At a library booksale in the late 1990s, I found an old paperback of James Howard Kunstler’s The Geography of Nowhere. After years of playing sim City, I was vaguely interested in how real places were zoned and constructed. Kunstler gave me a language about urbanism and walk-ability and such that helped me explain why the swathes of parking lots surrounding everything were useless and ugly. He clued me into the truth: most new places being build and zones were being done badly.
We spent the first few weeks of November in Tennessee. The trip was ambitious: we drove with four young children for 16 hours. And it was routine: we planned to lead a normal life at my in-law’s house on the edge of the Smoky Mountains. For the kids, this meant continued homeschooling; for me this meant continued remote work from my father-in-law’s office.
Why would you want to find dynamism?
I think it’s because too many of our institutions and leaders pride themselves on stopping change or returning things to how they used to be.
Marketing success requires knowing your business and how to reach your customers. The secret sauce for digital success adds an eye for the opportunities in the evolving digital space. For example, when I was a digital marketer for a political non-profit, I generated good results by borrowing ideas from B2C digital (emails like Apple) and political campaigns (Facebook like Obama).
This July, I’ve been slowly reading The Stories of John Cheever. He published short fiction in The New Yorker for half a century and won the Pulitzer for this 1978 collection.
I’ve picked CRM systems a few times. Some flopped immediately, others worked at first but were outgrown, and only rarely did the CRM provide long-term value. But it’s those CRMs that stuck around that were the best: CRMs only add value if you keep them!
We’re about to push off for Plymouth. Like the Pilgrims of yore, we’ll have a minivan full of beach games, towels, and our beach wedding best on some hangers. It’s an early summer wedding, of my older brother.
BEVERLY, MA In our last local election, my longtime city councilor’s re-election message was a list of the things he’d opposed. Highlights on the list were stopping a gymnastics place from opening and successfully blocking the licensing of a new day care in our part of town; his lowlight was that he’d tried and failed to stop the new Whole Foods from going in. Happily for the neighborhood, his failure to stop the Whole Foods ensured that the old dump by the highway overpass was turned into an ok little shopping plaza.
These three pieces have stuck with me. Most writing on the internet doesn’t. And I read a fair amount of the internet!