Sunday Scaries, and other
things we publish.
SUNDAY SCARIES: Absent Mothers of Invention
A new folding phone for $3,000, a toothbrush with a camera for $499, a pair of $1,300 glasses that should never be worn in public, and a ring whose parent company is asking Wall Street for a valuation of $15.6 billion. The proverb says necessity is the mother of invention, but the lineage for these inventions has some foggy DNA.
READ THE POST ↗SUNDAY SCARIES: Reasons to Believe!
Last Sunday’s edition was about the end of the world, so it’s only fair that this week is about evening the score and reminding ourselves of why we should be optimistic. This week the brief is optimism for creativity and humanity, and the RTBs wrote themselves.
READ THE POST ↗SUNDAY SCARIES: Will AI Kill Us All?
At least a dozen outlets ran some form of the question this week, and none of the coverage that followed really explained how it could happen. Here are the four mechanisms the researchers are actually describing, in plain language, along with my personal read on whether each one is going to happen.
READ THE POST ↗ANNIVERSARY SUNDAY SCARIES: An Alien’s Assessment of Earth
One year of Sunday Scaries, handed over to Xurloz, a blueish-tinted interstellar visitor on a recon mission. He has studied the full year of texts carefully, and these are his findings. You are not permitted to disagree with them.
READ THE POST ↗SUNDAY SCARIES: Michelotti the Idea Person
There is a thing people say about creatives in this business, usually while explaining why somebody is not getting promoted, which is that they are just an idea person. Michelotti was just an idea person, and the ideas are still out on the road.
READ THE POST ↗SUNDAY SCARIES: Delaying Disaster
I used to be pathological about instant gratification, and postponing the inevitable and unpleasant reality. This week, the world feels like it’s wrestling with the same debate and choosing the irresponsible path, picking the immediate satisfaction and setting up the Delayed Disaster.
READ THE POST ↗SUNDAY SCARIES: It’s a Mad Mark Mad Meta World
When Mark Zuckerberg published six and a half thousand words on superintelligence, it was the third Sunday in a row his company was in the weekly pile. When you line up the last fifteen years properly you find the same plot.
READ THE POST ↗SUNDAY SCARIES: Stamps of Approval
From the Met to Ford, four stamps said very different things than intended by those who put the proverbial stamps on the boxes. And a 700-year-old lesson from the Goldsmiths' Company about what a mark is actually worth.
READ THE POST ↗SUNDAY SCARIES: ACCURACY
Pervert glasses, nudification lawsuits, license-plate cameras that cry wolf, and real-estate fine print signed in a doorway. Accuracy is one-sided. Only clarity is mutual.
READ THE POST ↗SUNDAY SCARIES: Danger!
Every headline is a siren, and every siren is blaring at the same volume, so we stop listening to the warnings. The version of The Boy Who Cried Wolf we're actually living is the one where the wolves are walking through town in broad daylight.
READ THE POST ↗SUNDAY SCARIES: Where did this come from?
Two Odysseys, a leaked training corpus, a $50 million T. rex, and ten weeks of federal lettuce forensics. Provenance is the entire value, and its absence can become a crime scene.
READ THE POST ↗SUNDAY SCARIES: The Brilliance of Dogs
In honor of Juney: four things she spent her life teaching me. Like most dogs, she was the best teacher I ever had.
READ THE POST ↗SUNDAY SCARIES: America's Brand Pillars
America is arguably the biggest brand in the world and it's had more than a few reputation issues recently. So today we look at its pillars and compare the patriotic ones to the reality of how those same pillars survive when it's all in market.
READ THE POST ↗SUNDAY SCARIES: Now What?
The Knicks ended a 53-year drought, Bannister's miracle became a minimum, and Stonehenge got upstaged by two postholes. The honest answer to what next is not printed on any foam fingers.
READ THE POST ↗SUNDAY SCARIES: The Revisionist Present
A hallucinated KPMG report, a trimmed Wemby clip, one clear villain for our kids, and thirty percent fake reviews we trust anyway. The record gets revised while it's still warm.
READ THE POST ↗SUNDAY SCARIES: The World Is Watching
A billion people choosing the same ninety minutes is the one piece of inventory nobody can print more of. And somewhere in your business is your Monaco.
READ THE POST ↗SUNDAY SCARIES: What I Got Wrong in the First Year
TNC turns one this week. The cliche on an anniversary is to list what went right. It felt self-serving. So here's a more useful version: four things I was certain about that were, in fact, wrong.
