The College Mass Discard Problem, Retro Restaurants and More Generated Podslop | #515
05.21.2026 - The most fascinating non-obvious stories of the week curated by Rohit Bhargava.
Greetings from sunny LA! It’s been a travel week with talks for AT&T and Warner Brothers and some private gatherings as well - including a book launch event for my friend (and Ideapress author) Jamie Shapiro. In stories this week, you’ll read about an emotional new museum opening, how one non-profit is trying to solve the mass discard problem on college campuses as students leave for the summer, and how Pizza Hut is bringing back retro restaurants.
Enjoy this week’s stories and stay curious!
Rohit
Solving The Mass Discard Problem on College Campuses
Imagine a day or series of days when people pile up all sorts of stuff on the curb and give it away for free. Unopened food, near new mini-fridges. Perfectly good furniture. Even digital devices like monitors or TVs. Anyone can come up and take anything they want. This is the reality on college campuses across the country right now as students move out of dorms and find themselves unable or unwilling to take all the stuff they used all year. So they just leave it on the curb.
Over 15 years ago, one student witnessed this annual ritual and decided to try and do something about it to help find a good home or reuse for all those curb-side possessions. His national non-profit is called the Post-Landfill Action Network (PLAN) and works to create a school-run, student-led, zero waste initiative on campuses that works with over 200 schools around the US. At his former alma mater at the Universty of New Hampshire, volunteers spend 600 hours collecting and sorting items left by students departing for the summer. Items are cleaned, put into storage and then saved for resale when students come back after the summer.
This is the sort of non-obvious idea for a non-profit that I love to see stories about. Solving a problem, educating people and helping us manage our throw-away culture to make a change.
Pizza Hut and the Retro Restaurant Movement
For delivery pizza, the leader for years has been Dominos. For sit down pizzerias, there are plenty of options in most cities. Pizza Hut has largely been stuck in the middle and left behind. It has been the weakest performing brand in parent company YUM Brands’ portfolio and the chain’s U.S. same store sales fell 4% last quarter. One franchisee who owns nearly 100 locations has a vision to try and turn this slide around: by bringing back the look and ambiance of the old Pizza Hut restaurants many of us might remember from the 80s and 90s.
Tapping a larger retro trend, owner Tim Sparks is aiming to restore what he feels is the core identity of the brand and what sets them apart from their delivery competitors. The renovated restaurants in his portfolio include the iconic salad bar, stained glass overhead lighting, plastic checkered tablecloths, red vinyl booths and even the chain’s legendary “Book It” program that offered students a free personal pizza for achieving a monthly reading target.
It will be interesting to watch how this strategy plays out and whether nostalgia alone is enough to get diners to come back in to the old school Pizza Hut they might remember.
The Most Depressing Museum In The World Has A Message To Share
I’ve been to my fair share of depressing museums. The Holocaust museums in LA and DC and parts of the African American Museum in DC definitely qualify. The sadness built into most of them is intentional. A way for each of us to relive past injustices and tragedies so perhaps we can all be a voice to help prevent them from happening again the future. This week Megan Markle inaugurated the Lost Screen Memorial at Place des Nations in Geneva during World Health Assembly Week. It’s aim is to spotlight the “human toll of unchecked digital spaces” while also offering a call for coordinated global action to make digital spaces safe by design.
“Their faces ask the world questions we can no longer avoid: how many more millions of children will be harmed by products that, while innovative, are still designed without sufficient safeguards? When will children be able to enjoy the extraordinary potential of technology without it compromising their wellbeing.”
The memorial features 50 lightboxes each with the story of a child who died because of some form of online harm - cyberbullying, grooming, sextortion or exposure to self-harm content. It’s an urgent message as part of the movement to recognize child online safety as a public health issue and major societal challenge. This is a challenge that we can solve through demanding more accountability from the companies and leaders building the technology we use every day.
Amazon Invents Another Way to Steal Media With Ai Generated Podslop
Amazon just announced Alexa Podcasts, a new Alexa+ feature available to paying Amazon Prime members. The platform allows you to ask for information on any topic and it will auto-generate an “explainer” podcast episode of any length with AI voices that are in one of their default personalities (Alexa, brief, sweet, chill, and sassy) along with its conversational style. The episode will then pull content from over 200 news sources that have “signed up” to participate, including “Associated Press, Reuters, The Washington Post, TIME, Forbes, Business Insider, Politico, USA Today, and publications from Conde Nast, Hearst and Vox.”
So essentially Amazon has strong-armed media partners into providing their high quality content in order to build what is being described as a podslop generator at scale? It’s no wonder the announcement is generating widespread backlash online.
The sad part is how the leadership of many of these content partners likely felt like they had no choice but to participate just so they don’t get left behind. This is the reality of public pressure on media leaders right now to dive into every new AI initiative. Even the ones that are pretty clearly terrible ideas.
The Non-Obvious Media Recommendation of the Week
Undark
“Undark is a non-profit, editorially independent digital magazine exploring the intersection of science and society. The name Undark arises from a murky, century-old mingling of science and commerce — one that resulted in a radium-based industrial and consumer product, called Undark, that was both awe-inspiring and, as scientists would only later prove, toxic and deadly. We appropriate the name as a signal to readers that our magazine will explore science not just as a “gee-whiz” phenomenon, but as a frequently wondrous, sometimes contentious, and occasionally troubling byproduct of human culture.”
This week’s pick for a media recommendation is one of the sources I often turn to for some fascinating long reads about science and society that will get you thinking and I suspect the stories you’ll find here will do the same for you. A good one when you have some time to explore new ideas and the archive is excellent as well.
The Non-Obvious Book of the Week
Moral Ambition
What is the biggest problem in the world is a lack of moral ambition from those in a position to change the world either through their financial or intellectual resources? This is the simple but powerful idea at the heart of this book that was our pick for the Most Important Book of 2025 in the Non-Obvious Book Awards. The author, Rutger Bregman, has been on a tour at world events often speaking uncomfortably candid truth to the faces of billionaires that bring the legendary Dutch reputation for candor to life.
Beyond writing a book on the topic, he has partnered with leading organizations (starting with Harvard) to build his School for Moral Ambition to teach this way of thinking to those who need to hear it most. Imagine if the smart minds powering innovations for tomorrow cared deeply about the morality of their solutions. It is movements like this which might actually make this a reality. For that reason, this is a book that is worth your time to read and share. We could all use a bit more moral ambition in our daily lives.
About the Non-Obvious Book Selection of the Week:
Every week I share a new “non-obvious” book selection. Titles featured here may be new or classic books, but the date of publication doesn’t really matter. My goal is to elevate great reads that perhaps deserve a second look which you might have otherwise missed.
Even More Non-Obvious Stories …
Every week I always curate more stories than I’m able to explore in detail. Instead of skipping those stories, I started to share them in this section so you can skim the headlines and click on any that spark your interest:
People Are Getting Plastic Surgery to Look More AI-Generated
Google Revamps Its Search Bar for the First Time in 25 Years
Can women’s football help reconnect North and South Korea?
Southwest Airlines bans robot passengers after humanoid Stewie’s viral mile-high moment
This children’s book startup wants to unseat Scholastic as the king of the book fair
If You Used Insider Knowledge to Score Big on Polymarket, You May Now Be in Huge Trouble
New Podcast Episode!
Can belief alone be a magic power to ignore pain, create success and change your life? That’s the question we’ll explore this week as I talk to my friend Nir Eyal about why belief is so powerful and how to use it in your life to achieve what you want.