The Strain of Gaiety

“All I ask is one thing, and I am asking this particularly of young people who watch: Please do not be cynical. I hate cynicism. For the record, it’s my least favorite quality. It doesn’t lead anywhere. Nobody in life gets exactly what they thought they were going to get, but if you work really [...]

I recently got sucked into a political debate in the comments section of a Facebook friend’s update, where he posted a link to Sarah Palin’s obviously ghostwritten op-ed in the Washington Post on global warming politicizing science. At first I took the bait and came out swinging with my two cents, but as my blood [...]

I wanted to address the anniversary of the sneak attack on Pearl Harbor by remembering being at the actual Pearl Harbor memorial in Hawaii many years ago. I can remember the American tourists giving Japanese tourists the stink-eye. The picture-snapping and posing at photo-ops by the Japanese struck the Americans as “insensitive.” There were a [...]

This entry is the WWW-equivalent to mailing myself my own idea in a sealed envelope to stake a claim to coinage of a term that needed… er, terming. I just googled the word “vestigiolism” and got NO hits. So when Wired or some such trade magazine needs to give credit where credit is due in [...]

I’m certainly guilty of paying attention to the Sarah Palins and Rush Limbaughs and the Glenn Becks of the world. Scrutinizing them to ridicule them. They are the pied pipers that cynically manipulate their stupid followers into the hijacking and re-framing the debate on health care reform in such a way that it shanghais the [...]

First read Meghan Daum’s op-ed piece on Twitter from the LA Times.
Then read this email I sent her.

Meghan,
Meghan, oh Meghan. I am disappointed. You’ve contributed another eye-rolling, get-a-load-of-this-crazy-thing editorial on Twitter that completely misses the point. But first, what you get right:
Yes, there is a lot of inanity on Twitter. Certainly. Before going [...]

Why didn’t I see it? It was so obvious. Facebook’s new redesign wasn’t some blunder on Facebook’s part. It wasn’t some clumsy misstep. It was the watershed moment, the jump-the-shark moment, where Facebook declared its serious intention to service Facebook’s advertisers and business partners over its users.
Any Facebook user surely has noticed the sudden crush [...]