The smoking section for your average taco truck… Smoking an elongated cigarette on El Camino Real in front of the Kaiser Permanente hospital… (South San Francisco, California 2017. See more of my […]
Hey Facebook – can you tell me who my perfect match is?
Big Data and Social Media: Americans can’t give their privacy away fast enough… Big Data just keeps getting bigger and biggerer, and it seems like if you have enough data you can […]
Affluenza: Black Friday is America’s new high holy day

Originally published on 11/23/2012. And it’s getting worse. Black Friday is under way – has been since midnight, in fact. In many places around the country, retailers started kicking off the festivities at […]
Target to require retinal scans and DNA samples of all in-store customers
Okay, maybe not yet. But we’re definitely getting there. Check out today’s two-part gotcha. Part 1: Back in 2008 I wrote a piece called “The Smartest Shopping Cart That Ever Lived,” a […]
Meanings, pt. 2: a crisis of prevailing values
by Michael Tracey It isn’t just that there is an appetite for scandal, sex, sleaze, death narratives, it is also that feeding such appetites can be very profitable. The fact is that […]