You probably heard about the Delta Air Lines plane that crashed in Toronto, landing upside-down on the tarmac. Amazingly, due to the swift actions of the crew, all 76 passengers survived. (Since this was in Canada, I immediately worried that the long-suffering guitar-carrying Canadian musician Dave Carroll must have been on that plane, but apparently…
Editors often ask writers to do things they’d rather not do. I once edited a book for a brilliant thinker. He’d written the book stream of consciousness. It was full of great insights as well as infuriating, distracting, and self-serving asides. I found that if we deleted the asides, the rest was great — so…
Newsletter 82: How to manage beta readers, who’s licensing what to which AI, how not to blurb, plus three people to follow and three books to read. Benefiting from beta Software that’s finished enough to use, but not complete, is in the beta testing stage. And lately it’s been similarly fashionable for authors to recruit…
If you read this blog, you may be considering writing and publishing a nonfiction book. You’ve probably seen lots of service providers — developmental editors, writing coaches, hybrid publishers, self-publishing services, book publicists, and the like — who are encouraging you to write that book. “You can do it!”, they say. What you can’t hear…
Let’s get this out of the way first. I know practically nothing about ice hockey. I’ve never seen a whole game live or on TV. I’m sure you hockey fans will educate me in the comments. In case you haven’t heard, something unusual happened in Saturday’s US versus Canada game of the NHL’s 4 Nations…
Few people, when deciding to work on a business book, recognize what they are really creating. A book is not just an idea made real and and powerful. It’s not just a way to spread influence and generate business. It’s a database that you can mine to power much of your work moving forward. How…
The Kansas City Chiefs weren’t the only group of people who made astoundingly bad choices in the Super Bowl. Add these folks to your list of villains: the rapper Ye (formerly called Kanye West), who hawked swastika T-shirts, and Guy Bar and Ori Bejerano of the Israeli ad agency BBDO, who appropriated celebrity images to…
Newsletter 81. Using machines to enforce prejudice backfires, don’t use AI to apply to AI companies, a copyright legal shocker, and a list of words to avoid. Plus, three people to follow and three books to read. Machines can’t make trans people disappear — but they can sure do a lot of damage when they…
Researchers at Carnegie Mellon and Microsoft Research in the UK have completed a study to determine how generative AI affects critical thinking. Not surprisingly, knowledge workers that use AI feel they are less likely to be thinking critically. The researchers surveyed digital workers by explaining what critical thinking was and then asking them if they…