In the Showtime series ‘Billions’, it’s hard to pinpoint a protagonist. Both characters, the cocky self-made billionaire investor Bobby Axelrod and the sincere but ruthless US Attorney Chuck Rhoades callously manipulate all the tools at their disposal to ‘stay in the game.’ The show provides a farcical look at how…

Balancing the tension between independent leadership and external expectations requires managers at corporate entities to walk a unique tightrope that only they can see. In recently published research, however, researchers point out that, since the 1980s, too many ‘successful’ American companies have eschewed internal exceptionalism (and any innovation and added…

The title quote comes from a Joan Didion essay that mocks its premise. Didion wrote in the sixties. As a journalist and film critic as well as a screenwriter and novelist, Didion documented, criticized, and exploited the human addiction to narrative. While much of Didion’s output implies a sort of…

When I pursued my LLM in Brussels, I took a paid internship and then a job with an online media monitoring company. I got the job because I spoke English, had a VISA, possessed very basic salary expectations (feed me, house me, pay for my alcohol), and knew what Twitter…

Can Napster’s temporary ’99 revolt against the music industry offer some insight into this not-so-modern issue? (Culture karma for each 1999 GIF recognized.) Peer review is predictable by default. Peer-reviewed publications are supposed to make research better by ensuring and preserving academic excellence. It is true that peer review ensures quality work and endorses good science (and by extension, good scientists.) …

First, a personal story about my uncle. My uncle grew up on a dairy farm in the northern part of the state of Georgia in the USA. My uncle’s Connecticut-based family had purchased the farm for my uncle’s father, my grandfather, who had graduated from UConn, Connecticut’s public state university, as an agricultural engineer. At that time…

I for one am sick of the environment. Sure, global warming is real, but if I have to listen to yet another lecture from another leader about how I need to reuse, reduce, and recycle before he jumps on his private plane and jets off to his next paid consultancy…

I am what one now calls a technical writer which is to say I work with people who do things like math and science (including social science because, ultimately, isn’t every technical product aimed at engineering the humans who access it? For now anyways…soon Alexa, Google, and Siri will turn…

Soon it will be September, back-to-school sweater weather (though less so recently, what with global warming) and the European Commission and its subsidiaries will crank out a huge number of grants and tenders. These offers will be virtual goldmines of bullsh!t Bingo terms, from digital to democracy to online creative…