The highs were high, the awe, I'm not a religious person, but I'll tell you, to be in the azure blue of the Gulf Stream as if, as you're breathing, you're looking down miles and miles and miles, to feel the majesty of this blue planet we live on, it'...
A lot of times when you have very short-term goals with a high payoff, nasty things can happen. In particular, a lot of people will take the low road there. They'll become myopic. They'll crowd out the longer-term interests of the organization or eve...
I don't think it's a Western thing to really talk about intrinsic motivation and the drive for autonomy, mastery and purpose. You have to not be struggling for survival. For people who don't know where their next meal is coming, notions of finding in...
I think we will have a boy baby and he will be born on the 20th of August. Everyone else has a girl baby and at times I don't believe I should mind having a little Phyllis Dawn but Dearest wants a boy and I do.
The easiest way to figure out who the customer is in an online space is to figure out who is paying for the thing. Usually, the people paying are the customers. So on Facebook, the people paying are marketers. That makes them the customers. And it me...
Many billboards and magazine ads have resorted to showing isolated body parts rather than full-body portraits of models using or wearing products. This style of photography, known in the industry as abstract representation, allows the viewer to see h...
Microsoft's new OS, Windows 7, may finally be a worthy successor to XP, eliminating the clutter of Vista and letting users get to what they want to use without the fuss. All this, while remaining compatible with their IT departments' demands for scal...
Think 'Game of Thrones.' In the old days, this sort of show might be considered bad writing. It doesn't really seem to be moving toward a crisis or climax, it has no true protagonist, and it's structured less like a TV show or a movie than a soap ope...
It's easy to make fun of AOL's pending purchase of HuffPo. Just like AOL's purchase of TimeWarner, here we have a new media company - Huffington Post - fooling an old media company, AOL, into overpaying for something that has already peaked.
New content online no longer requires new stories or information, just new ways of linking things to other things. Or as the social networks might put it to you, 'Jane is now friends with Tom.' The connection has been made; the picture is getting mor...
I do remember the moment when, as a child, I realized that the things we call 'TV shows' are really just the stuff that gets put between commercials. Later, I came to see that the kinds of things that get on 'free' TV are shows that help sell product...
No matter how invasive the technologies at their disposal, marketers and pollsters never come to terms with the living process through which people choose products or candidates; they are looking at what people just bought or thought, and making calc...
I had someone at the Houston police station shoot me with heroin so I could do a story about it. The experience was a special kind of hell. I came out understanding full well how one could be addicted to 'smack,' and quickly.
If we could stop thinking of 'meaning' and 'purpose' as artifacts of some divine creative act and see them instead as the yield of our own creative future, they become goals, intentions and processes very much in reach rather than the shadows of chil...
Writers are outsiders. Even when we seem like insiders, we're outsiders. We have to be. Our noses pressed to the glass, we notice everything. We mull and interpret. We store away clues, details that may be useful to us later.
We secretly believe that if only we achieve some elusive goal - fitting into a pair of skinny jeans, or redoing our kitchen or getting that promotion - that it will make us happy. But the pain of our insecurity is hidden in all that racing around.
Sometimes when I'm at my desk, I'll realize that I have contorted myself completely, and I haven't moved for hours, and that my legs have fallen asleep. I am elsewhere, not in my body, not in the room, not in my house.
Like it or not children are being raised by gay and lesbian parents all over America - as many as 10 million children. And it does nothing to make their lives more stable and secure to attack their families, to attack their parents to prevent us from...
When I was in high school I got involved in the fringe theater scene in Chicago, and I met some openly gay people. I could see that it got better, that they were happy and loved and supported. I saw with my own eyes that it got better.
It's going to take generations of gay people marrying before these things start to feel natural. We haven't had it long enough to remake it as our own, so it does feel like you're getting dressed up in straight drag to do it.
English teachers, workshops, and myths try to make writers slow down. We are the ONLY ART on the planet that tells young artists to not practice and do less to get better. Head-shaking in its stupidity. And new writers buy into that.
