Briefly

Never forget the dramatic loving effect you can have on the people in your life if you choose to show them. A friend of mine got a message from an ex-co-worker today which said, “I have become sentimental in my old age and watching life happen before our eyes and I would hate to think you never realized the impact you have had on me — personally and professionally. You are truly an amazing person.” As you might imagine, this made my friend feel really great and it made me really proud of her. That note didn’t cost the sender anything in time or effort, but she made another person feel great. Just remember that you have the chance to make someone feel special, too, every single day. Don’t miss that chance. The time will come when it’s too late.

The very existence of the Sports Illustrated swimsuit edition is ridiculous. It’s not about sports. It’s not about swimwear. It’s thinly veiled sexual titillation for those who prefer not to go to a porn site, I suppose. But if you’re going to publish such a goofy book of soft-core porn, at least embrace the truth of what you’re doing. Don’t include a Muslim model wearing a head-to-toe outfit and act as though you’re being “inclusive,” which Sports Illustrated is doing this year. They never bothered to feature any modestly clad Baptists or Mormons or whatever before. The only reason to do this is to pander to the gospel of inclusion. It’s ridiculous, especially for an edition that exists for nothing other than to sexually arouse men by showing as much skin as possible.

As much as I wanted to believe it once upon a time, technology is not neutral. A communications medium which becomes dominant at a given time shapes the culture in which it dominates, for good or bad. Books once shaped culture. Now it’s something else. Why do we obsess over politics and argue about it constantly? Only because 24-hour television needed an audience and taught people to care by generating controversy. Then the Internet came along. Social media has an unlimited “news hole” to fill, so everything became news. Before we knew it, everyone around us had been trained to obsess about the daily matches between Team Red and Team Blue. None of this would have happened without the need of television and the commercial Internet to capture attention for others’ profit. Almost everybody has become a slave to the needs of this technology — and most don’t even remember life before it was this way. Marshall McLuhan and Neil Postman were right.