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…
The White House web site’s announcement about the MS-13 gang called them “animals” ten times in 439 words. This is master-level trolling — it drove the Web crazy, just as planned. Let’s examine what’s really going on here. Calling people, even gang members, “animals” is provocative to say the least. Dehumanizing people can be a…
Tom Wolfe died this week. His prose was a revelation. He was 88. Back in 1979, at the height of powers, he published The Right Stuff, a novel about the experimental pilots at the center of the space program. When I taught writing to homeschooled teenagers, I used a passage from this book to jolt…
The Washington Post reported on a study showing that adding two spaces after a period improves readability. Now all the use-two-spaces philistines are using this to justify their depraved practices. But the study proves nothing. Three researchers at Skidmore College, Rebecca L. Johnson, Becky Bui, and Lindsay L. Schmitt, published a paper called “Are two spaces…
Yesterday, in a writing workshop I was conducting, a woman interrupted me to tell me my explanation of the concept of flow was incomplete and not quite right. And a commenter pointed out an embarrassing grammar mistake in the title of my post. I had only one emotion in each case: gratitude. People seem to…
Charlene Li has added her own perspectives on the tenth anniversary of the publication of Groundswell. Read her post on LinkedIn or below: 10 years ago, my co-author Josh Bernoff and I released our first book, “Groundswell: Living in a World Transformed by Social Technologies”. On this anniversary, I wanted to reflect on what our expectations were when…
On April 21, 2008, ten years ago, Charlene Li and I celebrated the publication of our Harvard Business Press book Groundswell: Winning in a World Transformed by Social Technologies. It was the first book for each of us. It made an impact, selling over 150,000 copies. Ten years later, I’d like to talk about how…
No matter who is president, we’ll get over it. We’ll get past Trump. We’ll get past whoever comes next. But once we cease to believe that objective truth is the baseline for every discussion, we are doomed. I was reading Facebook the other day when a high school classmate of mine posted this: I had…