Social-Creature

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 [...]

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, [...]

The ‘Source’ in the Distance Last week, my friend Kris Krug flew down to the Gulf of Mexico on the TEDxOilSpill Expedition, a week-long project to document the crisis in the Gulf and bring a first hand report back to the TEDxOilSpill event in Washington, D.C. on June 28. Kris, a photographer, web strategist, and self-described “cyberpunk [...]

While everyone else is busy speculating about the potential significance of Microsoft’s new mobile contender, the Kin, I just discovered last night that I am much more interested in the content of their new ads, namely Portland’s March Fourth Marching Band, who’ve been repping it for the Northwest Contingent of the 1-5 Circus Scene since [...]

Last night, in a special election to replace the late Senator, Ted Kennedy, my home state of Massachusetts elected its first Republican to the senate since 1978, Scott Brown. Massachusetts has never elected a Republican senator during my lifetime. I’ve never known anything but Democrats (except for one Governor, once), from my home state my [...]

The 7.0 peak from the Haiti earthquake indicated by a seismic analyst at the Caltech Seismological Laboratory. (AP Photo/Damian Dovarganes) On Tuesday, January 12, I went into a meeting at 3:00pm PST, and when I came out, about an hour and a half later I quickly discovered that something had happened in Haiti during those [...]

Do you like Reggaeton? This was a question an old friend asked me while visiting in L.A. We’re both from Boston, where most people have never heard of Reggaeton. And I hadn’t either, until I moved to Southern California. If you don’t know what Reggaeton is, it’s: A form of urban music that became popular [...]

Oh boy. This is not typically the kind of stuff I write about here, but it is something I feel quite strongly about, and, if nothing else, it makes for a case study in cross-cultural communication — not to mention some interesting neuroscience. Last week, as the New York Times reported, French President Nicolas Sarkozy [...]

I had already joined the Circus scene when, in early 2006, I was consulting at Wong Doody and heard about a clothing company client they were working with called Edoc Laundry. The clothes had an intriguing concept: there were secret codes in the garments, which, if deciphered, would reveal clues to a mystery story. The wearers of Edoc [...]

I noticed this last night in a window of a corner store in my neighborhood and thought it was great. I’m not a native Spanish speaker but English wasn’t my first language either, so I understand what the message means beyond simply understanding what the words mean. If you don’t know Spanish, what “Te extrano” [...]