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A Renewal of Pleasure
Our lives are enriched when we join artists in taking glorious risks. I became a Beatles connoisseur and fan both early and late—early in my life, late in their success. It was the summer I drove with my parents and a couple of their friends to (the former) Yugoslavia. We drove from Modena all the…
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Whatever it Takes
From the dark side of business and the growing imbalance of power to making a difference with naming and words. Lehman Brothers Inc. was an American global financial services firm and the fourth-largest investment bank in the United States. Its founding dates back to 1847. Before filing for bankruptcy in 2008, the firm employed 25,000 people.…
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Life’s too Short…
to be a copycat of someone else. If machines have personalities, it’s our doing. ChatGPT sure has been in the news lately. I’m not surprised to see it all over social media feeds, given how monolithic those feeds tend to be. “ChatGPT this, ChatGPT that” say the marketers like proud parents of a new toddler to…
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They called it the “gentle revolution.”
For six years I had the privilege of working with a group of therapists and researchers who believed that each child, at the time of birth, has the same potential as Leonardo da Vinci. Their belief was so strong that they started with brain-injured children—children who navigate life as different. The labels varied, but they’re…
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How you speak is who you are
Identity is forged in the interplay of language and emotion. The connection between the two has value. But we only realize the value of something after we lose it. You may not realize it, but language is the vehicle of our lives. It’s the means through which we communicate our values and orient to the…
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Details are the hallmark of a story you can relate to
But they work only when you nail the larger narrative. Before he could start enjoying his job, Jack Warr had to find his place in the world. The interaction between a quest to reconnect with his identity and the mounting urgency of the crisis in a new case depend on each other to make the…
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Some of us knew that all along
Companies turned social networks into media because they had no idea how to harness the value of socially useful energy concentrated there. The real horror to turning networks into media is that it happened gradually, and then all of a sudden. Few noticed. Making connections for modest use was okay. Turning everyone into constant content creators/sinks…
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Making Headlines with the Wrong Story
Instead of investigating the funneling of Euroscepticism into Brexit and the reasons why Britain, once a land of ambitious colonizers, is descending into a dramatic spiral, The Economist decides to make fun of Italy. Perhaps cucumber on pizza (must be a British thing) can paper over the Government’s embarrassment for the ridiculous twists and turns…
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The Emotional Toll of Believing in the Wrong Story
It’s 1860, the year before the end of “Kingdom of the Two Sicilies.” In 1814, the Congress of Vienna had put together the Kingdom of Naples (the southern half of Italy’s “boot”) and the Kingdom of Sicily under the rule of a Bourbon, in Naples. This is the backdrop for a spellbinding story. “For…
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Making the Story up as we Go
The “point of view in the American novel” was an assignment I relished during my course on American literature at the University of Bologna. I started the paper by describing a scene from Hitchcock’s Rear Window: A man in the semi-distance looking inside the apartment across and the yard below him. From the activities…