BradBerens.com
Thoughts about where our real and digital worlds collide.

  • 8 Thoughts on Michael Wolff’s “Fire and Fury: Inside the Trump White House”

    I picked up my copy of Michael Wolff’s Fire and Fury: Inside the Trump White House last night at 5:45pm; finished it today at 5:45pm. Here’s what I think. 1. It’s fascinating in an I-can’t-look-away-at-the-17-car-pileup-with-lots-of-ambulances way, but I didn’t learn anything reading it. The book is the signature aria in a media opera of confirmation…

  • Why using cash won’t protect your privacy

    We need to upgrade our nightmares, thank and excuse the monsters under our beds, and tell our bogeymen that it’s time to make room for a new generation of things that make us go “eek!” Some of our fears are analog antiques in a digital world. Here’s an example of what I mean: in our…

  • My 2017 in Books

    This is the fourth 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 2016 list here,…

  • Death Star Scenario: Amazon Prime Bank

    If Amazon decided to move into the world of commercial banking, would the company then revolutionize how people relate to their money as profoundly and irrevocably as it has already changed how people read? Why do I pose this question? A provocative finding from our forthcoming Future of Money and Banking report inspired it: when…

  • Brief review of “Autonomous” by Annalee Newitz

    Annalee Newitz’s Autonomous is a just-released and consistently interesting near-future dystopian science fiction novel set about 120 years in the future at the intersection of robotics, AI and biotech. Newitz, the author (with whom I went to grad school many years ago), has created an intriguing world that combines golden age science fiction tropes about…

  • From the archives: the Amazon Tip Jar

    My Amazon obsession is longstanding, as evidenced by this piece from way back that I stumbled across today. The date was October 6, 2009, and the original title was “Open Letter to Jeff Bezos: Please Create an Amazon.com Tip Jar.” If you want to see the original context and comments you can find it here…

  • Email: a modest proposal

    Here’s a sentence that I have yet to hear: “Y’know, I just don’t get enough email.” I do hear the opposite quite a bit. “Dear Lord, I’ll never get through all this email.” “I have 7,000 unopened messages.” “I want to declare email bankruptcy and just start over.” Occasionally, some optimistic soul achieves the Nirvana…

  • Why is “me too” happening now?

    It’s challenging to go onto Facebook and Twitter right now and face the ever-swelling river of “me too” posts from women sharing their horrible stories of sexual harassment. It’s good that these posts are happening, good that it’s challenging. Part of what I find challenging is that I don’t know how to respond other than…

  • What comes after smartphones?

    With all the press and the inescapable ads for new iPhones, Samsung Galaxy, Google Pixel and other snazzy devices, it’s hard to think of the smart phone as a transitional technology. But it is. Here are three recent indicators: The Third Generation Apple Watch that was announced last month does not need to be anchored…

  • Brief Rant about Email: Change the Topic, Change the Subject Line

    Look, you’re busy. I know you’re busy. I’m busy too.  We’re all busy. But there’s one inviolable rule of email communications — the prime directive, the Federation’s highest law — and it’s simple. If you change the topic of an email thread, then you have to change the subject line too. That is, you have…