"Qui plume a, guerre a." — Voltaire
The uncreative mind can spot wrong answers, but it takes a very creative mind to spot wrong questions. – Antony Jay As usual, I’m two or three issues behind in my New Yorker reading, so it was only a few days ago that I had a chance to finally read Alec Wilkinson’s controversial article about […]
Last week, in a stealth move, I posted the first installment of a new Space Repairman serial, “Word of Honor” on Channel 37. The next chapter goes up this week. I have two more chapters in the works to complete the story. And I’m thinking about what will come after that. Gary says we have […]
“Figures often beguile me, particularly when I have the arranging of them myself; in which case the remark attributed to Disraeli would often apply with justice and force: ‘There are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies, and statistics.’” — Mark Twain* Many years ago, I was helping a client prepare a report on primary […]
So Andrew Sullivan is quitting blogging, and the blogosphere commences its latest round of hand wringing and wailing and gnashing of teeth. The annual preemptive mourning for blogging’s shedding of its mortal coil has now become such a ritual that the commentary itself has reached its own critical mass of self-referential, ironic meta-awareness. “This isn’t […]
What I wrote here five years ago still applies today. Perhaps more so.
Because this is what a man looks like. Because of all the other images of men we see on TV and read about online — men who abuse women, who objectify them, who hound them out of the clubhouse for daring to show that they can play too. Men who feel that they have to […]
I was fortunate to have grown up in an era when the Ogilvy & Mather style of copywriting was at its peak. You know the style: a fearless amount of white space, a bold headline in an ever-so-mildly self-deprecating font, and dense but frictionless copy conveying a sense of — how do you describe it? […]
There’s a lot of stuff floating around Facebook of late dealing with typos of all kinds: cute homework misspellings, SMS autocorrections, misspelled graffiti, flubbed tattoos, missing or rearranged lettering on signs, blown cake inscriptions, and so on ad nauseam — and now, “Weird Al” Yankovic’s viral hit video “Word Crimes.” And since I am an […]
I feel compelled to poke my head out of the Treehouse of Overwork long enough to offer some brief, vague, and half-formed thoughts about the interesting discussion occurring right now in webcomic-land about Internet trolls and their effect on creative people. Zen Pencils makes the case for Art Triumphant with a visually and viscerally compelling […]