As you well know, I love TED Talks. I appreciate how they introduce me to new ideas and persons, and I value how they inspire me to think differently and to aspire to change…my ideas, my world, myself. All of this helps explain why I was so intrigued by this searing critique of TED Talks in a, well, TED Talk given by Benjamin Bratton, Associate Professor of Visual Arts at the University of California, San Diego. The core of his many concerns about TED Talks is their profound over-simplication of complex problems and potential solutions to those problems. He’s not against popularization, per se, but rather creating a false sense of...

I love New Year’s resolutions. They have this way of making you feel like anything is possible. Part of it is the wholly arbitrary and yet incredibly powerful event of the start of a new year itself. Even though we could conceivably start a new year on any day (February 1…or 28th, for that matter), once you choose to count from a certain place, it gives the impression of a new start. January 1st, of course, flows with absolutely no disconnect from December 31, but that’s beside the point. What matters is that we’ve decided to count 1/1 not simply as a continuation of 12/31 but as something new. The other delicious part of New...