Marian Salzman

It's Memorial Day weekend and many of us are preparing for barbecuing, beaching or just hanging out. But a note landed in my partner Jim's email inbox a few days ago that made me pause and think about the true importance of this holiday: honoring the valor of our soldiers,...

In this election year, I've been on fear watch. Folks are fearful of everything from 2012 theories to GMOs to student loans taking over as the number one source of pain for college grads everywhere. A few years ago, I talked at length about the cult of anger our country...

I remember being blown away by An American Family, which was a compelling and unorthodox documentary miniseries when it was made back in 1973 that showed the world the "typical" American family was anything but. Much time has passed since the Louds captivated our psyches (HBO recently did its own...

Normally when I speak or write, it's to comment on a new trend or the implications of breaking news -- the sort of stuff that's out there in the public spaces of the media. So at first, I thought speaking about social media at the American Association of Advertising Agencies'...

Now that the recession has retreated just a bit from American shores, we're being allowed to take a better look at its aftermath. To be frank, it's not pretty, especially for millennials and their parents. Many of the latter co-signed on student loans and must cope with the loss of...

It was always a lofty idea -- maybe too good to be true.

As it was conceived, the European Union would unite a growing body of member states with a web of treaties and a single currency -- a kind of dollar for the United States of Europe.

It has been 19 years this week since the first World Trade Center bombing (hello, world, they hate us) and almost 17 years since Oklahoma City exploded at the whim of an American terrorist. I remember that time that had us all fearful, but without the tools to understand what...

I've started to think I might be. Not textbook antisocial, just allergic to phone calls and small talk. It isn't my fault, though, and I think you might be able to relate.

As the CEO of a public relations agency, my life is all about the business of...

As we fade to gray in 2012, it's due in no small part to the tearing down of traditions and an end of entitlement gone extreme.

Look for next year to lead to a new era and change in thought; it has been said that the Mayans...

Does the notion of "me time" almost always mean "we time" in this decidedly social age (even if me plus one or more is virtual)?

I wonder what Greta Garbo (who infamously crafted a reluctant catchphrase in the movie Grand Hotel: "I want to be alone") would think of alone...

In the late '90s, Douglas Rushkoff's book Playing the Future introduced the term "screenager:" a teenager who spends a lot of time at a computer screen sending emails and instant messages, downloading music and movies, playing games and cruising around online. Cut to 15 years later, and we are all...

Ladies and gentlemen of the Preoccupied movement, allow me to redirect your attention to another location, because Wall Street is getting stale (word on the street is it's getting too cold for you to stay there anyway, and the object of your preoccupation enjoyed a nice little rally recently and...

Since 9/11 (and long before, actually), the world and our nation have been obsessed with a collective hatred of individuals who threaten our ways of life and promote hatred of it. But now that bin Laden, Hussein and Gaddafi are dead, who will be the object of our obscenity-laced scorn...

Everybody's talking about the inevitable social media fatigue setting in, but I myself am having a wicked case of brain blur. At any given time, my head is filled with ways to solve problems that often have no answer, as in trying to make sense of how to communicate in...

Behold the velocity of change, where technology has enabled a Mach 11 approach to spreading and receiving information. And as an outcome of all this now-or-now business, the rumor mill is not only buzzing but also shouting down the lane. It's not at all unlike the virus portrayed in the...

In my travels around the world, I've (over)heard a lot of ways for people to say they've reached a point of no return with their frustration, feeling so full of stress that they're stirred from passive acceptance to real action. Some cultures say it's "the drop that makes the jar...

Remember that stress-envy thing we were all feeling in the late '90s? You know, talking about how much we were working, how tired we were and how there were simply not enough hours in the day? We wore our stress with a badge of honor. And there was a cloying...

Much ado has been made over the peaks, valleys and general drama associated with big business -- but what happens when the business is all in the family and corruption seeps through and threatens the very fiber of its ancestral heritage?

There's certainly no better example these days than everything...

I recently spotted a statistic on Ad Age about how 68 percent of today's Millennials ask friends for their opinion before they try a restaurant.

I've done a lot of research on the Generation Y set and know that they are very codependent (why do anything solo...

There's a real paradox today in the meaning of the word community. On one hand, we're building our communities online and forming tribes with like-minded, digital folks who share our likes and dislikes, our restaurant recommendations and, in the case of places like Egypt, our desire for democracy.

But...