Category: Politics

  • 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?…

  • 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…

  • 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…

  • 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…

  • Listen to me on this week’s “Laugh Your Cry Out” podcast!

    I’m delighted to share that I’m the guest on this week’s episode of “Laugh Your Cry Out with Joey Dumont,” a podcast about (and I’m quoting here) men’s mental health and masculinity [seen] through the lens of fatherhood, politics, and the world of business. Our enjoyable conversation has a mediocre book as its point of…

  • Trump’s Shakespearean Moment?

    An exchange between Senator Elizabeth Warren and Meet the Press host Chuck Todd on the January 5th episode caught my ear. Warren implied that President Trump ordered  the assassination of Iranian general Soleimani to move the world’s focus from his coming impeachment trial rather than for reasons of U.S. national security: SEN. ELIZABETH WARREN: Donald Trump was doing what Donald Trump…

  • Will Twitter decide the 2020 presidential election?

    Is Mayor Pete Buttigieg really surging? Is Senator Elizabeth Warren really the new frontrunner? Can any of the Democratic candidates match Trump’s social media presence?  Most Americans, regardless of party, will agree that Donald Trump has been an unusual President of the United States, including his use of Twitter. Between his personal Twitter account (@realDonaldTrump)…

  • Brief Review: “The Fifth Risk” by Michael Lewis

    Lewis is such a remarkable writer that I sometimes find myself envious of his ability to forge a compelling story where there doesn’t seem to be anything. It’s useful to contrast The Fifth Risk with Bob Woodward’s Fear, which I inhaled last month. Woodward’s book ferrets out things that happened — crescendos of malevolence and arias…

  • New Media Math & the President’s NYT Obsession

    Earlier this month, I argued that the president has a fundamentally different way of measuring media. Instead of balancing positive against negative coverage in order to suss out average sentiment, the president views all media coverage as a tool to advance his agenda. The media is both incapable of understanding this different sort of math and…

  • AQ: The President’s No-Lose Media Equation

    Here’s a thought experiment: what if the White House held a press conference and nobody came? What if the president tweeted and nobody saw it? What if late-night talk show hosts didn’t mention the president once during their monologues? These things would disturb the president more than the sharpest satirical barb because the president understands…