Category: Personal

  • Wonder Moments

    When something makes you notice and appreciate the technological marvels that we all take for granted, pay attention. Last Wednesday, my first meeting was a Zoom with one person in Warsaw (6,000 miles away) and another in Palo Alto (a mere 350 miles away). I’m in Los Angeles visiting family. I have global meetings like…

  • Thought Flavors

    Different tools can unleash different kinds of thinking, including fountain pens (a recent interest). Lately, I’ve gotten into fountain pens. A couple years back, my friend Rob gave me a nice Pilot. Then, after they went to Paris on a long-delayed mother/daughter trip, Kathi and Helena brought back a Waterman for me. I had an…

  • Will Teach for Food: a Mini Memoir

    Today’s job market for recent college grads eerily resembles the academic job market in the 1990s: what are the lessons? The great graduate job drought, a dejecting article by Anjli Raval from the Financial Times ($) arrested my attention this week. Recent college graduates face long and difficult job searches. In the U.K., there are 140 applicants…

  • Am I Becoming an iPhone Recluse?

    I started experiencing profound relief every night when I powered down my smartphone. Why is that? Overture: What follows is an atypical piece from me. It’s a lightly-edited journal entry that explores territory adjacent to “My Quest to be Whelmed” from a month ago.  Soundtrack: I’ve never suggested music to have playing when reading one…

  • My Quest to be Whelmed

    It’s hard to watch the news and harder to talk about it with people who might disagree. I’m overwhelmed. Are you? I’m a lucky guy. I have a happy marriage. I’m healthy. My wife is healthy. We live in a lovely suburb just remote enough that there’s not much crime, and we can still get…

  • A Marketing Win

    Since so much of the news is dyspeptic and terrifying, here’s a story about how 1-800-FLOWERS creates happiness and profit at the same time. My last piece was grim, so I wanted to explore something smart that 1-800-FLOWERS does that drives business and profit while also making its customers happy. 1-800-FLOWERS.com owns Harry & David as…

  • A Scary Time

    Four shorter pieces this time: the so-called L.A. riots, the middle east, more on AI, and what would we call a third party? I’m not generally anxious, but the news of the last two weeks tested that. Here are reflections about two major news stories, one unsettling NYT article that deserves more attention, and my…

  • Experience Stacks and the End of Quests

    My search for a 22-year-old comic book series led to a realization about where satisfaction comes from… or doesn’t. A quick word about Experience Stacks before we move on to our top story. Experience Stacks are the different contexts that a customer, user, or audience brings to a product or story. People improvisationally shift from context to…

  • Our Best Friends

    Mark Zuckerberg thinks our BFFs will soon be AIs. He’s wrong. They’re still dogs, and that’s never more clear than when our dogs die. I have two distinct (but oddly connected) topics this post. AI Gone Weird The number of stories continues to increase about people surrendering all common sense when it comes to AI.…

  • The Unbearable Complexity of Drug Pricing: My Ozempic Journey Continues

    Regular readers know that I’ve been taking Ozempic for the last few months because I have Type 2 Diabetes and also have struggled to lose weight. I’ve shared My Ozempic Journey from time to time (this issue is one of those times) and also talked about the Center for the Digital Future’s research about Ozempic Disruption generally. Since…