by Mark O'Brien | Jan 30, 2017
With no fanfare of any sort, the venerable Harvard Business Review (HBR) has published the first in a series of brain teasers, word puzzles designed to look like articles, containing syntactical dead ends, grammatical errors, and logical non sequiturs. The purpose of...
by Mark O'Brien | Jan 16, 2017
Recently, for the first time in nearly 30 years, I heard the song, “Don’t Dream It’s Over”, by the Australian band, Crowded House. (The band comprised Paul Hester, Nick Seymour, and the Finn brothers — Neil, Tim, and Dorsal.) Along with a...
by Mark O'Brien | Jan 3, 2017
I was in a chi-chi shop during the Holidays that had a display of handbags fashioned from something called vegan leather. My first thought was that vegan leather must come from cows fed only on corn-fed grass that had been humanely slaughtered by filing down the teeth...
by Mark O'Brien | Nov 29, 2016
We’re not losing our ability to connect dots, kids. We’re giving it away. That reality was driven home by three things that came to my attention recently. Two of them were articles. The third was a website. Here they are, in order: 6 Cognitive Biases That...
by Mark O'Brien | Nov 21, 2016
Sincerity is everything. Once you learn to fake that, you’ve got it made. (Variously attributed.) As I get older, I continually wonder about reality, about the nature of reality, about our ability to perceive reality, and whether there is any objective reality...
by Mark O'Brien | Aug 18, 2016
Good news! We now have even more reasons to justify our conducting ourselves like idiots — linguistically lazy idiots at that — and to rationalize our utter disrespect for language and its precepts. That’s right. The editors at Inc., apparently tired of doing...
