Category: Politics
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The New York Times’ Moral Lapse
The Gray Lady blew it when it decided to review Jared Kushner’s new memoir, no matter how scathing the review. Your correspondent also blew it by posting about the review. When people learn that I’m an atheist often the first thing they say is, “oh, so you don’t believe in God?” “No,” I push back…
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Nothing is ever meant to be
The difference between stories and real life is that stories make sense. We humans love stories. We love to tell stories, and we love to consume stories even more. “Tell me a story!” little children command. Whether our stories are sweeping novels like Anna Karenina, a sweeping collection of TV series like more than a half…
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What Fox News Should Have Said
A new campaign by Check My Ads to get advertisers to stop supporting the conservative news network prompted an entirely inadequate response. On Thursday, the folks at Check My Ads received widespread coverage about their new campaign to stop advertisers from supporting Fox News. The three Check My Ads founders—Claire Atkin, Nandini Jammi, and Mikel…
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Trust is Analog
A handshake is worth a thousand Zoom calls. This has implications for going back to the office, building corporate culture, and democracy. You’re on a short elevator ride with one other person. Neither of you speak, but you get a lot of information. Does the other person politely keep a distance? Make momentary eye contact?…
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Anti-Vaxxers and the Arts of Persuasion
People decide with their hearts and then later justify those decisions with their heads. Once you accept this, then how you approach communications changes because all communication is about persuasion in one way or another. Learning simply to ask the question, “where is the heart in this?” can be powerful, although it can also be…
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Secret Stories: Microsoft, Activision, Spotify, Joe Rogan, Neil Young, Facebook
When a big business story hits I try to ask myself, “what else is going on?” When Amazon bought Whole Foods in 2017, for example, the obvious story was that the ecommerce giant wanted to tap into the nearly $800B annual U.S. grocery business. Less obvious was that by buying Whole Foods Amazon also acquired…
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Micro-post: Why I miss “Glee”
The last episode of Glee aired in March of 2015, more than six years ago. I still miss it even though the suds-to-singing ratio got out of whack in the final seasons, so I didn’t watch regularly. Despite the high school soap opera—or maybe because there’s no escape from high school until graduation for most…