Blog

The other day, for a brief time, Volkswagen of America posted a partial news release that announced it was switching the “k” in its name to a “t” and becoming Voltswagen. The supposed re-branding would signify a strong focus on electric vehicles. The release promptly...

A typo may be an accident, but it’s no crime. Unless you’re a Long Island thief who’s trying to avoid prison. Last year, CNN reported on a scheme by Robert Berger, who had been charged with attempted grand larceny and possession of stolen property. When Berger was due...

In Montreal, an independent bookstore owner got into a public spat with the building’s landlord. Fortunately, the tale had a happy ending. But before it got to that point, a smarmy comment by one of the two parties irritated the heck out of me. Stephen Welch, who owns...

If you want to keep your information safe, passwords, firewalls and encryption can all do the trick. But do you think that will protect your messages for 324 years? Here’s what did, for a letter dated July 31, 1697. That missive used a technique called letterlocking,...

Is COVID changing the way we think and act? I’m not talking about the medical impacts, but about the connections between COVID, information and technology. Four articles got me reflecting on this. A new study in the Journal of Racial and Ethnic Health Disparities...

Is the media biased? Maybe, just not in the way a lot of people imagine. Many critiques of the media concern a supposed liberal bias among reporters. For the sake of argument, assume that a majority of journalists do lean that way. Some surveys have shown that. So...

Are books suitable props? The question has come up a lot this past year, as people are on screen from their home and office settings. Bookshelves are prominent behind many talking heads on TV, and make for popular Zoom backgrounds. It’s not always a matter of people...

Some jargon might be unavoidable in our discourse, but let’s take a buzzsaw to buzzwords. Catching up on the some year-end lists, I noticed that AdAge compiled what they called the terrors of 2020 – the many ways we torture the language “to turn perfectly respectable...

It’s one of the most widely-distributed publications in the world. At its peak, it printed 200 million copies in 32 languages, and hit 50 markets. You’ve likely flipped through its pages, and may well have one in your home right now. What is it? The Guinness World...

Back in August, the Lincolnshire Wildlife Park in Friskney, England received five African grey parrots. They joined another 200. Within weeks, the new quintet had to be separated. Why? They started to swear routinely, which encouraged the other parrots to mimic them....