Stop me if you’ve heard this one. “A man walks into a bar. Goes up to the bartender, orders a drink. Bartender says ‘you gotta wear a mask in here, guy.’ The man shrugs and says, “If I haven’t caught it by now I’m never gonna.” Okay, so it’s not…

First off, I am not a scientist. I’m a PR guy; always have been, always will be. And as I look back on however many years it’s been in this business, I like to think I’ve made a positive impact on the world; when I founded my current agency, I…

Communications Follies: Rainbow Capitalism and Other Absurdities Now, far be it from me to claim to have my finger on the pulse of the LGBTQ community, but what I am an expert in is communications, and in particular, crisis communications, which means I notice when companies are creating PR problems…

Paging Doctor Spotify to Triage Spotify does have a bit of a pickle on its hands, doesn’t it? Now, just being honest, if you’d shown me a picture of the cast of NewsRadio, which featured the legendary Phil Hartman, and told me that, in 30 years, one of them would…

Don’t Believe the Hype: Joss Whedon and the Danger of Deifying Your Heroes I can’t pretend to be intimately familiar with Joss Whedon or his oeuvre; when Buffy the Vampire Slayer came out, I was already in my upper thirties. The twenty years of Whedonmania largely passed me by; Firefly…

And there it is: 2021, gone in a flash. If 2020 was a long, interminable spectacle of slowly rising waters, 2021 was wind and lightning. Last year often felt like endless sameness, while this past year seemed to lurch from status quo to status quo. From the darkest days of…

Principles Really are Worth the Cost, but More of Us Have to Start Acting Like It In a harsh public letter, top Fox News contributors Jonah Goldberg and Stephen Hayes announced they would no longer continue with the network in light of its ongoing promotion and support of Tucker Carlson’s…

I can’t say when or how I first heard about it. Probably from my kids, probably sometime in the mid-to-late 00s. It doesn’t feel like that long ago to me, but it was: when Facebook first launched, Youtube didn’t exist. Twitter was still four years out, and even then, it…

On Convincing The Unvaccinated “I don’t know how to explain to you that you should care about other people.” That was the headline of an article by HuffPost’s Kayla Chadwick published in 2017. Its thesis was simple: there is a fundamental divide regarding what it means to live in a…