There are a lot of people, mostly in Silicon Valley, who knew Shel Israel better than I did. But Shel made a positive impression on me and so many others, so I wanted to pay tribute as best I could, now that he’s gone. In 2006, Shel and Robert Scoble published Naked Conversations: How Blogs…
Newsletter 106: Writing incurs pain, but it’s up to you which pain to suffer and when. Plus, a new survey on AI and the Writing Profession, Bookshop.org surges, three people to follow, and three books to read. Writing? Choose your pain. Writing, like anything else that requires effort and growth, involves pain. The good news…
Starting today, you can participate in the “AI and the Writing Profession” survey. This survey is a joint project of Gotham Ghostwriters and Bernoff.com. Dan Gerstein, the CEO of Gotham Ghostwriters, proposed this project to me and I enthusiastically agreed to become his partner in it. The web is filled with all manner of opinions…
I do developmental editing. That means I edit text for everything from meaning and connotation to rhetorical consistency to subject-verb agreement. Obviously (he wrote arrogantly) that requires judgment, and cannot be replaced by a machine. But what about copy editors (or as they are known in the UK, subeditors)? Copy editors check text for spelling…
I’ve closely tracked the impact of technology on media for more than 30 years now. The impact of AI is of a completely different character. It is orders of magnitude faster. It moves so quickly that you cannot talk about it as if it were one trend — it is 100 trends wrapped up in…
Short answer: no. If you have a series of blog posts, podcasts, SubStacks, columns, or videos, turning them into a book seems like an obvious idea. After all, you have all this content teed up and ready. Why not just pour it into a book format and publish it? Seth Godin, Guy Kawasaki, and Mark…
Newsletter 105. Trump’s ultimate goal is the destruction of reality, or at least how we measure it. Plus, will AI doom consultancies; Johns Hopkins licenses books for a pittance, three people to follow, and three books to read. The war on reality We’ve heard past presidents declare war on concepts: the war on cancer, the…
Tesla’s board is giving Elon Musk $29 billion (a record compensation for a CEO) to “keep him focused” on Tesla. I have questions:
This is my father’s slide rule. For those unfamiliar with this vintage computing instrument, a slide rule was how scientists, engineers, and technicians did mathematical calculations for much of the twentieth century. You’d carefully align the sliding middle portion with outer frame and read the result off the scales, using the cursor (which was a…