Feb 2Nun Stuff RecordsDangerous fun at recess for eleven-year-olds in 1969 at St. Rose meant putting your clip-on tie in your back pocket and then, moving past the younger kids pitching pennies, queueing up on hands and knees with the older kids using milk straws to collect mercury that had leaked onto the…5 min read5 min read
Jan 31Disco Reverie“Do you like disco music?”, my new friend, Olga, from Kazakhstan, asked. The way she said it, “deesko music,” with her euro lilt captured my curiosity for a Saturday night party in the Allston-Brighton neighborhood of Boston. A Russian social club was taking over a community center for a disco…Disco4 min readDisco4 min read
Jan 30The Afterlife of PiWhen a piece of art migrates from a debut medium to a reimagined medium and then a re-reimagined medium, the perspective becomes kaleidoscopic, each new impression colored by the choices of the next interpreter. …Life Of Pi3 min readLife Of Pi3 min read
Aug 25, 2022The Birth of the Roomba Brand: Happy 20th BirthdayBack in 2001, my 3-year-old design consultancy was excited to start a brand development odyssey with iRobot, a new client of ours making waves in Boston. …Branding7 min readBranding7 min read
Apr 29, 2021The Rhetorical BidenJoe Knows the Persuasion Playbook Watching Joe Biden talk to America last night I flashed back to my first course in the first quarter of my first year at my land grant university in the Midwest. The Rhetoric of Western Thought had the heft of college. While the principles of…Rhetoric3 min readRhetoric3 min read
Published inModus·Sep 24, 2019Member-onlyThe Somewhat Secret History of EmojisA CompuServe marketer from the ’80s recalls the birth of emojis and avatars — Whenever I reach for an emoji as a shorthand for adding emotional effect to an online message nowadays, I’m reminded of a baby step that the phenomenon took back in 1985. This was well before AOL combined CD-ROMs and a virtual private network to bring interactive multimedia to online communications…Compuserve5 min readCompuserve5 min read
Sep 24, 2019Joe with Joe.A chance encounter with Joe Biden on the launch of his campaign in Concord, NH animates my friendship with a 92-year old undecided voter. My friend asked me to drive her mother back to New Hampshire after a visit to Boston for Mother’s Day this year. Rita is 92, recently…Politics6 min readPolitics6 min read
Jun 21, 2019Long Game ThinkingPlanning ahead for the transition to a Democratic post-Trump presidency may mean re-thinking how we think about the oval corner office and its org chart. In his May 2018 cover story in The Atlantic, “The Hardest Job in the World,”, John Dickerson — the former host of “Meet the Press”…Politics5 min readPolitics5 min read
