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Your Three-Year-Old Already Knows the Brand Name

Watch a three-year-old in a grocery store. Watch her eyes when you turn into the cereal aisle. Her gaze is not scanning the shelves the way you scan them, evaluating prices and nutritional labels and unit costs. A search is underway. The child already knows what she wants, and she knows it by name, and she knows the name because a screen taught it to her before she could read the word printed on the box. The box appears in her sightline. A finger goes up. The name comes out of her mouth. You have just witnessed the end product of a commercial pedagogy that has been operating in American media for more than fifty years, and the child has no idea it happened to her.

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Non-Fungible Tokens and Cryptocurrencies

Cryptocurrencies and Non-Fungible Token (NFT) Artwork have been big in the news this week, and in many ways they are the path forward into the virtual future that shall become us. I love NFT Art, and I buy, and collect it, using the Ethereum cryptocurrency. Ethereum has become the standard currency for purchasing NFT Art because ETH hovers around $3k USD for one ETH coin while Bitcon hovers around $40k for a single coin. You can see below a mashup of five separate “Tokyo Punks” I purchased from the Sabet collection and then included them all in a single animated GIF.

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Questioning the Memeing of the Kindle Fire

The naming of products can be a funny and tricky thing. There is the often repeated and yet false story about how the Chevrolet Nova failed to sell well in Latin America because the name means that the car does not go in Spanish. Even the naming of web sites, thanks to the lack of spaces in the url, can turn an innocuous store like Pen Island into the less than innocuous Penisland. A place to find out Who Represents actors suddenly seems like it could really be about Whore Presents when you don’t parse the name of the site correctly.

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The One Book Bookstore

For many years, bookstores have gone through different phases of figuring out how to get the people who came into their stores to buy the books on their shelves. Should books be faced out, lined up with the spines out, or a combination of the two — and which books got the face out treatment? Successful strategies were copied — you don’t see too many bookstores that are missing a “staff picks” section for a reason — it moves books. It really caught my eye when I saw the strategy of one Brooklyn native, Andrew Kessler — make an entire bookstore dedicated to his book.

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The Ansel Adams Con Job

When a team of “experts” manage to get something wrong — especially when that team decides that they have decisively come to the only correct conclusion possible — it confounds us and makes us wonder how we can ever trust people that call themselves experts.

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