Media Maven
We used to fear a robot army was coming until we realized that they’re more afraid of us than we are of them.
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Herb Caen Never Had to Make an Em Dash on a Chromebook
Those of a certain generation may recall Herb Caen, the erstwhile?San Francisco Chronicle?columnist who anchored the Macy’s ad next to his daily forays into what he called ?three dot journalism.? I never met Caen but my mother, when a bank VP, retained his services as an on-call personality. This was during the rollicking ?90s when…
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Literary Criticism by Robots
Writers who fear that computers will someday displace them may shudder to learn that the machines won’t just write the books, they will read them too. In recent months, both researchers and literary critics are harnessing computational power to ‘read? books in an effort to divine qualities human writers and readers haven’t the bandwidth to…
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Narrative Science Robots Want My Job
When I first learned about Chicago-based Narrative Science, the smallest, weakest part of my ego caught flame and soon an inferno of doubt engulfed my every thought. The firm’s artificial intelligence algorithms combine “business analytics” and “natural language communication” in a manner that makes raw data easily consumable. Basically, they’ve taught robots to write news…
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All Saints Day: Simon Templar is The Saint
Because you have nothing better to do on All Saints Day, here’s a selection of the opening credits of The Saint, a Brit TV spy thriller starring a pre-Bond Roger Moore as a suave modern Robin Hood known as Simon Templar. He is described by his creator, author Leslie Charteris, as a “buccaneer in the…
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War of the Worlds Radio Broadcast: When Hearing is Believing
23-year-old Orson Welles put the me in mea culpa when he apologized for his infamous War of the Worlds radio broadcast of the Martian invasion tale.
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The Big Business of Being Superman (Infographic)
Whodathunk that a space alien with a Christ-complex and leotard cooked up by a couple of Jewish kids in Cleveland would become a billion dollar business? They apparently didn’t – hence the $130 fee from Detective Comics (now Warner Bros.-owned behemoth DC Comics). 75 years later, Superman has become so emblematic of “Truth, Justice and the…
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Video on the Radio, My Billboard Interview
I recently had a chat with Billboard editor Mike Stern about how radio peeps might inexpensively incorporate video into their bag of tricks. Yes, it may seem a tad counter-intuitive that radio stations need to make forays into a visual medium but since the web has become the unified field theory of all media, we…
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Self-Driving Google Car Hastens Apocalypse
Of the myriad End-of-the-World-As-We-Know-It scenarios that have gripped the popular imagination in recent years, two are perennial chart toppers: the zombie apocalypse and/or the robot uprising. Whether hailing from the supernatural or science fiction, both find humanity spending the End Times cowering from what are essentially roving bands of drones interested in either eating our…
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A Google Alert Feel-Good Book Review
Because I’m a vain and paranoid author, I use Google Alerts to track online mentions of me, my books and my nemesis (who shall go nameless but you know who you are and I know you’re reading this). Most days the Google bot just regurgitates my own blogs and columns or the occasional news item…