Dua Lipa's Manifesto Library has opened inside Livraria Lello in Portugal, one of the most photographed bookshops on Earth. It features 100 books that have been banned somewhere in the world, sorted under the headings Control, Voice, Memory and Power.

Whether it is Reese Witherspoon, Oprah or Dua Lipa, celebrity book clubs work by attaching a famous person's taste to a list of titles and that list moves units. But is reading a banned book actually resistance?

So I looked social listening data in YouScan. While much of the conversation focuses on institutional battles, there is a distinct and growing cluster that reveals people bypassing traditional libraries and schools entirely.

There's a rumour that Taylor Swift and Travis Kelce will get married at Madison Square Garden. True or not, it's a signal that weddings are being optimised for the feed. Because somewhere, a woman who isn't famous, will feel the same pressure for her wedding to get that reach.

YouScan social listening data tells you how far branded weddings have gone: "content creator" now appears as a standalone vendor category in wedding planning conversations. Couples are not just hiring someone to document the day, they are hiring someone to produce it. And brands to sponsor it.

I wrote about what that means, where it comes from, and what gets lost.

I’m oldschool. I need to write things down by hand when I need to think. But I increasingly found that I was one of the few people who had a notebook and a pen, instead of typing on a smartphone or taking screenshots.

Then I started see in @YouScan social listening data, that what was once tagged as a "grandma hobby" tag, is now resurging as digital detox.

When AI can be generated everything instantly, the things that take time increase in value. Handwriting is becoming a proof of presence. A way of saying: I was here, I chose these words, and that mattered.

I wrote about handwriting as post-AI behaviour, why people are reconsidering pen and paper again, what they're really opting out of, and why the resurgence is more complicated than it looks.

#sociallistening #culturalinsights #culturalstrategy

William Bruce Cameron famously said “Not everything that can be counted counts, and not everything that counts can be counted.”

But we live in a world obsessed with quantification fixation. And even sleep has become a performance metric.

Using YouScan social listening, I looked at conversations about sleep scores and what happens to us when we outsource decisions over our own bodies to algorithms.

And happens when we escape the cult of optimisation?