Latest publications

Read my latest stories for The Wall Street Journal, Passcode, The Harvard Business Review, JSTOR Daily and more.

What’s really hurting your relationships?

What’s really hurting your relationships?

Today's paper has an article about how hard it is to preserve tight family relationships in a world where we have so many other relationships. It offered 10 signs your friendships might be hurting your family relationships: You can't get through a meal without having...

Call for Papers: Social Media in Higher Education

Call for Papers: Social Media in Higher Education

The Internet and Higher Education has issued a call for papers for a forthcoming special issue on Social Media in Higher Education (PDF). The issue will be edited by Stefan Hrastinksi and Vanessa Dennen. In the call, the editors note: In this special issue, we would...

How the other half goes offline

How the other half goes offline

Between the Christmas break and the season of New Year's resolutions, I was braced for a flurry of blog posts about the merits of unplugging -- a phenomenon I was already tired of by the end of last summer, as I wrote about for HBR. So imagine my delight when I read...

Today in HBR: 6 social media choices you have to make in 2011

Today in HBR: 6 social media choices you have to make in 2011

What am I choosing to do on the Web? That's one of the key choices you'll need to make this year, as we set the course for how social media will integrate into our lives and reshape the world. In my blog post today for HBR,  Social Media in 2011: Six Choices You Need...

5 life lessons you can learn from emptying your inbox

5 life lessons you can learn from emptying your inbox

This entry is part 11 of 11 in the series 7 Days to Inbox Zero

You’ve probably got a handful of e-mails that are still in your inbox because you are, on some level, avoiding them. These e-mails, more than anything else, illuminate your core personal or professional blocks. Forcing yourself through them — the way you have to in order to empty your inbox — is not just a path to e-mail efficiency, but a very meaningful exercise in character-building. Here are some of the lessons that may lie waiting in your inbox.