Snapchat and Growth Hacking

I first signed up for Snapchat years ago, but after being completely befuddled by its user interface, I deleted it pretty quickly. I’ve been hearing so much about it lately that I decided to reinstall it and play around. Overall, it’s been fun talking with friends and checking it out. It’s still inscrutable, but it’s […]

The Green New Deal Has a Branding Problem

Nope, this branding problem has nothing to do with waging war against lobbyists, pseudoscience, or the “Estbalishment” – it’s grammar. Grammar is the great equalizer. It has an equal harshness for all of us, regardless of what you believe in. There’s beauty in that. Every time I read any reference to the Green New Deal, […]

Email’s Walled Garden

Online publishing seems to be in kind of a weird phase these days. With the death of Google Reader many years ago (gone too soon!), the self-publishing and RSS ecosystem seems to have left the mainstream consciousness. For years, I’ve been watching my favorite authors lament its disappearance and their subsequent battle to stay engaged […]

NaNoWriMo (my way)

I was reading the most recent newsletter from Shawn Blanc about posting every day during November and it inspired me to do the same. This is a total wimp-out version of NaNoWriMo but let’s be honest – I’m not writing a novel. Not in November 2019. Not ever. But! But, I’ll be publishing something here […]

Keep Your Eyes Open

This photo is undoubtedly one of the coolest, most impactful photos I’ve ever taken. I love it. I took it when I was in Freiburg im Breisgau, Germany last week. I’d never been to Europe before and it was really cool to get a firsthand view of the juxtaposition of modern life going on in […]

What Are Toes For?

The other day, my daughter (8) asked me why people have toes. I explained to her that “Toes help you balance. You wouldn’t be able to walk well without them.” I didn’t Google it, but that’s always what I’d heard. Is that right? Who even decides that as a parent, you get to instill a […]

Tim Ferriss vs. Dr. Peter Attia

I was recently listening to an incredible episode of the Tim Ferris show and stopped dead in my tracks when Tim said this: In fact, I would say for the vast majority of my adolescence and certainly throughout high school and college, I somehow came to the conclusion that I was just not designed to […]

Your Two-Tap Mental Health Assessment

I was recently sending a message on my phone and couldn’t find an emoji I expected to be in my “frequently used” list. There were a bunch of really snarky little characters in there and it made me wonder how closely that list tracks with how I was feeling mentally and emotionally. Does your list […]

The Shutdown Drags On

This NYT article about federal workers scrambling to make ends meet is full of disgusting anecdotes. There are several things you could pull-quote, but here’s one for instance: Across the country, idled federal workers and contractors are taking up last-resort jobs with ride-hailing services and delivery apps. They are flooding school districts with applications to […]