READ THE POST ↗SUNDAY SCARIES: The Honor System
From Princeton to Cannes, four institutions just admitted the honor of their system was no longer legitimate. A 133-year-old honor code, a 180-year-old medium, a 72-year-old award, and none of them lasted three and a half years against a chatbot.
READ THE POST ↗SUNDAY SCARIES: Every Day is Mother's Day
Moms make the decisions in nearly every category, every day of the year, but the marketing industry built a $38 billion holiday around the same consumer it treats like a sitcom character for the other 364 days.
READ THE POST ↗SUNDAY SCARIES: Local Rules
The operating logic of the convenience economy is more, faster, which works on the commoditized stuff. But it breaks on the things that mean something. You can't AI a hometown.
READ THE POST ↗SUNDAY SCARIES: Glimpses of Joy
Cynicism has always been the cheapest posture in marketing, and the negativity business is booming. But the fearful story is louder than the actual one. This week: glimpses of proof that the positivity we need is right in front of us.
READ THE POST ↗SUNDAY SCARIES: The Brands Worth Becoming
Four species from the TNC Cultural Field Guide worth becoming. Not 'aspirational brands.' Brands other brands should aspire to be: the Calm Brand, the Human-Only Brand, the Explainable Brand, and the Paradox.
READ THE POST ↗SUNDAY SCARIES: What Kills Good Ideas? (not you)
Why do good ideas die? Not once they're out in market — the ones that die in hallways, or spend eternity in deck purgatory. Four species from the Cultural Field Guide play different roles in the oldest issue in marketing.
READ THE POST ↗SUNDAY SCARIES: Algorithmic Camouflage
Brands are adapting content to mimic whatever platforms seem to reward; not to express what they stand for, but to stay visible. At scale, camouflage stops being a survival strategy. It becomes the uniform.
READ THE POST ↗SUNDAY SCARIES: The C_O (formerly known as CMO)
The CMO title is dissolving and agentic shopping is the future. But the actual work of making people give a damn about your brand has never mattered more.
READ THE POST ↗SUNDAY SCARIES: CPG's Empty Shelf
AI agents now browse, compare, and buy products on behalf of humans, creating a digital shelf that nobody can see or touch. The CPG industry spent a century getting very good at being seen. The next decade belongs to the brands that figure out how to be understood.
READ THE POST ↗SUNDAY SCARIES: Beauty + AI, Perfectly Imperfect
Beauty becomes the first category where the consumer rejects optimization itself. An algorithm can match your undertone to four decimal places. But it cannot care whether you walk out feeling right.
READ THE POST ↗SUNDAY SCARIES: The Big Bluff
In poker, a bluff isn't exactly a lie. It's a story you tell the table about the cards you're holding, while knowing the real cards tell a different one. Four companies told the market one story last week, while their audiences were seeing a different one.
READ THE POST ↗SUNDAY SCARIES: History Doesn't Repeat Itself, But It Rhymes
Erewhon rhymes with Dean & DeLuca. ChatGPT rhymes with Xerox. Duolingo rhymes with MTV. Liquid Death rhymes with Swatch. Every new idea is an old idea in new packaging.
READ THE POST ↗SUNDAY SCARIES: An Unequal AI Future
A self-appointed prophet, a demon figure skater, a plumbing report, and a newspaper all told a different story about AI. They only got part of it right.
READ THE POST ↗PRESIDENTS' DAY SCARIES: Presidents and Pretenders
The President of the United States is the biggest brand-stewardship job in the world. For a special Presidents' Day Scaries: four presidents as four CMO archetypes.
READ THE POST ↗Super Bowl SUNDAY SCARIES: Week of Sellouts
A newspaper sold its newsroom. A chatbot sold its credibility. A platform sold its users. And tonight, the guy who didn't sell out gets the biggest stage in America.
READ THE POST ↗SUNDAY SCARIES: American Dreams
American Dream Mall is a $5 billion monument to late stage capitalism, and it's the United States of America in miniature. The gap between what America promised and what it delivers has never been wider.
READ THE POST ↗SUNDAY SCARIES: The Performance Economy
We can't afford the life we were sold, so we're performing the emotions anyway. Millionaire energy. Minimum balance reality. The vibes are immaculate. The rent is still due.
READ THE POST ↗SUNDAY SCARIES: When Language Stops Saying Anything at All
Listening without repeating. Complexity used to blur obvious truths. Apologies that admit nothing. Excitement that bulldozes the past. When language stops carrying accountability, it stops carrying meaning.
READ THE POST ↗SUNDAY SCARIES: CES From a Safe Distance
CES 2026 was about tech admitting it's exhausting. One smart brick instead of a platform. Quiet tools instead of dashboards. A correction at the edges and a panic at the center.
READ THE POST ↗SUNDAY SCARIES: 2026 Is the Year of the Opt-Out
People aren't pulling away because they don't care. They're pulling away because everything asks too much. Sometimes opting out is the most human move we can make.
READ THE POST ↗SUNDAY SCARIES: 25 Things I Am Excited to Leave in 2025
The Holiday Edition. As the year is at a close, it's time to say goodbye to the many things that we hope won't follow us into 2026. Plus: 2025 was the year we saw clearly.
READ THE POST ↗SUNDAY SCARIES: Closure — The End of Endings
Nothing this year closed cleanly. No finales. No satisfying resolutions. Just stalled transitions. The future didn't arrive. But it didn't cancel either.
READ THE POST ↗SUNDAY SCARIES: Irony
Netflix buys the video store. Svedka hands its Super Bowl ad to the robots. Pantone picks white. Irony is what resides in the gap between intention and outcome, and this week was a panoramic photo of the Grand Canyon of gaps.
READ THE POST ↗SUNDAY SCARIES: The Outsourcing of Accountability
When was the last time you heard someone say, 'I really f*cked up'? Everyone wants credit. Nobody wants lineage. In 2025, the orphanage is full.
READ THE POST ↗SUNDAY SCARIES: The Thanksgiving Edition
The origins of Thanksgiving provide a polarizing metaphor for our current situation with AI: the promise of a shiny new world, layered on top of a much darker story about power, assimilation, and how innovation can come at someone else's expense.
READ THE POST ↗SUNDAY SCARIES: Surrender as Strategy
WPP hires McKinsey to explain itself. Amazon tells brands to stop thinking. Coke uses 100 humans to manufacture artificial humanity. The through-line isn't innovation — it's abdication.
READ THE POST ↗SUNDAY SCARIES: Feelings and Other Simulations
Faith. Joy. Fear. Truth. Everything this week was designed to simulate sincerity and packaged for consumption. What's real doesn't scale. What's real still lasts.
READ THE POST ↗SUNDAY SCARIES: The Spooky Edition — Fear
Fear isn't lurking in the basement anymore. It's leading the quarterly offsite. On the eve of the loss of DDB, an exploration of the less spooky type of fear — and what Bernbach knew about it.
READ THE POST ↗SUNDAY SCARIES: Disappearing Connections
We've made relationships convenient but not durable, performative but not personal. Presence, the act of simply showing up, is still the greatest signal in the system.
READ THE POST ↗SUNDAY SCARIES: Truth
Walmart teaches machines to preach convenience as gospel. Brands hire algorithms to fake conviction. If honesty finally becomes the luxury good, maybe that's when we'll start treating it like one.
READ THE POST ↗SUNDAY SCARIES: Pirate Rules
An homage to Rob Schwartz's Pirate Rules: show up, listen, make the complicated simple, and make the simple simply amazing. In a world optimized for more, the only real edge is Nuance.
READ THE POST ↗SUNDAY SCARIES: An Infrastructure of Irreverence
West Ham memes, social-native must-see TV, Judy's Cafe, and the trillion-dollar AI tracks. The edges of culture don't slowly slide into the center anymore — they bulldoze it every day.
READ THE POST ↗SUNDAY SCARIES: Anchors
RaptureTok, Waiting for Godot, run clubs, and Substack's slow-cooking. When the world feels unstable, people reach for the anchors they need to steady the ship.
READ THE POST ↗SUNDAY SCARIES: Brand Is the Voice
Ben & Jerry's muzzled, TikTok's new landlords, legacy TV borrowing creator gravity, and the human proof point. When founding voices are muzzled, outsourced, or automated away, the brand itself vanishes.
READ THE POST ↗SUNDAY SCARIES: The Blur
The performative male, bullet bras, smellmaxxing, and dupe culture. Identity has blurred — gender, authenticity, originality — none of it holds steady. That's not collapse. It's the condition.
READ THE POST ↗SUNDAY SCARIES: The Inversion of Risk
Nike rewrites its own mantra, the Sweeney Effect, luxury's crisis of joy, and language as product. Bold isn't brave. Safe isn't safe.
READ THE POST ↗SUNDAY/MONDAY SCARIES: The Labor Day Edition
AI chat ads, beauty's attention recession, the fragility of authenticity, and Tayvis brand bombing. Only brands with savvy self-awareness — and something real to say — get invited to sit at the table.
READ THE POST ↗