I am just so sad to learn that Heather Armstrong, who wrote in the blog persona of Dooce, is no longer with us, having apparently taken her own life. She was only 47, and had so much to give, and so much to say. Dooce turned blogging about the pain of everyday life into an…
Basketball’s Boston Celtics — picked by many as the most talented team in the NBA playoffs — stunk up the joint last night with a weak, low-effort home game against the Philadelphia 76ers and Joel Embiid, the most valuable player in the whole league. First-year coach Joe Mazzulla was on the hot seat to explain…
Logline: When a band of smart thieves successfully steals a $1 trillion coin minted by the US government, they hold the country hostage in a daring game of cat-and-mouse. Opening Scene: We see the interior of the US Treasury building in Washington D.C. – an ornate and imposing structure filled with busy bureaucrats and security…
Write what you mean. It’s my most fundamental writing advice. Tucker Carlson apparently did that. According to a text revealed by the New York Times, here’s a text that Tucker Carlson sent the day after the January 6 insurrection at the Capitol: Tucker Carlson January 7, 2021 — 04:18:04 PM UTC A couple of weeks ago, I…
We’re about to see a wholesale restructuring of how people get the feeds of information that matters to them, especially news. Right now there are three types of players. News organizations create news content and surround it with advertising. Consumers consume news and ads, sometimes paying for subscriptions. And between the two are intermediaries. The…
Oh, wait. They actually didn’t. When companies make mistakes, I analyze their apologies. So I headed over to Fox News to see what the network was saying about its recently settlement with Dominion Voting Systems. Fox and its on-air talent were accused of knowingly lying about the nonexistent failures and fraud in Dominion machines in…
I think of words as a medium I can use for the clearest possible communication. So it was very strange to see artists using words as art materials — and often, for the purposes of obscuring communication rather than clarifying it. Some thoughts on “Turn of Phrase” at Bowdoin College Bowdoin is in the charming…
How do you punctuate what you write? I like rhetorical questions, think we use way too many em-dashes, and disdain exclamation points. But how well do I follow my own rules? One way to analyze punctuation habits is with “just the punctuation,” a fascinating tool that allows you enter any collection of text and X-ray…
I admit it: I’m obsessed with why ChatGPT and other AI services can’t be funny. I’m convinced the answer is that true humor demands an unexpected shift in perspective, and AI machines, trained to mimic patterns in what they’ve read, have problems with both “unexpected” and “shift in perspective.” Monty Python is the master of…