On the day after Donald Trump was elected president, I made a set of predictions. Today I’ll revisit those predictions and grade what I got right and wrong. The true analyst is always looking forward. Most of my friends were in despair on November 9, 2016. But I knew that Trump was a nontraditional candidate,…
The writer Harlan Ellison died yesterday. He was a brilliant, irritating, iconoclastic, inflexible force of nature. I cannot imagine him being 84 years old, and death is exactly the sort of inconvenience he’d never put up with. Harlan (everyone just called him “Harlan”) began his writing career by joining a street gang, undercover, and then…
You want to write a book that will make everyone take notice of the insights you’ve gained — insights that no one has thought of before. But how to start? I’m going to assume you have a powerful idea and you’ve researched it. (If you haven’t, nail those down before writing.) If you have a…
Here’s what went wrong. You started with a good idea. Then you showed it to someone. She told you it needed something more. So you added it. You sent it out for review. Your reviewers all suggested adding and changing things. They’re important and powerful people, so you did. The technical people insisted you include…
I remember editing people at my last job. I would give them the charge on what to do, and then check back two days later. “How much did you write?” I would ask. “One paragraph,” they’d say. You will never achieve flow that way! Flow is effortless writing. You know how it feels. You sit…
The New York Times traffics in clear, straightforward text. Except, that is, in the Sunday Style section. Having no style myself, I’d typically skip the Style section, but an article by Penelope Green on birds sucked me in yesterday. I like birds. I read it. I’m still dizzy. If you like metaphors, you’ll love the…
I’m grateful to Christopher Penn, cofounder of BrainTrust Insights, for his analysis of link and influence on both sides of the political spectrum. Yesterday, he posted some incredible graphical visualizations. Here’s how describes what he did: Using Facebook’s API and its Crowdtangle journalism tool, we extracted 6 months of data from approximately 250 conservative and…
This is not a politics blog, but politics is part of my subject matter. So here’s what I hope is a very clear statement of my principles. I write about anything associated with writing quality, analytical thinking, truth, and influence. These are “meta-analyses.” I’m generally writing about how people think and communicate, not whether those…
Have you seen this photo? What an outrage. Trump’s Border Patrol is separating families at the border and putting children in cages. I’ve seen this photo all over my Facebook feed, on posts filled with rage. But there’s a problem. This photo is not what people think it is. According to snopes.com, this photo is…