In 1956, Donald Horton and Richard Wohl coined the term parasocial interaction to describe the psychological relationship that people were starting to have with TV personalities. Though radio had already started this phenomenon, the television brought with it an entirely new dimension. People started to… Read More
Last week, audio clips from an internal Q&A session at Facebook were leaked and published by the Verge. These meetings have historically always been private. In what I think was the right move, the company then decided to publicly livestream a subsequent Q&A session —… Read More
I took the above photo on my Fujifilm X-T3 at the Museum of Contemporary Art here in Toronto. Obviously, it is a cast of David Bowie’s head. I’ve been using Fujifilm’s X cameras for exactly 3 years now and have already gone through 2 different… Read More
Last week it was announced that WordPress.com (which is what I use for this blog) had purchased Tumblr for around $3 million. This is, of course, after Yahoo had purchased it for $1.1 billion in 2013 and later wrote it down, having never figured out… Read More
This Toronto Life article about a 32-year-old who has managed to buy 10 homes in the city is very Toronto Life. At a time where many young people are struggling to afford housing, here is a millennial who has bought 10 of them (albeit with… Read More
In 2017, the New York Times Style Magazine ran a piece on Harry Nuriev – and his design firm Crosby Studios – titled: The man designing spaces for the Instagram age. Since then, Harry and his firm have been in Time Magazine, have had a… Read More
The product matters. How big is the screen on this smartphone? How many horses does this all-wheel drive car have? And how high are the ceilings in this condo? (Some architects get grumpy with me when I call buildings a “product.” It’s so much more than… Read More
Andrew Kortina and Namrata Patel recently published an intriguing essay called, Kinky Labor Supply and the Attention Tax. They begin by talking about declining labor force participation rates, particularly among young men. Remember that the participation rate is distinct from the unemployment rate. Here is a… Read More
Earlier this week I deleted my Facebook account. If we were friends on the service and you can no longer find me, this is the reason why. Part of why I did this certainly had to do with privacy. I read Brian Acton’s (WhatsApp cofounder)… Read More
Economists at Facebook, Harvard, Princeton and NYU recently analyzed anonymous Facebook data in order to study our social connectedness. The New York Times’ Upshot wrote about it here and it is a must read. There are a number of interesting takeaways from the study. One… Read More
