Category: Personal

  • When Great Artists Are Bad People

    Artists can have dark sides, some alleged and some convicted. Should evil actions by artists change how we experience and judge the art? Let’s start with two thought experiments. #1. How would things be different today if newly uncovered evidence revealed that William Shakespeare was a pedophile who assaulted the boy actors in his company?…

  • Today’s Wildfires, Yesterday’s Memories

    There’s only one story on my mind this week: the Palisades Fire in Los Angeles. The last few days tore my attention to shreds and patches. I was in Vegas for CES when the Palisades Fire exploded in my hometown of Los Angeles. I flip-flopped between thoughtful business meetings and anxious refreshes of the Cal…

  • B.L.U.E. revisited…

    In today’s issue of my newsletter, The Brad Berens Weekly Dispatch, I revisited a piece I wrote on this blog back in 2019: Am I B.L.U.E.? (Bored, Lonely, Uncomfortable… Ever). Here’s the context from The Dispatch: Last week, the MSNBC host Chris Hayes had a peculiar op-ed in The New York Times about the value of boredom that’s a…

  • Movie Marketing Magic and… Stupidity

    Two Hollywood stories this week prompted a mediation on the two things movies need to succeed—and yes, it’s only two.  Two things in the movie biz happened last week: one fantastic and one fatuous. Let’s start with the dumb one. On Tuesday, the Wall Street Journal ($) ran an article titled, “Here’s a Hollywood Twist: Streaming Success…

  • Incursions of Memory

    A delightful podcast provoked three unexpected memories and a think about the differences between coincidence and serendipity. Let me start with a PSA: if you have any affection for or curiosity about Shakespeare, then don’t miss the delightful book Shakespeare: the Man Who Pays the Rent by Judi Dench and Brendan O’Hea, which is part discussion about…

  • Family as the Ship of Theseus

    For some irksome reason, the old philosophical question about the Ship of Theseus has come to new life as a business cliché. Type “Ship of Theseus and business” into your favorite search engine, and you’ll find numberless (yawn… whoops, sorry… started to drift off there) articles about organizations as Ships of Theseus. If you’re so lucky that you…

  • Experience Stacks and Travel Back

    Returning to places you’ve been can reactivate old contexts and relationships in a special way. 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 context during experiences, which…

  • My Ozempic Journey: Packing Up

    Sometimes, when you know a change is coming, the anticipation itself can create other sorts of change. Regular Dispatch readers might remember a few issues back—in Will Ozempic Kill Movie Theaters?—when I explored how the possibility of 10% of the U.S. population going onto GLP-1 weight-loss drugs like Ozempic might be the final nail in the collective coffin…

  • Serendipity Engines

    In commerce, there’s an incalculable difference between search and discovery. Discovery requires serendipity, and there’s no better source of serendipity than independent bookstores. Wednesday, I was in Eugene, a small Oregon city a couple hours south of Portland. I dropped into the legendary Smith Family Bookstore, where I found a $4.00 copy of Violent Spring by Gary Phillips,…

  • Cheating at Wordle

    In which I confess to a weak moment that also has some interesting implications, or at least that’s what I’m telling myself. Bless me, Reader, for I have sinned. La Profesora and I aren’t competitive when the stakes are real, but this mutual support does not apply to vicious games of Gin Rummy or to…