Urban Honking

When I was living in Los Angeles, a director mentoring my writing partner and me asked how old we were. Early 30s was our collective reply. He nodded his head. “So, you got the next 10 years to make your mark.” It made sense at the time. After all, this idea that you need to [...]

Last week, I wrote a piece for Vice Magazine’s Motherboard about an android version of the science fiction writer Philip K. Dick. The story of the android is truly surreal, stranger than even Dick’s flipped-out fiction, and I recommend you pop over to …

Boy meets girl, boy is less productive. It’s a tale as old as time. Under normal circumstances, no one is going to complain when someone is buying flowers or going out to dinner and a movie. But as a publicly traded person with a responsibility of productivity to the shareholders, we live under special circumstances. [...]

Is poetry a driving force of Oceanography?
Read Rimbaud!

- Phillipe Diolé

I’ve written many times, although not recently, about the ocean.

When I first began Universe in 2005, it was practically a ship’s log: meandering pieces on narwhal tusks, …

Failure has been a mantra where I work, at Wieden+Kennedy, for much longer than I’ve worked here. Dan Wieden has preached failure from the start. So much so that a few years back W+K 12 made a massive pushpin wall that reads “Fail Harder.” The current class, whom I teach, recently added an extra “er” [...]

In 1977, NASA sent a pair of unmanned probes named Voyager 1 and Voyager 2 into space. Among the infrared spectrometers and radio receivers included on each probe were identical copies of the same non-scientific object: the Voyager Golden Record. …

This blog isn’t really working. Or at least not how I imagined it would. I’ve been writing long format essays that start with a personal story and spin it into a business insight. In an effort to concentrate on the ideas, I haven’t included images or hyperlinks. Just words. I was hoping to get an [...]

Investing in a publicly-traded person carries certain risks that are not present in a more traditional investment. Specifically, the health of a person is key to their financial performance. K. Mike Merrill has worked to address health concerns by engaging in regular exercise and developing healthy eating habits (Juice & Salad™), but the fact of [...]

I love records. The problem is my young children do as well. And in an effort to allow our records to endure their childhood relatively scratch-free we’ve become a digital music household. Currently that means we move an iPod touch from room to room plugging it into various docks and speakers as we move throughout [...]

A few years ago I saw Mike Daisy perform Monopoly at the PICA TBA festival. He sat behind a desk and told a two-hour monologue that wove together Nikola Tesla’s battle against Thomas Edison over electricity, the history of the game of Monopoly, his own relationship with Wal-Mart and various anecdotes about Microsoft. For whatever [...]