Social-Creature

According to the Mayan calendar — as translated by new-age hippies I used to know, and depicted by Roland Emmerich — the year 2012 is alleged to herald the apocalypse. Perhaps this collective unconscious sense of mass destruction is what’s driving the popularity of turn-of-the-millennium musings about the end of the world. In June 2008, [...]

Boston Latin School, my alma mater, is the oldest (and longest existing) public school in the country. 141 years older than the country, in fact. Ben Franklin went there before he moved to Philly. Alumni include Sam Adams, John Hancock, Joseph Kennedy, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Charles Bullfinch, you get the idea. There’s an admission test, [...]

On September 8,2011, Nike announced they would be releasing a limited number of pairs of a new product. As the shoe’s official site explains: In 1989, Nike designer Tinker Hatfield was asked to design a shoe for the second chapter in the Back to the Future series. He created the power-lacing, self-illuminating, Nike MAG. Riding [...]

A few months ago I started noticing a proliferation of editorial content using data as the narrative foundation. The first place it occurred to me was on the OkTrends blog, which publishes research compiled from hundreds of millions of OkCupid user interactions. Their insight opuses on “The REAL ‘Stuff White People Like,’” and, “Gay Sex [...]

When I was producing music festivals and nightlife events, Facebook changed its membership policy, opening up beyond just the collegiate community. Hundreds of people I didn’t know requested to add me as a friend. At first I balked at the idea of letting complete strangers into a space that had previously been the walled-garden escape [...]

Image: Culture Wins Charlie Sheen is not crazy. Or, at least, he’s not crazy the way you think he is. Charlie Sheen may finally be admitting that he’s lost his mind — exclusively to Life&Style, of all places, if we are to believe it — but that’s something that would have already been a long, [...]

Last year, I wrote a post called “Your Life Is A Transmedia Experience.” In October, the post became the basis for a panel discussion event at the FutureM conference in Boston with me, Marta Kagan and Jan Libby. I have updated the deck from that panel, and am sharing here for your viewing pleasure. Enjoy!

Ever since Apple started putting a lowercase i in front of its products, their advertisements have been known for basically two things — articulating a visceral, transcendent grace inherent within the Mac product experience: …and making fun of people who don’t already use Macs: Which is why the iPad ads — with their exaggeratedly simplistic gestures, [...]

Ad #2 (but watch them in order). . . UPDATE: On December 1st, I received an email from a reader, Dave Clooney, pointing to an NBC Sports article which uncovers the truth about the Jordan ad: Sorry, it’s a spoof. Someone has taken an old Jordan Nike commercial, “Maybe You Should Rise,” and mashed it [...]

Remember a time when it seemed like the power of the new technologies suddenly at our fingertips was limitless? When lasers and floppy disks and modems were cutting-edge, and a whole slew of movies which took on the subject matter insisted that teenagers, especially, were capable of using these incomprehensible, futuristic phenomena to do things [...]