Just as the marketing of Christmas begins around Columbus Day, each year the Super Bowl commercial frenzy muscles onto the scene earlier and earlier, and extends beyond the final scrimmage. In fact, a Super Bowl commercial is no longer a mere message, it is a complex and prismatic marketing campaign...

As Romney's lead in Florida solidifies, and an unfocused Gingrich rages in all directions -- he's his own attack dog -- I want to come right out and say it. Romney's Brokaw commercial is one of the most devastatingly effective negative spots I've seen in years. I believe it will...

Despite the very public nature of Christopher Hitchens' battle with esophageal cancer -- amplified by his atheism and the media's ghoulish obsession with whether his mortal illness would elicit any crowd-pleasing, pre-deathbed conversions -- the amount of attention paid to the death of a "man of ideas" was extraordinary. Public...

Those looking for a unified metaphor to explain the sheer nuttiness of the Republican primary season need look no further than the return of Donald Trump -- and his distinctive hair infrastructure project.

For a time there, Trump had been off the radar. He had receded after resurrecting the hoary...

As the United Nations sits on the verge of an historical vote on the issue of Palestinian statehood, we can't forget this:

Israel started with one of the world's great brands. Since then, it's been on a reputation trajectory that would make a great Harvard Business Review case titled...

Tuesday -- the first day back at work after Labor Day -- is the symbolic start of the Serious Season.

Can there be a more emotional, more potent moment for a speech about jobs?

He could have started it off by saying:

"Today is the first day after Labor Day.

Today is C-Day. It's the grand launch of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, an entity that was created nearly two years ago as part of the Dodd-Frank legislation, as regulatory fervor was surging in the post-meltdown, populist ether.

Unbridled banking testosterone was the enemy, with convenient expostulations from both...

Carl Bernstein describes the current uprising against Rupert Murdoch and News Corporation in terms he's intimately familiar with: Watergate. Give a child a hammer and every target looks like Nixon.

I think a more apt analogy would be the dazzling cycle of sea-change events that started in Tunisia...

To be healthy, a society -- like a mature adult -- must be capable of dreaming, and of discipline.

Last week, with the valedictory flight of the Space Shuttle, and the contemporaneous failure of the parties to agree on a bold step to address the structural cause of the...

Cross-Posted from FastCompany.com

Yesterday's surprising verdict was, simply put, a supremely emotional consumer purchase decision. Though a potential death sentence was at stake, the process by which jurors acted as purchasers followed well-established patterns of perception. Jurors listened, drew conclusions and eliminated unpleasant realities that interrupted their existing...

One needs to view the stunning denouement
of the Dominique Strauss-Kahn matter through the lens by which we draw conclusions in today's raw, blunt, and pre-determinative social (and media) context.

Specifically...

Our brains have been programmed.

Our neural networks locked and loaded.

The minute we hear...

This week, the SEC settled with JP Morgan Chase. And we, the taxpayers -- more aptly known as their oxygen supply -- have nothing much to show for it.

The bank agreed to fork over a paltry $153.6 million to the government to settle civil charges that "...it...

Last week, Moody's -- the ratings service that played a central role in the financial crisis, the results of which remain painfully alive -- threatened to downgrade America's credit rating.

Here's what they said in their press release:

... if there is no progress on...

Take 10 minutes. Read Dwight Eisenhower's Farewell Speech, to the nation, delivered 50 years ago yesterday. You'll be stunned.

You'll be stunned by its intellectual courage. If your impression of Eisenhower is limited to his military leadership during World War II, and the perceived conformity and deadening...

President Obama is generally getting strong reviews for his speech last night, and I think he did a fine job of calling the nation to a higher purpose. There were even some moments when his rhetoric spread its wings, as when he urged us to "expand our moral imaginations." Although...

The New York City Health Department isn't full of wussy, controversy-averse, fear-of-offending bureaucrats, that's for sure. They're responsible for a AIDS-prevention TV spot that is gutsy, tabloidy, and has riled up some segments of the gay community.

The spot, which as been likened to a "

The irony of the death of Richard Holbrooke preceding the death of the DREAM Act by just a short time is too substantial to remain unnoted.

Holbrooke was the child of immigrants; his mother's family made it out of Hamburg in 1933,...

Today in Oslo there was an empty chair for the imprisoned Liu Xiaobo, and equally empty seats in the audience for the 18 gutless countries that didn't show up because of Chinese arm-twisting.

We'd expect those jammed in China's pocket ideologically or economically to cave. But think about...

The unstoppable epidemic of crowd wisdom, the relentless American Idolization of the land, claimed another victory when Amazon announced it is getting into the movie production business.

The vehicle for this is their new Amazon Studios, which is a wide-open platform where would-be auteurs can submit...

Requisite disclaimer: The following is not an endorsement of Sarah Palin's views, merely a cultural deconstruction of the semaphoric qualities of the title of her new book.

Because nothing that Sarah Palin does is by accident -- or put less freightedly -- because everything she does is strategic and plotted...