Category: Personal

  • Notes from Bergen 3: Paternal Victories

    “Dad,” my teenager daughter asked one recent morning as she picked her way through over-easy eggs, seedy toast and Earl Grey tea. “What have you eaten for breakfast?” At a quick scan it’s an innocuous question, but down, deep down, subterranean with stalactites, a parenting victory glints in dim light. Here’s what I mean. This year…

  • Pragmatics: you can only walk through one door at a time

    Sharon washed up at the table next to me during a post-conference dinner here in Bergen and opened up over beer and reindeer steaks. She’s a bright young woman about to finish a Masters in finance and economics who doesn’t know how to approach the post-graduation void. Sharon started reeling off different directions and opportunities,…

  • Against Disruption: Louis Menand, Douglas Adams, Books and Technology

    Have you ever smacked into a glass door when you didn’t realize it was closed?  I have.  It hurts.  The intersection of my face and a glass door happened at my great aunt’s tiny desert house in the 80s, where the mix of a trick of the sunlight and my distracted boyhood mind made the…

  • My 2014 in Books

    I read a lot — magazines, two newspapers, email newsletters, and countless social-media-shared links I chase down digital rabbit holes. I’d never know anything, for example, without Jason Hirshhorn’s magnificent daily Media Redefined. But I’m lost without books.  Actual books.  Whether paper or digital, if I’m not reading at least two books then I get…

  • Notes from Bergen 2: Walking Meditation and Gershwin

    The “ion” trailing at the end of the word “meditation” reveals buried movement in usually concrete and restful nouns. Like “locomotion” or “concentration” or “constipation” or “friction” or even the simple “action,” the word “meditation” conveys fragile, balletic flow, conveys just how difficult it is to be without thinking. Meditation challenges me. I’m busy-minded at…

  • In Praise of Atul Gawande’s “The Checklist Manifesto”

    I first smacked my forehead (ouch!) against a wall of decision fatigue when I was the Editor in Chief of iMedia Connection (a daily trade journal covering a different collision between marketing and technology). The best part of editing involves coaxing order from mess, making points pointier and helping writers to say what they want…

  • Notes from Bergen

    Our two most precious currencies are time and attention.  Money, our more conventional currency, helps to focus attention and to make us chary of how we spend our time. I write this sitting in Chaos Coffee, perched at the edge of the University of Bergen campus and a block from Nygård Skole where W, my…

  • Journey Back, Journey On: Watching my son rediscover a comic book 4 years later

    Saturday morning. Mom’s at yoga. Dad’s puttering downstairs. 13-year-old Big Sis is hibernating — those pesky teenagers. What’s an almost-9-year boy old to do? That’s my imagination of what W, my son, was thinking after I shushed him for the fifth time when he was playing in the open area right next to where his sister’s puberty-induced coma went…

  • Two new posts on Medium.com, plus thoughts on platform proliferation

    The past week or so I’ve enjoyed writing on Medium.com. I mentioned a post about Tina Fey’s “Bossypants as Startup Bible” here before, and since then I’ve written two more: eBay’s Sublime Terror: Staring down the precipice while hunting Babylon 5 DVDs and Barnes & Noble’s real problem: In praise of chunky scale Medium.com is…

  • Ahhh– the right email filter at the right time

    Sometimes a tiny adjustment can make a huge difference. Example: I have a backup email address where copies of emails that I might otherwise miss are routed. Recently, I started using this backup email address for other things as well– a new use case. The problem, however, was that suddenly I couldn’t see the new…