Rough Drafts

One of today’s top recommended stories in my Medium feed is a piece intriguingly titled “How I Got My Attention Back.” I clicked through, only to see that Medium estimated it as a 14-minute read. Fourteen minutes! You expect me to spend more than half a pomodoro of my precious attention on a wanderi

As a society, we are facing a crisis of understanding. Fake news is just the latest expression of a deeper problem: We have more and more difficulty thinking about (and talking about) complex topics. In short, it’s hard to convey nuance and multiplicity with the media we have today. Social networks

This year I took the kids shopping with me on Christmas Eve. I gave them $60 each: A twenty to buy a present for their mom, a twenty to buy a present for their sibling, and a twenty to buy some stocking stuffers for the other three members of the family. “You’re going to help play […]

I’m done with Facebook for now, so I am signing off for awhile. Partly I am annoyed with the company for not taking a stand against the Trump administration and its elected leader’s comments about making lists of Muslims and immigrants. For the company’s COO to attend a meeting with Trump yesterday

The radio tells me that calls to suicide hotlines are up 30 percent since the election. The news tells me that racists will be in the white house. Friends share stories with me about how bad things are about to get. A writer I respect says we have less than two months at best. People […]

In the past few days I’ve been thinking about how much I have to lose. I enjoy the evenings at my son’s soccer practice, overhearing snippets of English, Spanish, and Arabic. I love the Spanish-speaking soccer moms who bring way too much food to weekend soccer tournaments, plying us with sandwiches,

So you’re considering quitting the rat race and becoming an entrepreneur — congratulations. Whether you’re working on a killer startup with a few pals or embarking on a career of self-employment, you’re about to discover what life is like when you have maximal control. In many ways, it’s awesome. I’

The South End (aka SERC) is one of two swimming-rowing clubs that share a building in Aquatic Park, right next to Hyde St. Pier. It’s a terrific group of welcoming, fun-loving people who are into all things aquatic. What’s more, it’s a San Francisco institution, dating back to 1873. Serious history

I was a kayaker this morning for a group of veterans swimming from Alcatraz to SF. It was a great morning… Beautiful, flat water, warm… And a bunch of men and women hauling ass through the water. Including guys missing limbs but swimming just the same. It was pretty cool. Before the swim I was […]

Univision is acquiring Gawker Media for $135 million, news reports confirmed yesterday, beating out Ziff Davis in an auction for the media company’s assets. Here’s what that means for the media industry.

It’s hard to imagine now, but the web once meant far more than Google and Facebook. In the early days, there was an explosion of optimism and experimentation as people embraced blogging, mostly via a range of sometimes half-baked open standards that let them publish, share, and communicate with each