In the bestselling thriller, an assassin uses the birth certificates of dead babies to obtain fake passports. Unfortunately for the authorities, this publicised a genuine loophole in the system – the Identity and Passport Service (IPS) uncovered 1,200 cases involving the use of dead people’s identities, and it was only in 2012 (35 years after the book was released) that the loophole was closed.
All Threads
In one of the film’s most iconic scenes, Don Corleone scolds a man for visiting him on the day of his daughter’s wedding – while petting a cat. Was the cat a metaphor for Vito’s cunning nature, or perhaps his soft and calm exterior that bellies his brutal acts? Neither. According to director Francis Ford Coppola, “the cat was not planned for, I saw the cat running around the studio, and took it and put it in his hands without a word.”
The newspaper recently released a new way of showing content popularity: the articles people are spending the most time with. A nice way of demonstrating quality, and an antidote to clickbait headlines.
The Holocaust – perhaps the ultimate symbol of human evil – wouldn’t have been possible without a highly advanced railway system (Reichsbahn). At its peak, 1.6 million workers were employed to develop the network – the main transportation to concentration camps. One historian called the Reichsbahn “the largest enterprise in the capitalist world between 1920 and 1945.”
It’s certainly a societal issue, but it’s not getting worse. Research from Brunel University has shown that the proportion of people experiencing chronic loneliness has remained steady for 70 years, with 6-13% saying they feel lonely all or most of the time. Yes, it’s true that more people are living alone around the world, but loneliness and aloneness are not the same – the most restful activities, like reading and listening to music, are all done alone.
TikTok is more than a video platform – it’s a place for discovery. An Adobe report suggests that 40% of consumers use it as a search engine: looking for new recipes, fashion advice, workout routines and much more. For brands, TikTok is becoming a vital battleground for promoting their products.
TikTok has started to upload full episodes of TV shows. The pilot of Killing it, a new comedy show, racked up 4.5M views in 3 days. Is this TV in disguise?
The author of five #1 New York Times bestsellers says this about writing: “I started out basically imagining I was writing for a stadium full of replicas of myself—which made things easy because I already knew exactly what topics interested them, what writing style they liked, what their sense of humor was.” In short, focus on what you want to read, not what you think others will want to read.
A recent Stanford study shows that half of Tinder users aren’t interested in meeting offline, and nearly two-thirds are already married or in a relationship. It turns out that social connectedness and entertainment are key motivations to start swiping.
Need to save your company from going bust? Ask Tom Cruise to use your product. Ray Ban was struggling in the early 1980s, selling 18,000 pairs of its Wayfarer glasses. But just when the company was about to discontinue the range, Tom Cruise wore them in the film Risky Business and sales increased by 50%. Three years later, when Top Gun was released, Ray-Ban saw another massive increase of 40%. By the end of the decade Ray Ban was selling 1.5 million pairs annually.
Ben Greensmith, the UK manager of Tony’s Chocoloney, credits the brand’s growth to clever placement: in 2020 Ocado wanted to send a free gift to loyal customers during the pandemic and bought 400,000 bars of Tony’s Chocolonely to give out with orders. Before that “no one had heard of the company, and now 58 per cent of the UK population recognises our milk chocolate bars. That’s pretty incredible.”
Claude Hopkins, an ad executive, almost single handedly created the habit of toothbrushing. His campaigns for Pepsodent turned it into one of the best-known products on earth, with everyone from Shirley Temple to Clark Gable bragging about their ‘Pepsodent smile.’ Before the campaigns appeared, only 7% of Americans had a tube of toothpaste in their medicine chests. A decade later, that number had jumped to 65%.
We follow the herd: in supermarkets, top seller labels result in an average sales lift of 41%.
In 1903, the French sports newspaper L’Auto needed a way to increase newspaper sales and beat off competition from Le Vélo. The chief cycling journalist created a six-day cycling race all around France, and invited the most famous road racers of the time to compete. The Tour de France increased L’Auto’s circulation more than sixfold, and is now watched by 1 billion people each year.