Armchair Sociology
What the Existence of Don Draper and Katy Perry Really Says About You
Why we need to stop living vicariously through our pop culture heroes and start living our own lives like we mean it.
Why we need to stop living vicariously through our pop culture heroes and start living our own lives like we mean it.
NOTE: I wrote this years ago, but I took it down when I last redesigned my blog. Then a reader told me that this post helped her a lot over the years, and she asked me if I would consider reposting it. So, after a few small updates, I did. Read more…
Facebook is making us boring. Our perpetual digital connectivity has warped our minds into believing that others are hanging on our every word… even when those words are all about our allergies, our retail woes, our opinions about pop culture, politics, and other inanities. In other words, the very stories Read more…
Life is short. We’re busy. Things happen. And then we die. In the meantime, here are 10 questions you should ask yourself more often, so you don’t end up running in place between now and then. What did the 18 year-old me think the current me would be doing? What Read more…
A few months ago, I decided to try an experiment with this blog. From May through July, instead of posting daily, I would only post once per week. That way, rather than scrambling to say something relevant 5 times a week, I could invest my time in one good, solid Read more…
Last week, Ian M. Rountree and I started Read It All Week, a challenge to read everything we were subscribed to — especially all the blogs we so easily subscribe to, but never actually absorb. We did this for two reasons: To reconsider why we subscribe to certain kinds of Read more…
On Sunday nights, Mack Collier runs a Twitter-based group chat called #blogchat, which I highly recommend to anyone who wants to learn more about blogging while hobnobbing with their peers. But, based on the defensive reaction to some of my comments from several of the #blogchat participants, I’ve realized that Read more…
I don’t know anybody who loves pop radio. I know people who listen to it ironically, as though they’re not comfortable admitting they don’t entirely hate Lady Gaga. And I know people who admit to liking just Lady Gaga, or just Usher, but still insist they “hate the radio.” But Read more…
If you write, speak or perform for a living, you need an audience. Without one, you don’t get paid. (Hell, online, you still don’t get paid even with one. But I digress…) Your audience is one way to validate your success as a communicator. But your audience is also a Read more…
What if our newspapers were filled with articles on how to write for newspapers? What if the only books we printed were books about how to sell books? What if TV shows consisted solely of monologues about TV? I doubt we’d have much use for them at all. So why Read more…