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 | 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...
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 4, 2016
Some syntactical constructions are a little harder to penetrate than others. The following snippet requires a hammer drill with a diamond bit to permeate, after which it could still stand some explication. The snippet comes from an article entitled, “Why The...
