Latest publications
Read my latest stories for The Wall Street Journal, Passcode, The Harvard Business Review, JSTOR Daily and more.
Steve Jobs in 10 Infographics
Steve Jobs is the rare tech innovator who will be remembered as much for his aesthetics as for contributions to functionality. No wonder that so much of his legacy can be captured graphically: 1. The history For an at-a-glance overview of the intertwined histories of...
Can smartphones create stillness?
If you want to learn something about stillness, visit a kindergarten class. I spent about 45 minutes with Little Peanut and his classmates today, and it gave me a whole new perspective on quiet -- or the lack thereof. In the half-hour in which these 19 kids were in...
10 early warning signs that you need to decrease (or increase) your time online
Yesterday I received what I accurately diagnosed as the Best Error Message Ever: Being a deeply religious person, I figured that an error message this…ummm…ironic? apt? transcendant?…must be some kind of sign from the universe. At first I thought it might be a sign to...
4 ways to protect your privacy and reputation on Facebook Timeline
My latest blog post for HBR takes a look at the new ooh! aah! Facebook Timeline, which comes tantalizingly close to fulfilling my wish list for a social media scrapbook without allowing me to easily print the damn thing already. (And I'm guessing it won't be long...
Facebook’s Timeline Will Impact Your Career
The advent of Facebook’s new Timeline feature gives you, your colleagues, and your customers a whole new set of reasons…
How to add yourself to your own Twitter list using HootSuite
Today I noticed an irony on the SIM Centre website: our Twitter sidebar widget, which does a lovely job of displaying tweets from all those who are connected to the SIM Centre, wasn't showing tweets from the SIM Centre itself. I realized that was because our sidebar...
6 solutions to the sadness of social media
Is social media making us sad? On the UK's Channel 4 News website, Benjamin Cohen is concerned that social media is changing the nature of friendship, and has adjusted his use of social media in response: I’ve stopped sharing as much, full stop....I’m not suggesting...
Why I like to check my email
Recently I've been trying to follow my friend Leda's advice on taming the compulsive need to pull my iPhone out any spare moment: the eight seconds in which the grocery clerk is running a price check, the twenty seconds it takes to walk to the bathroom, the...
The 10 best tips on how to write an online dating profile
It was inevitable that one of my single friends would get the hint. I go on and on about my fascination with online dating, and how tragic it is that I missed out by getting married before it was really a thing, and how much I would like to learn more about how it all...
Jobs of the future
It has been widely reported that for most of today's elementary schoolchildren, the jobs that lie in their future don't even exist yet. While that may be terrifying for those of us in the parenting or education game (how do you prep kids for a future you can't see?),...