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 | 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 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 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...
by Mark O'Brien | Mar 21, 2016
According to the WORM (World Organization Rescuing Meaning), the number of bored people in the world has more than septupled since YouTube was invented. Nobody’s really sure why that is, other than the fact that it constitutes innumerable attempts to prove Andy...
by Mark O'Brien | Mar 11, 2016
Attention brand managers: In case you haven’t yet gotten the memo, you now work for your social-media person. That’s right. According to the social-media person who authored this gem — “Branding isn’t dead, but it’s no longer in your...
