Short Essays About Our Foibles and Successes As Communicators. Click a Topic to Open an Essay.

Core Principles

• The Necessity of Acknowledgement
• “Mere?” Not so Much
• The Conversational Fire of Curiosity
• Communication as Context
• Getting Clarity: The Usefulness of “Mirroring”
• Empathy: Finding Ourselves in Others
• The Myth of Personal Authenticity
• Turing, and the Bogus Rivalry with Machine-Based Intelligence
• Meaning is Less Transferable Than We Think
• Which Gettysburg Did He See?
• Seating: A Concern For More Than Brides
• Looking for Multiple Narratives
• The Park Solution
• Persuasion: The Myth of Easy Influence
• The Power of Rhetorical Transcendence
• The Myth of Successful Multitasking
• The Mistake of Communication as Chemistry
• Character and The Confidence to Not Know
• Getting to the Target First
• Attention Without Deficits 
• The Melioristic Bias
• The Power to Name is the Power to See
• Feeling Put-Upon? Sharpen the Knives and Round Up the Goats
• We Hear What We Need to Hear
• Not to Despair, But We Are Islands
• In Praise of the Linear Mind
• The Addressable Audience: the Decline of a Communication Model
• The Grammar of Hubris
• The Mistake of Assumed Agency
• The Small Pleasures of Finding the Right Word
• The Damaged Individual Who Cannot Self Monitor
• Happily Misinformed
• De-Stressing in the Woods
• The Deterministic Mind
• The Paradox of Our Multiple Selves
• Emotion as Logic
• Social Intelligence
• Parting Thoughts
• The Appeal to Fear
• Anchors
• The American Impulse for Light
• No Thanks.  I’ve Been Warned
• Rhetorical Exigencies
• The Keyboard Inventor
• Nonfluencies
• Negative Models
• A Theory of the Depression Monsoon
• What should I say?
• Sticking the Landing
• The Decline of the Dialogical Model
• The Uses of Ambiguity
• Name that Rhetorical Device!
• The Response of Compliance
• I Must Have Missed it.
• Dualistic Thinking
• Don’t Count on Straight Line Effects
• The Bond of Eye Contact
• The Mistake of Multitasking
• Jeremiads 
• Burke’s Definition of All of Us, In Five Clauses
• Looking for Listeners
• Voicing Messages
• Figuring Out When the Lights on On
• The False Promise of the Ill-formed Question
• Easily the Most Common Communication Deficit 
• On the Make
• The Useful Idea of Social Intelligence
• Celebrating Division
• Brain or Mind?
• Simulated Versus Real Experience
• The Rough Ride of Identity Politics
• Why We Cling to Magical Thinking
• Do We Still Know Who We Are?
• Our Brush With Authoritarianism 
• We Need to Remember What an Argument Looks Like
• Writing or Typing? It Seems to Matter
• The Face of Trumpism Comes into Focus
• The Appeal of Being Inside a Fence
• Curating Our Memories
• We Easily Miss the Big Stuff
• Overestimating What we Can Fix
• Making Sense of it All
• The Cheapest Path to Redemption

 

Face to Face

• Close Quarters
• Grace Under Pressure
• Very Verbal People
• The Self-Referential Bore
• Bombing
• Doing What Comes Unnaturally
• Is Mentoring Out of Fashion?
• Face to Face in the Classroom
• Invitations From Hollywood to Witness Conversational Trainwrecks
• The Fluency of Caffeine
• What Could Possibly Go Wrong?
• Are We Losing Our Children to Conversational Silence?
• An Emerging Norm of Low Affect?
• Witnessing
• Conversational Ping Pong
• The Listening Surcharge
• The Eyes Have It
• Lunch Anyone?
• Broadcasters and Receivers
• Our Fragile Selves
• The Phone Test
• Finding Interiority
• tics
• Malapropisms
• Where Are the Kids?
• Snap Judgments
• It Was Supposed to be Just a Thought Experiment

 

In Organizations

• Sometimes the Perfect Response is No Response
• Papering Ourselves to Death
• The Strange Business of Fronting For Others
• Where are the Conciliators?
• The PowerPoint Crutch
• What Counts as Genuine Persuasion?
• Backchannels
• Tracking Corporate Miscreants in Time Out Corner
• Finding the Sense of a Meeting
• Crummy First Drafts
• Sleepwalking Through a Conference Call
• The Johnson Treatment
• The Dissent Backchannel
• A Campus Idyll
• Teachers
• Things Will Get Worse Before They Get Worse
• The Agentic Personality
• The Tyranny of Rule Making
• Different Systems That Should Yield Different Results
• The Illusive Soft Skill
• Organizational Rot
• Showhorses Versus Workhorses
• Can we Salvage the Humanities?

