(Hat tip on this to Julien Smith) Lots of your time and mine is spent thinking about commerce and engaging in it. It was thus refreshing to read this NYT piece from a former US Marine named Maurice Decaul. Check it out – it is REALLY worth your time. Having returned…
I am frugal in most circumstances and definitely not a label whore. Last Thursday, however, I got bit by an alligator. Next thing I knew, a short sleeve polo shirt priced at over $125 was mine. The tags are now off, so the garment is here to stay. That a…
Mr. X writes five to six times a week on dead wood parchment. Over 320 000 people read his paper on weekdays and over 415 000 on weekends. He has been writing for over 30 years and has won numerous awards for his outstanding reporting and commentary. They read X’s…
When I was young I spent a summer working in a glass factory. It made bottles of all types. The shifts were 12 hrs at a time, from 7 am to 7pm or vice versa. Breaks, lunch and station changes were scheduled to the minute. They have places like this…
I just read a great post by David Silverman re how bad biz writing is partly a result of what we learn in school. Talking about the excessive use of big words and the tendency for length to trump clarity he says: In every essay, “-ion” and “-ing” words outpace simple…
Writing is really hard. It is one of those things that lots of people claim to be good at but aren’t. Mechanics, style, flow and the inability to express thoughts succinctly are the usual suspects when it comes to crappy prose. Even if you are OK at putting words together,…
If you, like me, follow mainstream media outlets on Twitter then you LOVE how they clog up your stream by broadcasting their own content. While a number of organizations have figured out great uses for Twitter, big media remains seemingly clueless. The content outlets broadcast via tweets does not seem…
In a dictatorship candour is generally absent from public life. This creates situations where the dictator has trouble getting good information about what is actually going on. For example, in the first Gulf War Saddam Hussein had such faulty intelligence re his own military’s capacity that the Iraqis got into…
I just got Jamel Shabazz’s incredible book of photos, Back in the Days. In a nutshell, it documents hip hop and street culture (mostly in NYC) from 1980-1989. The incredibly varied sense of fashion in hip hop culture during the early days is striking. It was not all homogenous the…
Parents agonize over where to send their kids to school. This is especially true if they are spending $10k plus on the price of admission to a private institution. Some private schools seem to get marketing, some don’t. While education is something most people are apt to spend money on,…