📚 #241 Atomic Unit of Knowledge, Online Workshops, Ari Emanuel’s Anti-AI Bets, Cricket’s Genius

63 Hours in Palermo, Jealousy List, Thanksgiving Dinner and more

Dec 15, 2025

Hello,

Welcome to Stay Curious #241.

I’m writing this introduction and putting together the final curation from my hometown, Indore. As always, it feels lovely to be here. Family, friends, and food. Most of my Indore stories can easily anchor themselves to one of these three.

There is a fourth thing that now stands out even more than the three Fs. The spirit of the city. Indore has been the cleanest city in the country for so many years that it almost feels like a separate category was created just so others could win. How it achieved this, and how it keeps going, still puzzles me.

The business energy here is always fascinating. Every visit, I meet or hear about someone who has built something remarkable in ways I could never have imagined with my ‘professional’ education. The retail scene is vibrant, and my list of places to visit and experiences to try grows every year. What people do here, and how they do it, is incredible. It constantly challenges the lazy assumptions we make about so-called small or tier two cities.

Each time I come here, I imagine learning from and participating in so much of what Indore offers. And each time, I fail. Time slips away, commitments pile up, and I never have enough mental space to dive in fully.

What could be a better way to do this?

💡 Atomic Unit For Knowledge

I’m drawn to explorations that try to understand the fundamental models of human thinking and action. These efforts look for deep patterns shaped by human experience and evolution. They give us frameworks to think better and help us apply new technologies and cultural shifts in ways that go beyond the hype.

If that sounds interesting, I’d strongly recommend Steven Johnson’s “What is the right atomic unit for knowledge?”. It traces the journey from the origins of peer reviewed articles to today’s idea of deep research powered by cutting edge LLMs.

Here’s one graphic from the post that will seed the core idea for you.

🧑‍🏫 Making Online Workshops Great

Vaughn Tan’s “Making online workshops great” puts words to pain points many of us feel but struggle to explain when it comes to online workshops.

The physicality of the space is itself an asset for interacting with others and their ideas. Humans navigate physical spaces using evolved capacities that work almost effortlessly. We remember where things are using spatial location, visual appearance, and our position in three-dimensional space. In a workshop room, you can glance at the far wall and recall what someone else wrote on the post-its there. You can see aggregations forming—three people clustered around a particular set of ideas, animated conversation suggesting something important is happening. The friction of moving physical objects is low. Someone can walk across the room, peel a post-it off one wall, carry it to another wall, stick it next to a related idea. This takes seconds.

The post is short and it does not promise neat solutions. Instead, Vaughn breaks the problem into clear challenges. That alone points us in the right direction when searching for better answers.

If you are a practitioner in this space, I would love to chat, learn from your experience, and exchange notes.

🤼 Ari Emanuel’s “Anti-AI” Bet

So, Ari Emanuel’s “Anti-AI” Bet is on Live Entertainment. I am not surprised. He is one of the most influential figures in the entertainment and content world today. This interview offers a clear window into his journey and the thinking that continues to shape the industry.

There is a lot to love in this episode. From his early struggles with dyslexia to how Covid reshaped entertainment overnight, his stories are gripping. Couple of themes that I loved more than others:

Live Events as the “Anti-AI” Bet
Monetizing Premium Experiences
Using the Phone as a Weapon

His journey is fascinating and makes for a genuinely fun listen.

I have been a long time fan of Ari Gold from Entourage, who is said to be inspired by Ari Emanuel. Feels like the perfect excuse to start another rewatch.

Any Entourage fans here?

🏏 Samir Varma on Cricket’s Genius

When we talk about live entertainment, it would be a miss not to talk about cricket, and especially the IPL. Samir Varma has a fantastic piece on how cricket borrowed the best ideas from other sports and formats, then refined them to become a spectator favorite.

From commentary to technology, the game has kept evolving. Tech is not just used for key decisions anymore. It enhances the entire viewing experience. Commentary adds narrative and drama to visuals that are already compelling. There is a lot here that other sports could easily learn from.

It is a Samir Varma piece, and I admit my bias. His storytelling pulls you in right away. And while T20 and IPL may not move at the same pace as football, that does not weaken the arguments he makes in this post.

Here is a snippet on how technology has helped improve the viewer experience in cricket.

3. Educational value: Because viewers hear the decision-making process, they learn the rules. They understand edge detection, ball-tracking, frame analysis, what constitutes “conclusive evidence.” Trust scales with transparency.
4. Entertainment value: Replays in cricket are exciting. The crowd waits, the tension builds, and everyone learns something. It’s not dead time—it’s a mini-drama where viewers get insider access to the decision process.

🇮🇹 63 Hours in Palermo

I’m loving what Andrew is sharing in his Souvenirs newsletter. The recent two part series on Palermo is a joy to read and instantly makes me want to visit and experience it for myself.

Part 1: Not on the itinerary: the accidental discovery of a full-life crisis

Part 2: 63 Hours in Palermo (day two)

Andrew’s observations about people and places are vivid and delightful. After reading his work, I may not know the must see tourist spots of Palermo, but I know how the place might feel when I walk its streets and interact with it. That, to me, is the magic.

Here try it for yourself:

📋 Bloomberg Businessweek Jealousy List

So what is the Jealousy List? Let’s hear it straight from the source.

For an industry that’s perpetually facing the parallel challenges of diminishing reader trust and declining advertising revenue, the media business sure delivered in 2025. There were way too many podcasts, documentaries, in-depth investigations and entertaining magazine stories to consume, let alone optimistically bookmark for later. That is why we, the philanthropic-minded editors and writers of Bloomberg Businessweek, assemble our annual Jealousy List, where we each identify the one piece of journalism from the past 12 months that we think is absolutely not to be missed. The only stipulation: We only pick stories from rival outlets, never the home team. —The Editors

And here’s the list: Best Journalism of 2025

I have read only a couple of pieces so far. Still, I can already tell this list can feed my curation for a long time. So instead of picking highlights, it felt right to share the source itself.

More than anything else, I love how openly experts admire the work of other experts. Appreciating and promoting great work is one of the best ways to raise the bar for everyone.

✨ Everything else

All thanks to the folks at Colossal. I find their mails a fresh dose of ‘wow’ and ‘happy.’

A little late for a Thanksgiving special, but I did not want to miss sharing this. How 10 Famous Artists Would Plate Thanksgiving Dinner is pure fun. It shows how a strong personal style travels across fields and stays instantly recognizable.
A Woolen Menagerie of Miniature Creatures by Natasya Shuljak is packed with joy and whimsy. The cuteness is hard to handle.
Ayako Kita’s tender sculptures turn emotions into uncanny scenes. The poses and expressions of the figures hint at deeper stories waiting to be told.

ICYMI, here is the link to last week’s post: