The US has tech and France has luxury goods: The roots of French dominance lie in a luxury ecosystem that dates to the court of Louis XIV, and a culture of corporate raiding that began with Bernard Arnault. After gaining control of LVMH in 1989,… Read More
AI is going to be very disruptive, right? At this point, I think it is pretty clear to most that the answer is yes, almost regardless of what industry you’re in. But is it going to be really disruptive? Like disruptive in the Clayton Christensen… Read More
I just learned about Blackbird’s technology platform and the restaurant loyalty program that they are currently building. On the surface, the way it works is that you walk into a restaurant and then tap your phone on one of their NFC-enabled chips (see above). This… Read More
Let’s assume that you’re Mayor of your city and that, for whatever reason, you have no need to pander to voters. You’re a benevolent dictator. You can do whatever you think is best overall for the city and it will just happen. What would you… Read More
Like everyone else, I have started playing around with Midjourney to create AI-generated images. Here are two that I created last night using the prompt: “A silver Land Rover Defender driving through a snowstorm in the mountains of Utah.” Now, you can tell that these… Read More
Last week, the Centre Pompidou — which is Europe’s largest modern art museum — announced that it has acquired its very first NFTs (18 pieces by 13 artists) and that it will be exhibiting the collection this spring. This makes them the first museum in… Read More
As far as I know, there are now at least two mercury-like and bean-like public art sculptures in the US by Anish Kapoor. The first is, of course, in Chicago’s Millennium Park (pictured above). Commonly referred to as just “The Bean”, the sculpture was dedicated… Read More
The central bank tightening and interest rate hikes that we saw last year will come to an end in the first quarter of 2023 as inflation gets under control. This will ultimately lead to a recession but my sense is that it will be more… Read More
This morning, I came across an FT article talking about how mainland Chinese people are right now flocking to Macau to receive western mRNA vaccines. Apparently the Special Administrative Region has a single hospital offering the western varietals to “tourists”, and lots of people now… Read More
It has become tradition around here that at the end of each year I write down my predictions for the following one. And in 2022, I did that here. The overarching point of writing something like this down publicly is not necessarily to be right… Read More
BRANDON DONNELLY 