Hi!

I rarely talk about my life outside of Now I Know in this newsletter. Today is an exception of sorts.

(If you want the tl;dr version of this one: I’m working on a new project for Comms professionals, and I need to grow my network, so if you work in Comms or can intro me to someone who does, please reply to say hi.)

As you probably know, Now I Know isn’t my day job — it’s a side project/hobby. I rarely talk about my life outside of Now I Know here, By day, I’m actually a reporter for the Daily Planet, Metropolis’s biggest newspa— no, wait, that’s someone else. 😀 By day, I work in Communications for a Fortune 150 company; I’m not going to talk about that in specifics here but it’s easy to look me up and figure out the details. All the stuff I’m about to say is my opinion, not my employers, yadda yadda yadda, and shouldn’t be attributed to anyone but me — you get the idea.

Anyway:

The Comms landscape is changing rapidly because of the emergence and adoption of generative — and soon, agentic — AI. I’m seeing it first-hand with Now I Know data. People are getting information from chatbots, either directly (by going to ChatGPT, Claude, or the like) or indirectly (via Google’s AI answers widget embedded in their search results). That means fewer clicks to source materials, and websites in particular. How you tell your story in 2025 is a lot different than how you told it in 2023. We’re at a major inflection point in how we communicate, and how Comms professionals need to guide the organizations they serve.

The good news for me is that I’m typically ahead of the curve when it comes to transformative tech changes. I built my first website in 1995, three years before Google launched. Fifteen years ago — months before Instagram and Snapchat launched, and years before TikTok — I was hired by a major brand to establish their social media presence. That same year, I started Now I Know, nearly a decade before Substack emerged to help establish the blog-as-newsletter genre. So as you can imagine, I’m knee-deep in learning about how AI is changing things, and I’ve learned a ton already. And I want to share it.

That brings me to today’s ask:

• If you work in Comms, reach out — just reply to this email.
• If you know someone in Comms, particularly in a Fortune 500 company that you can introduce me to, please do so.

Why? Because I’m probably going to start a second email newsletter: a weekly, focused on helping Comms professionals understand and take advantage of the technology stack available to them.

I’m in very early stages on this — I have a few directions and ideas, and your outreach and intros will help me refine them. Plus, hopefully, they’ll lead to my first subscribers. I have a deep understanding of the newsletter space through Now I Know, and of the intersection of comms and tech through my career — the hardest part about this new project is this phase where everything is amorphous and I have no readers. So if you can help, I’d truly appreciate it.

Thanks, and now, back to you regularly-scheduled Now I Know!

Three Things I Learned This Week

A few weeks ago, I piloted this section of the Weekender. The feedback was across-the-board positive, so let’s give it another go! 😀

Being super curious, I learn a lot of new things each week. But not everything has an interesting story behind it (or, at least, not one that warrants 500 or so words). But I still want to share them!

Why are a lot of goose ‘geese” but a bunch of moose aren’t “meese”? This two-minute video does a better job explaining it than I ever could.

While I’m on the subject of words that don’t exist, is “prepone” a word? It’s hotly debated. “Postpone” — to put something off until a later time — is definitely a word, so it only makes sense that “prepone” would be, and the Cambridge Dictionary says it is. (It’s a verb meaning “to do something at an earlier time than was planned or is usual.”) Merriam-Webster isn’t so sure, though; they’re considering it for inclusion in their dictionary because “India has the second-largest English-speaking population in the world” and the “word” is used often there. But it hasn’t quite yet met their criteria for inclusion.

I’m generally not a fan of the “weird laws” trivia genre and rarely write about it. But I was looking up recipes for latkes this week (feel free to send one if you have one you like!) and discovered that until 2021, people in Western Australian couldn’t possess more than 50kg of potatoes without being an authorized agent of the Potato Marketing Corporation of Western Australia. The law, passed after World War II, was designed to stabilize the price of potatoes and ensure year-round availability, and was repealed in 2016.

The Now I Know Week In Review

Monday: The Cost of Being a Simpsons Superfan: “Bort” isn’t a name, but it can cause you a headache!

Tuesday: A Free Race Ticket, With Ups and Downs: Escalator trivia is my favorite trivia. Really.

Wednesday: The Escapee: He should change his name to something with the initials SKP.

Thursday: A Planely Bad Way to Quit: The slide ride must have been fun, though.

Long Reads and Other Things

Here are a few things you may want to check out over the weekend. And apologies if any are behind a paywall — I was able to access all three without issue, but paywalls are funky sometimes!

1) “Playing Santa Does Strange Things to a Man. What It Did to Bob Rutan Was Even Stranger.” (Esquire, 30 minutes, December 2025). The subhead: “Bob Rutan is legendary among the tight-knit fraternity of Macy’s Santa Clauses. Like many of these men, playing Santa changed Bob. Profoundly. His story is one of struggle and failure, heartbreak and grace and—yes—the magic of Christmas.”

2) “How the Fridge Changed Flavor” (New Yorker, 9 minutes, June 2024). I never really thought about this, but it’s kind of obvious, no? If you refrigerate foods, they’ll taste differently than otherwise — and because refrigeration is now widespread (commercially and residentially), we’ve caused a fundamental change to how food tastes.

3) “How to Raise a 165-Year-Old Cat” (Atlas Obscura, 11 minutes, December 2015). The cats are only actually 30 years old, but that’s a lot longer than the average cat lifespan, so the 165 years thing is a “in dog years”-style conversion (but, uh, in cat years).

Have a great weekend!

Dan