 

Personal Media

• Questioning Questionable Sources
• Tell Them You Like It
• In Praise of Some (Polite) Hell-Raising
• Attempting to Drive From the Backseat
• The Risks of Drinking from a Fire Hose
• The Sentimental Songs of Dis-Connectivity
• The Fraudulent Rhetoric of Anonymous Response
• The Disciplined Consumer
• Are We Done Collecting?
• The Pervasive Symbols of Personal Reinvention
• Hiding in the Bushes
• Is There a Masculine Style?
• The Diminished Returns of Managing “Smart” Things
• Words that Wound
• Coping with the Email Tide
• Putting the Squeeze on Tired Parents
• Internet Contagion and Communities of Outrage
• What A Real Debate Looks Like
• The Lure and False Authority of Click Bait
• Digital Doping
• The Canvassing Imperative
• The Simplification Bonus
• Phrases Ready for Retirement
• Helpful Ready Responses
• Curating Our Lives
• Phone Culture is Making is Stupid
• Photo Ops
• The Cloud Pollutes
• Social Media Just Aren’t That Interesting

 

Public Media

• Resisting The Fabulist Impulse in Television News
• The Money Shot
• Debased Debates
• Muting the Dream
• The Oppositional Turn
• CNN’s ‘Tragedy Porn’
• Prayer as Performance
• What Mayors Can Teach Us About Public Discourse
• The Seductive Rhetoric of Conspiracy
• Writing History Without the Soundtrack
• A Case of Failed Journalism Ethics
• Six National Media Treasures
• The Challenge of Reframing Leisure Choices as Ethical Choices
• Four Words That Are Trouble
• The American Pitch
• Disaster a la Carte
• PMQs: What Americans as Missing
• Who Gets to Tell Our Story?
• 2400 Times and Counting
• Are We Losing the Trope of American Optimism?
• News Inversions: Sound and Fury Signifying Nothing
• The High Voltage Language of Status Issues
• The Overstated Value of Rhetorical Consistency
• The High Costs of Living in an Ocular-Centric World
• The Problem of the Unintended Audience
• A Rebuke that Stuck
• Discuss and Repeat
• Looking for a Paper in Baltimore
• It Started With a Wire and a Key
• Media Matters
• The Conspiracy Mindset
• Our Iconoclastic Moment?
• Monuments to Uncertainty
• The Political Poison of Twitter
• Dusting Off an Old Problem for a New Age
• The Tacky Business of Affirmation by Denial
• What Are Campaigns For?
• The Disinformation Age
• Public Radio Thrives
• The End of the Rhetorical Presidency
• Echoes From Forty Eight Years Ago
• Ad Hominem
• The President’s Rhetorical Style
• The First Amendment
• The Limits of Forbearance 
• In the Bubble
• The Eclipse of Advocacy by Assertion: The Case of Cable News
• Presidential Theater on a Small Screen
• Presidential Theater and its Patrons
• The Worst
• Musical Bridges
• Hopeful Signs in Pessimistic Times
• The Tragedy Euphemism
• New Jersey News Media as Disappearing
• Trump’s Strategy Mindset
• No Effects?
• From Citizens to Consumers
• The Observer
• You Can Say That Again
• Taking the Bait
• American Dislocations
• Paterson
• Perfect Titles
• Living Down Plato’s Scorn
• Fighting Social Media Storms
• The Queasy Rhetoric of Cultural Appropriation
• Dancing Away the Doldrums
• The Frail Rules of Rhetorical Courtesy
• The Disappearing Agora 
• We Were Warned
• The Divider
• The pleasures of criticism
• The Rise in the Mental Health Lexicon
• The Nightmare of Presidential Incitement
• Fake News
• What to Do if a Debate Breaks Out
• Can’t be Bothered with Democratic Norms?
• The All Purpose Advocate
• The Red Carpet of Uncertainty
• The Decline of Campaign Predictability
• Finding Common Touchstones
• The Nightmare of the Brexit Debate
• The Timeless Jokes of Annie Hall
• Subverted Experiences
• Nihilism Unbound
• In Praise of the Longform Documentary
• Plan B
• A Few Lessons From a Congress that Can’t Govern
• Well Said
• American Hustler
• No Sports, No Problem
• Otherwise Engaged
• About that Slippery Ramp. . .
• Public Wealth and Private Squalor 
• Can We CGI the Outfield as Well?
• A Campaign of Mockery and Abuse
• The Feds Say Its Safe**
• Help Them Turn it Off
• The End of the Rhetorical Presidency?
• The Vote was Accurate
• How Much Media Oxygen Will He Get?
• The Fiction of National Security
• Failed States
• Freedom Claims: The Seeds of a National Crack-Up
• A Theory of Flourishing Ignorance

 

Sight and Sound

• The Invitation of the Blank White Page
• Music as Memory
• Breaking the Sound Barrier
• Words and Music
• Through a Vale of Tears: the Story-Song
• Too Much Noise on the Line
• The Acoustic Sponge of White Noise
• The Rhetoric of Hubble’s Imagery
• What Counts as Funny?
• Might Their Hatreds be Tamed?
• Keeping Our Golden Ears
• The Signal to Noise Ratio
• Focused on the Rear View Mirror
• Track 18
• Noise Fests
• Turns Out, Americans Love Opera
• Here’s to the Fools Who Dream
• Knowing by Seeing
• Restricted Revivals
• The Perfect Note
• Everyone Needs an Editor
• Dressing Ideas
• A Picture is Sometimes Worth Very Little
• Our Neglected Sense
• Where Does Music Mean?
• Paying for the Quiet
• The Primacy of Sound
• The Sound Centric Individual
• Going Solo
• Connecting With Phones Rather Than Cameras
• Misophonia
• The Dominance of Light and Vision Imagery
• The Havana Syndrome Revisited
• Valuing the Source More Than the Thing
• Save Those Compact Disks
• A Last Musical Wish
• Remarkable Features of Sound
• Hearing is Our Newest Sense
• The Irony of Expansive War Music
• Sound is a Product of Where it is Heard
• Our Fragile Hearing

 

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