With advertisers paying $7 million per 30 seconds, Super Bowl ads are among the most expensive branding opportunities available. But do they work? If you watched the game on Sunday, take the quiz below. Write down your answers on a piece of paper. The point isn’t whether you remembered the ad. The point is, do…
There is awesome writing. There is just okay writing that does the job. And then there is writing that makes you stop and say, “What in hell is going on here?” In an article about what’s to become of the venerable Boston tourist trap that is the Faneuil Hall Marketplace, Boston Globe writer Dana Gerber…
It’s not just the things you should avoid in writing that are a problem. It’s the constant overload of those things. Too much passive voice, too much jargon, too many puns, too many exclamation points. If the reader is saying “Enough!”, the writer has made a mistake. I’ve written in this space before about the…
Multiple people on my timeline recently shared the photo of Donald Trump and famous pedophile Jeffrey Epstein on a plane, shown below, which is a fake: How do I know it’s fake? As soon as I saw this, I was suspicious. Why? Because while I’ve seen other photos of Trump and Epstein together — as…
There are now multiple lawsuits in which owners of copyrighted material — books and articles, fiction and nonfiction — claim that entities using large language models (LLMs) from Microsoft and OpenAI have violated their copyrights. But at what point in the process does the alleged copyright violation occur? Let’s examine the process of creating and…
Newsletter 24: Why Claudine Gay had to go, a Mickey Mouse horror film, Tolkien’s victorious ghost, plus three people to follow, three books to read, and how to successfully write your book in 2024. Reflections on the plagiarism that brought down Harvard president Claudine Gay Harvard president Claudine Gay has now resigned. She made the…
Newsletter week 22: Stop slagging other authors, will Spotify crash audiobooks?, AI copyright posturing, three people to follow, three books to read, and some very lame ad copy. The myth of personal market share A shocking and tragic story rattled the publishing world this week. Cait Corrain, a fantasy novelist who had secured a two-book…
Let’s take a moment to understand how it looks when an article uses data effectively — and what you can learn from that. There are so many abuses in media citations of statistics — from poorly conducted studies, to sloppy citations, to lack of transparency in sources — that I take notice when journalists do…
Elon Musk says he is sorry he amplified an antisemitic post on X. But at a New York Times event, here’s what he said about advertisers like Disney, who have since left the platform (the “Bob” in this quote is Disney Chairman Bob Iger): If somebody’s gonna try to blackmail me with advertising, blackmail me…