by Mark O'Brien | Jun 23, 2016
The perils of ingesting gluten have been fairly exhaustively chronicled, here and in other other, almost equally august media. Nevertheless, as is our incorrigibly human knack, we remain susceptibly gullible to all manner of fads, frauds, flimflams, and other forms of...
by Mark O'Brien | May 23, 2016
After recent revelations about the homogenization and routinization of everything, I suppose it makes a bit of logical sense that we should now be on to trivialization. But this latest revelation seems somehow more dire than its predecessors in that it has the...
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,...
by Mark O'Brien | Mar 21, 2016
When I took my first full-time job (in a major U.S. insurance and financial-services corporation), my boss said to me: “The quality of your work doesn’t make any difference. The only thing that matters is who you know.” It remains one of the most...
