Thursday, April 4, 2013

Creative Destruction for Dictators

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We are always talking about how some area of our lives has been changed by creative destruction. We know that it’s widespread and impactful...
Wednesday, April 3, 2013

Secrets of Happy Families

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Families are a little like snowflakes. No two are exactly alike. That’s why it often seems so ridiculous that so many people think they kno...

Truth, Lies and The Unchangeable Spots of Leopards

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We’ve talked often about the obligations and responsibilities of memoir and the way in which our memory, more than our truth, shapes our pa...
Tuesday, April 2, 2013

What makes Buzz?

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Why do certain products and ideas become so popular? Why are some stories and rumors more infectious than others, and what makes some onlin...
Sunday, March 31, 2013

Dollars and Sex

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The song says "money can’t buy me love." But we know that’s not really true. The fact is, the same market forces that drive our e...
Saturday, March 30, 2013

Creative Intelligence

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No one questions that we are going through a period of dramatic change. The world, the nature of work and relationships are changing faster...
Wednesday, March 27, 2013

Why do we always get it wrong?

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Forty plus years ago, in Vietnam, we saw how the best and the brightest could ignore history, ignore truths and facts and conduct one of o...
Thursday, March 21, 2013

The Fog of 10 Years of War

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All the talk about drones lately seems to miss the larger point. What compels us, what disturbs us, is the sanitized way in which we conduc...
Tuesday, March 19, 2013

Wall Street, Gambling and Baseball

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What do you do if you are a veteran Wall Street trader who worked for Lehman Bros. when the collapse came?  To make matters even worse, yo...

The Myth of Christian Martyrdom

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We live in a culture where victimhood is too often embraced. Usually, because we seem to lack internal motivation, we look to it to galvani...
Saturday, March 16, 2013

Big Data

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We know that companies like Amazon have vast amounts of data on our purchases and that they use it in order to recommend other products to u...
Friday, March 15, 2013

Baseball as a Road to God?

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This past week saw the pageantry of religion in the selection of a new Pope. Next month we will experience a different kind of pageantry, a...
Thursday, March 14, 2013

Song Without Words

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Remember, as a kid, playing the old game of telephone? Someone says something, and passes it on. After it goes through 5, 6 or more people...
Wednesday, March 13, 2013

Raising Oenophilia

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Often we associate writers with a particular place and their unique abilities to capture the essence of that place. Steinbeck with Monter...
Tuesday, March 12, 2013

Oh, the places you can go....

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Vietnam, Mexico, Guatemala, El Salvador, South Africa, Burma are just some of the places in the world that have seen the profound violation ...
Sunday, March 10, 2013

Defeating the culture of Bullying

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Many us have powerful and painful memories of High School and Middle School. Sometimes, if we were not the most popular kid, something happ...
Friday, March 8, 2013

Should technology save the world?

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Imagine a "connected" car that when the check engine light comes on, it diagnoses the problem, contacts the appropriate repair pla...
Thursday, March 7, 2013

The House that Herring Built

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It sometimes seems like everything is going through change. Yet there are some institutions that, the more they change, the more they remai...
Monday, March 4, 2013

India and The Middle East

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One of the central tenants of fiction has always been to tell stories of human scale and human frailty, set against the backdrop of powerful...