by Mark O'Brien | May 9, 2016
An ‘ideology’ is like a spirit taking up its abode in a body: it makes that body hop around in certain ways; and that same body would have hopped around in different ways had a different ideology happened to inhabit it. (Kenneth Burke, 1897-1993, from Language as...
by Mark O'Brien | Apr 20, 2016
A client told me she’d gone to Madison Square Garden to see David Gilmour on the last night of his recent North American tour. Hearing that gave me gifts of reminiscence both nostalgic and whimsical. Thinking about David Gilmour and Pink Floyd always reminds me...
by Mark O'Brien | Apr 15, 2016
Dick Clark has been gone almost four years. But his past — the origins and ethnic derivations of the celebrity entrepreneur and perennial New Year’s Eve fixture — remained stubbornly murky … until now. According to Clark’s Wikipedia profile, he was...
by Mark O'Brien | Apr 7, 2016
The blind squirrel found an acorn. It was bound to happen. After stumbling around in an amaurotic crepuscule, falling out of a few trees, and living in a virtually opaque stupor, the scansorial rodent finally discovered what empiricists working with even modestly...
by Mark O'Brien | Mar 29, 2016
You had to know the trivialization of everything would find its way into business at some point. You had to anticipate superficiality, like water, would eventually seep into every nook, cranny, and formerly purposeful aspect of our lives. And so it has. In fact,...