ARTICLES

ORIGINALLY PUBLISHED for SPARK – see it here A few days ago I stumbled across an interesting pair of companion pieces:  Malcolm Gladwell’s New Yorker review of FREE and Chris Anderson’s response to that review – Dear Malcolm: Why So Threatened?  Read back to back, the two pieces make for an interesting, if disjointed, debate. 

Anderson has shrewdly tapped into (and consequently helped frame) an emerging

ORIGINALLY PUBLISHED on CORE77 – see it here The other day as I sat in a hotel room in Milwaukee watching Anderson Cooper grow more and more telegenically indignant about the BP oil spill, I found my thoughts returning once again to a growing list of recent governmental and institutional failings. The entries on the list are familiar to us all: the housing bust, the credit crises, the ensuing job losses and now

ORIGINALLY PUBLISHED for FAST COMPANY – see it here Having grown up in New York in the ’70s, public transportation holds a special place in my heart. I can fondly recall the dilapidated state of subway cars and platforms in the mid-’70s. The sight of teenagers catching free rides off the back bumper ledge and that uniquely urban rite of passage: taking your first unchaperoned ride on the unwieldy sy

ORIGINALLY PUBLISHED on CORE77 – see it here “I am a type of new bottle opener, I am a sort of door just to open your brain.” With those inscrutable lines Philippe Starck opens his BBC seriesDesign for Life, an irrepressible head-on collision between reality TV, design competition and the myth-factory that is contemporary design. I was drawn into Design for Life in spite of myself, in large part bec

ORIGINALLY PUBLISHED on CORE77 – see it here Lately I’ve been unusually cranky: It may be the frustrations of a difficult marketplace where economic adversity forces one to tolerate the otherwise intolerable. It may be the extra hours of summer sunlight here in the Pacific Northwest, which brings about an initial euphoria that can descend into mania. But with a gnawing conviction, I’ve come to belie