I used to be an organizer — a person who works to gather people together into organizations for social change. There’s a mistake I made once, years ago, and I’ve never let go of it. It’s a small thing. …

We’ve all been there. It’s a conference or a workshop. The room isn’t huge but it’s big enough. Or maybe it is big. Maybe it’s a small theater. The speaker gets on stage, fumbles with the microphone for less then a second and then says, “I hate microphones. …

Did you read the story about the Russian porn actresses who were unexpectedly outed by facial recognition software? I didn’t write it, but I read it. In 2016, I became deeply invested in reporting on why people should be more careful about how much information they volunteer to strangers who…

So last week a creepy little site descended on the internet and American media gave its creators exactly what its creators wanted: a lot of attention. Here’s the story in The New York Times about the new bit of digital real estate and all the well-reasoned critiques made against it…

Stay for the cat photos 2015 was, personally, a huge year in writing for me. I moved from freelance work to a staff gig at the New York Observer, but I also did what journalists do and learned a lot about the world around me while communicating the most salient…

How to do a conference call I have been doing conference calls since the early, early days. I think I ran my first conference call as a paid service in 1999. I used to be the national field organizer for a non-profit called The Interfaith Alliance. My job was to…

Don’t ask them to send you links to the stories they wrote about you. It was enough that they wrote about you. — If you’re that important, maybe set up a Google News alert. kthx.

News stories rely too much on rates of change — You see comparisons in news stories all the time, company vs. company, state vs. state, that give percentages to show that one entity is outperforming another. The trouble is, without a broader context, that can be really misleading. …