Moonlights #181
Satisfy running, travel perks from AMEX, a new new way to learn, The Tiger by Gucci, and a sunflower heat map.
Hi, I’m Michael - Moonlights is a paper trail of where my head’s been lately and the things I thought were worth sharing.
Send this to a friend or anyone who might appreciate a well-curated detour from their algorithm. Thanks for being here!
Watch 👟
New York’s got this pulse that’s impossible to ignore. This video taps right into it. “I THINK I SAW YOU ON MY RUN TODAY, VOLUME II” drops you into the middle of the city with feet hitting pavement, traffic humming, the whole mess of energy swirling around SATISFY Pro Athlete Vaida Nakrošiūtė as she moves through the craziness. There’s rhythm in all of this noise, but also this kind of quiet in the middle of all that rush. If you’ve ever run in a city (or just wanted to know what it feels like), this gives you that perfect glimpse into a runner’s stride synced up with New York’s heartbeat.
Travel 🧳
American Express is rolling out a new travel app, and it looks pretty slick. Instead of bouncing between a bunch of tabs to figure out flights, hotels, and all the other moving pieces, you can do it all in one spot now. I’m kind of stoked for the new feature called Amex Passport that lets you collect digital “stamps” for the places you’ve been, RIP Gowalla and Foursquare. They’re also making it easier to check lounge waits so you can avoid the stand-in-line for 45 minutes to get some hummus experience!
Try 📰
Oboe is a new learning platform from the Anchor founders. It uses AI to spin up courses in real time - whatever you care about, however you like to learn. No digging through random links, no wasting time. The idea’s simple: instead of pouring all our effort into making machines smarter, Oboe flips it and makes people smarter. They’re based in New York, just raised a seed round, and are rolling out a public course library - you should check it out!
Watch 🎶
Gucci put out a new short called The Tiger — by Spike Jonze and Halina Reijn. It features their La Famiglia collection in a real story. Demi Moore + Edward Norton are the main show and this was worth a watch. The art direction was stellar, and also weird in the best kind of way. Plus, thirty minutes is a sweet spot for me, long enough to captivate but short enough to not waste your time.
From Me 🎒
We’ve been making a lot of quiet moves at Sunflower and have shipped dozens of updates that improve the core experience of the app. But this week was a little different, we spent the week mapping out some of our future plans across the company. So this week was lighter on the design side but heavy on the planning. I’m grateful for this kind of pause - it helps us come up for air and make sure our why is still the way. Email is one of those every day tools, so if we want a place in someone’s day, the basics have to be right and the quality bar has to stay high. That’s the way.
We closed out the week with a clearer roadmap to close the year, reviewed early feedback that keeps us honest, and a renewed sense that the opportunity we chose is still the right one. I’m excited for the next stretch of months and closing out the year with even more momentum.
Hope you all have a great week - and thanks for following along!