Why I’m going to Pittsburgh

Your generation had John Kennedy and Pierre Trudeau. My generation has checked out of politics for the longest time. We’re jaded. We’re cynical. We’re tired of spin and sound bites, tired of talking points, tired of being talked at. We want authenticity. We want an end to corruption. We want inspiration. In 1961, John F …

Facebook’s lawyers: idiots or jackasses?

Hanlon’s razor tells us that we should “never attribute to malice that which can be adequately explained by stupidity.” I’m still unable to figure which is the case with Facebook’s new promo guidelines. Bad linking policies are nothing new — we’ve seen them from Fast Company, NPR, Starbucks and KPMG. But these stories are old, …

Lost in translation

In English, when reading numbers out loud, one often “chunks” the numbers into smaller groups. For example, when reading the phone number “555-1212,” one would say “five five five, one two one two,” not “five hundred fifty-five, one thousand two hundred and twelve.” Similarly, one would call Interstate 280 “interstate two eighty,” not “interstate two …