A few weeks ago, I found myself at Reagan National Airport in Washington, DC early on a Saturday morning. The terminal tends to be quiet at that time of week, so I was a bit surprised to see more people than I expected waiting in the security line. As I looked closer, I noticed that [...]
commentary
Kara Miller, an instructor on media issues at Babson College in Massachusetts, writes in her Culture Club blog at Boston.com about conflicts of interest in the media. Her focus is on the intersection between media coverage and sponsorship of media outlets. She concludes: Commercials, certainly, are not new to news shows. But there is something [...]
Organizations should not proactively monitor what their employees are doing online. There’s an asterisk we’ll get to in a moment, but tracking social networking behavior, what sites workers visit, the content of emails, and other electronic behavior should not be on the list of workplace activities. Now let me be clear: I believe employers have [...]
Most of the time I read recently released books, but that doesn’t mean there aren’t good books out there that were published more than a few months ago. I’m not talking the “classics” — which honestly don’t generally appeal to me all that much (with apologies to my old English teachers). There are books from [...]
Online consumer product reviews have changed the way I shop. Rarely do I make a purchase without checking on the web to see what others have experienced themselves. I take into account the assessments of professionals, but I value the collective judgment of multiple consumers more. The system works when many people take the time [...]
When a speaker or author drops the “f bomb,” utters excretory expletives, or launches a lusty cuss word, it doesn’t add emphasis. It doesn’t make them look cool, hip, and smart. It makes them seem crass, juvenile, arrogant, and less than they are. I say this not because I’m a linguistic purist. Far from it. [...]
It seems as if we have heard about the coming convergence of electronic communications tools for years now. And yet while we continue to see ever more powerful gadgets that do indeed have greater functionality than their predecessors, we still can’t shed all of our gear and replace it with one central device. Some company [...]
Ars Technica kicked off a hullabaloo by blocking content for those who use ad blockers. The “experiment” lasted only about 12 hours over the weekend, according to editor Ken Fisher. In a blog post, Fisher argues that “ad blocking is devastating to the sites you love.”
It has become increasingly common for me to find myself in conversations with colleagues where I recognize the reality that I have gone from being a young turk to a budding grayhair. I explain things that seem entirely foreign to the 20-somethings who I work with. For example, I did not have a PC or [...]
Upon Further Review Let’s Have a Booth Umpire for Baseball
by Chip Griffin on June 6, 2010
I was just two years old when Larry Barnett served as the home plate umpire of Game 3 of the 1975 World Series between the Boston Red Sox and Cincinnati Reds. Needless to say, I have no contemporaneous memory of the game, but I came to learn as a young boy that he had made a controversial non-call in that game that many believe cost the Red Sox a victory.