The Kingdom of Heaven My earliest memories are tied to two powerful mythologies that have governed my life. The first of these is Star Wars. I remember being bundled up in the back of a station wagon with a Tupperware bowl of air-popped popcorn in my footie pj’s at the drive-in theater outside of Binghamton,...
“I wish I could help him” – Chapter 1
Content Warning: this post contains frank descriptions of sexual violence and child abuse. I have included these as they are part of my personal history, and important to the discussion at hand. Chapter 1: Start at the beginning… Texas was mine, but I wasn’t sure I was going to live until morning to enjoy it....
“I wish I could help him” – Introduction
I was looking at a fallen giant. My father and I were standing in an upstairs bedroom of a two story home in the suburbs of New Jersey, and what we were struggling to process was the sight of a man who had loomed so large in our lives, almost to a position beyond legend,...
Farewell, Joe. I’m sad to see you go…
In 1796 George Washington gave a famous farewell address in which he issued a dire warning about the nascent “German Republican Society” and the “Democratic Society of Pennsylvania.” Speaking plainly he predicted that these new political parties: Are likely to become potent engines, by which cunning, ambitious, and unprincipled men will be enabled to subvert...
The end of Coexistence
It’s early 2002 and I’m driving to work with the radio sharing heartbreaking news of the deployments and death of troops in Afghanistan. A beat-up car passes me on the highway with huge patches of rust on the hood and a trash bag where one of the windows should be. On the back bumper is...
What Oprah, Sarah Silverman, and M. Night Shyamalan have in common
When I do my morning run I generally listen to an Audible book, or a podcast. My podcast subscriptions run the gamut from geek culture chats (mostly Star Wars) to self help and relationship discussions, to author interviews and perspectives. One of the podcasts that crosses over many of these motifs is the Sarah Silverman...
The case for Marketing to have its own CTO
Marketing has a myopia problem In the span of my 23 year career I’ve worked in a variety of environments, for a myriad of clients each with their own goals. For the past 17 of those years, I’ve either worked in agency teams or directly for marketing departments, and I’ve seen all the ways those...
AI isn’t here to steal your soul
Because I follow so many creatives (fine artists, photographers, writers and designers) on social media, I see a trend in the conversation around AI that is steeped in the fear that this technology has been tailored to steal their creativity. I can truly see why they might think that. The AI stories that dominate social...
Galactic Starcruiser wasn’t a clickbait failure
With all the hype around Disney’s Galactic Starcruiser closing, the social media “influencers” have crawled out from under their respective rocks to dance on its grave with a collective cry of “told you so!” The problem is that by and large, these folks never took the time to try it out, so their “analysis” of...
The Job narrative and Evangelical confirmation bias
Often as I scroll through social media or have conversations with my “nonvangelical” and atheist friends, we discuss their general sense of frustration with any effort to reach out and speak to evangelical people. The common gripes are often that conversations with evangelicals quickly devolve into discussions of theology and dogma, and that in those...