There are no passengers on Spaceship Earth: only crew. --Marshall McLuhan
What if I turned the oldest book in the world into a digital program? That was almost, but not quite, the question I asked back in 1988, in Rome, when in some youthful abundance of ambition I wish I could recapture, I was learning two languages: Italian and JavaScript. The book in question was the Continue reading "Today began with 5 Coffees!"
How do you solve a problem that is mostly invisible, often deadly, and perpetuated unknowingly by millions of people every day? How do you make people pay attention to a problem that they think has nothing to do with them? You joke about it. Seriously.
Disruption has handed us an opportunity to promote some deeply important stories that can change the world. Here’s how you can do your part to hack the zeitgeist. We swim in a sea of invisible stories that shape what’s normal, what’s right, and what’s possible. But the calm waters of “the normal” are gone?—?as Continue reading "We were made for these times"
If every crisis is an opportunity and every failure is a lesson, then the world is brimming today with opportunity and lessons. I was hours away from getting on a plane a month ago to meet an Italian friend, Salvatore, in Tel Aviv, when he called to tell me to cancel. He’d been put under Continue reading "Coronavirus: Infecting the Zeitgeist"
The measure of a great story is not the heights of imagination to which it soars, but the depth of the truth that it unearths. Greta Thunberg is telling the most important story of our time by obeying the three commandments of great storytelling: Tell the truth. Be interesting. Live the truth.
Steve Sawyer wanted to write his own obituary, and he would have done a better job of it, but time got away from him. I say he would have done a better job at it because he did a better job than most of us at just about everything he put his hand to. After Continue reading "Steve Sawyer, 1956–2019"
So here’s a nice little illustration of one the reasons why we’re the planet’s most successful predator and yet are also capable of believing climate change doesn’t exist or that the world is flat. I’m a big fan of the You Are Not So Smart podcast, which deep dives into cognitive quirks and things like the Backfire Effect, active Continue reading "Made an Alexa skill to illustrate a cognitive…
The forest is bathed in moonlight, thick with the scent of pine, and alive with the crackle and ketchup smell of oak ablaze in a circle of stones, the sparks flying up into the night sky to create temporary constellations. Mister Fox takes an apple, runs a stick through its core, and holds it out Continue reading "The Power of Story"
“No way you humans ought to be the dominant species on this planet,” says Mister Fox, sizing us up. “By forest standards, you’re weak, you can’t see much or hear very well, your teeth are better suited to cookies than combat, and your claws are a joke — other than that Wolverine fellow. But you’ve Continue reading "Activist communication traps: Reinforcing the “Descriptive Norm”"
Mister Fox popped a blueberry into the air and pointed his whiskers skyward. I was trying to explain the US election to him. “So what was the happy ending that Occupy, Clinton, and Bernie were promising?” he asked, munching on the caught blueberry. “What do you mean,” I responded, grabbing in midair the next blueberry Continue reading "Outfoxing Trump: A Story"