of the past.

Gurvinder draws from Friedman’s work on casino design, which later influenced retail aisles, to show how environments are shaped to hijack attention. Social media borrows the same playbook, stealing focus without us noticing.

Then he turns to chatbots. It’s not very evident, but he makes a persuasive case to point towards it.

Take, for instance, chatbots. They are inherently mazelike; not only do they frequently hallucinate red herrings, but they’re also prone to “verbosity compensation”, which means they frequently ramble and equivocate in their responses, raising more questions with every answer, and creating a kind of verbal Gruen effect. They also have a tendency to validate users’ delusions, leading them further down deceptive and dangerous rabbit-holes.
Chatbots are also becoming curvilinear, increasingly ending their answers with a question or an offer for further help to create a kind of conversational infinite scroll. And now, Meta and others plan to have their chatbots message you unprompted — the AI equivalent of the enticing calls from Friedman’s cubicles. These developments pose problems because there is emerging evidence that chatbots, when used carelessly, can impair awareness and memory just like social media.

A great think piece, offering a lot of food for thought. It’s one of those pieces that will offer you new ideas with every reading.

🦋 Why Do We Collect Things?

I’ve always been a collector (or a hoarder, if we’re being honest). As a kid, I gathered matchboxes, over a thousand at last count, before I got bored and dumped them somewhere. These days, I collect souvenirs: pens, keychains, magnets, postcards, and other little trinkets. I wouldn’t call it a hobby, since I don’t go out of my way for it most of the time. But it gives me joy. My secret stash is full of these tiny keepsakes, and every piece makes me smile.

So when I found Elsie Morales’s Why do we collect things?, I had to read it. The essay spans everything from the history of collecting to the psychology behind it.

Elsner and Cardinal define three themes of collecting in their book, The Culture of Collecting: desire and nostalgia (missing things or wanting to recapture moments), saving and loss (holding onto what’s in danger of disappearing), and the urge to erect a permanent and complete system against the destructiveness of time (the desire to build something that says “I was here and this mattered.”).

Morales also shares fascinating collections he’s obsessed with. Reading about them has a certain charm—it’s both enlightening and energizing.

And since we’re on the subject, here’s one collection I’d love to build myself. Hats off to those who pour such care into their passions.

🏓 How Pickleball Explains American Culture

No sport has attracted more fans or more controversy since 2020 than this blend of tennis, ping-pong, paddleball, and badminton. The game is “driving everyone nuts,” causing “shattered nerves [and] sleepless nights” with the infamous pock-pock-pock sound of plastic hitting paddle. In Washington, D.C., where I live, the sport’s surging popularity has pitted neighbor against neighbor, created fights between tennis fans and the “pickleball lobby” (apparently a thing), and inspired the Washington Post to call it simply “the worst.” A manifesto titled "Against Pickleball" called on tennis players to “oppose the gangrenous spread of pickleball at every turn.”

This rise pushed Derek Thompson to dig deeper into why pickleball has exploded, and he shared his theory in How Pickleball Explains American Culture

If you’ve followed this trend even a little, you already know the basics. So I won’t go into that. Instead, watch this hilarious reel about pickleball things in South Delhi (and Bandra, Indiranagar and other happening localities near you).

Derek’s point about fitness as a fashion is easy to grasp. What makes it richer is his use of Stanley Lieberson’s “A Matter of Taste: How Names, Fashion, and Culture Change”. His examples of names landing big really struck me, and I’ve seen the same play out (there are endless memes on it too).

It’s a sharp read on how cultures take shape, and also a fun look at a sport you’ll be seeing everywhere in the coming months and years.

By the way, I did some research on this sport and trend recently, and I’d love to exchange notes with anyone building in this space or simply curious about it. Let’s connect if you’re game.

🎞️ The Art of Talking Films

My hunt for new themes had another great win in the last couple of weeks: Hindi Cinema.

I binged on the Love of Cinema podcast by Himanshu Joglekar, which dives deep into Hindi movies with people who make and celebrate them. I mostly picked films from the pre-OTT era. It was a great company in Bangalore traffic and pure fun.

There’s something special about listening to two aficionados talk about a film, then watching it yourself to spot the beauty they’re pointing out. I watched Johnny Gaddaar and Satya after the episodes, and it was a treat to notice details I had missed.

Some movies, though, I haven’t rewatched yet after the podcast. Sholay, Hazaaron Khwaishein Aisi and Jaane Bhi Do Yaaro fall in that group. The episodes were fantastic and they made me want to watch these films again. The last time I saw them was with friends who were die-hard fans, so it feels fitting to do the same now with folks who love them just as much. If you’re a fan and are up for it, let’s plan a rewatch sometime.

Another gem was an episode called The Art of Talking Films with Nasreen Munni Kabir from the Ideas of India podcast. It’s less about one film and more about how movies enrich our lives. The hosts’ passion shines through, making the whole thing vivid and joyful.

I’ve to talk a bit more about Shruti Rajagopalan’s brilliance. Her curiosity feels endless, like a student soaking up every bit from her guests. No matter the topic, whether it’s academics, artists, or historians, she makes the conversation engaging. Her style reminds me of Tyler Cowen: sharp, curious, and full of surprises. The Stay Curious archive already has a few more gems from her work (Sorry, Wrong Number and Zakir), in case you want to explore.

✨ Everything else

Ratfactor's Illustrated Guide to Folding Fitted Sheets. First world problems, maybe. But somebody had to solve this.
I'm Not a Robot. This is the latest from Neal and you’re going to love it! He did it again.
From Opium to Chai: How Britain Stole Tea & Enslaved Millions. A lesson in history, marketing and how to create long lasting habits.

That's all for this week, folks!

I hope I've earned the privilege of your time.

ICYMI, here’s a quick link to the post from last Monday: Stay Curious #228.