BradBerens.com
Thoughts about where our real and digital worlds collide.
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Amazon’s Secret Strategy with its new Department Stores
Amazon never does things for only the obvious reasons, which makes me wonder what the company is up to with its latest retail foray: department stores. Last week, the Wall Street Journal reported: The new retail spaces will be around 30,000 square feet, smaller than most department stores, which typically occupy about 100,000 square feet,…
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Book Review: Go read “Joey Somebody” by Joey Dumont immediately
The short version of this review is simple: drop everything, and order a copy of the new memoir, Joey Somebody: The Life and Times of a Recovering Douchebag. Then read it as soon as you can. You won’t regret doing so. Here’s the longer version: Usually when I’m reviewing a book I try to be objective, or at…
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Wearing a mask is like wearing pants
To the people who think that wearing a mask infringes on their liberties, then how do you feel about pants? If a nudist demanded to be able to, ah, let it all hang out in Starbucks, plopped down next to your table, and then claimed that his or her liberties were being trampled if you…
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Technologies of Grief
When a family member dies the script is clear: you scramble the jets, cancel your appointments, lean on a friend to watch the dog, and get there. For me, that means getting to Los Angeles from Portland. My aunt, Marlene Meyer, my mother’s sister, died on May 15th. She was 86, vibrant, still working as…
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It’s time: subscribe to your local paper; turn off your ad blocker. We did.
We live in Portland, and a few years back we let our subscription to the local paper, The Oregonian, lapse because we just weren’t reading it regularly. Then came Coronavirus, and suddenly I found myself checking the OregonLive home page daily, multiple times per day. It didn’t take long for the penny to drop: we…
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Who will create the best streaming video experience?
At this month’s Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, TiVo announced the release of a new gadget, the TiVo Stream 4K. On the surface, the TiVo Stream 4K looks like other “dongles” — Amazon’s Fire Stick, Google’s Chrome Stick, and the Roku Streaming Stick are all examples — that plug into a TV’s HDMI slot…
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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…
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My 2019 in Books
This is the sixth year that I’ve kept a running list of every book that I’ve completed for the first time and then shared that list here as the first thing I post on either the last day of the old year or the first of the new. You can see the 2018 list here, the…