Connective Visions

A few weeks ago, my friend’s Norwegian husband was in Philadelphia and visited the University of Pennsylvania photography-and-text exhibit “Righteous Dopefiend.” When we got together for dinner a week later, he made the point, “I know what a dopefiend is, and I know what ‘righteous’ is, but what do the two mean together?” As a [...]

Although the source was a U.S. one and ultimately deserves the credit, my kudos to Norway for bringing me my own national news before the standard channels here did. Last night, my first awareness that the House had passed the health-care reform bill came from the Norwegian newspaper Dagbladet – which I was not visiting [...]

Philadelphia has just completed a gorgeous, 70-degree F week (that’s in the 20s C, for all you civilized souls who use the metric system)* as the city entered springtime – and corresponding with the emergence of people from their homes were two blogs on happiness. The first is from my friend and fellow blogger at [...]

When I taught communications, I regularly emphasized the model of “sender-channel-receiver” for passage of information. At any point along that line, the message (the information) can go astray. The sender has an intention that may not be conveyed clearly. The channel may abbreviate, damage, or delete the message. The receiver may misinterpret the message. If [...]

My father finished his midday news viewing today and announced, “They say it’s going to rain.” As it was pouring buckets outside, I couldn’t argue with them, and I said so. He frowned and said, “Yes, but I didn’t turn on the TV to find that out. I want to know when it’s going to [...]

This weekend, I had two occasions to encounter the topic of envy. When that much envy surfaces, it seems time to give it another look – especially when both episodes have, for me, a component of delight, which is not the noticeable offspring of envy. What Is Envy, Really? The first occasion came when friends [...]

At the start of my previous blog, I said I’d explain my passive-aggressive approach to search-engine optimization (SEO) in headlines. That was the passive blog post; this is the aggressive one. Let me start by saying that, yes, I know the name is Nick Schuyler, not Nick Skyler. And, yes, I know that his story [...]

Note: Having read about 50 articles on how to write blog headlines for search engine optimization (SEO) and return on investment (ROI), my considered decision was to go with this one, which is highly unlikely to satisfy anyone with an MBA. It is a consciously passive-aggressive move on my part as a writer, the point [...]