Author Archives: Robert Basil

Communicate for Free

Posted on January 16, 2015 by Robert Basil

I had always found eHarmony Inc.‘s advertisements vaguely disconcerting: too optimistic about romance, and too confident about its vaunted heuristic (the “Relationship Questionnaire”!). An advertisement currently in frequent rotation on television promises viewers that “You can start communicating for free today” – … Continue reading →

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Ginormous

Posted on January 16, 2015 by Robert Basil

Bryan Garner, lawyer and English language usage scholar, on one of my favourite words: A portmanteau is a type of luggage with two separate sections. A portmanteau word is formed by combining the sounds and meanings of two different words. Linguists … Continue reading →

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Independent Creativity: Making Yourself Successful

Posted on December 24, 2014 by Robert Basil

The wonderful Molly Crabapple explains what she has learned, in fifteen paragraphs. Here are a half dozen: Companies are not loyal to you. Please never believe a company has your back. They are amoral by design and will discard you at a … Continue reading →

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#MRKT3311

Posted on October 30, 2014 by Robert Basil

Students in my “Marketing in the Digital World” class at KPU are educating one another and myself via numerous social-media platforms. Here’s the class twitter feed for your edification, too. It’s very lively, intelligent, and in tune. Photo by Miles Basil

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“Bucks for Clicks” journalism

Posted on October 30, 2014 by Robert Basil

I like Virginia Postrel‘s take on the recent controversy over at Forbes.com. A popular author, Bill Frezza, published a controversial column on that website – advising university fraternities to beware of female students who show up at their parties drunk … Continue reading →

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Accent-removal class

Posted on September 19, 2014 by Robert Basil

Notes Mark Liberman at Language Log: “In a better world, the speakers of the ‘standard’ variety would take a prejudice elimination class instead.”

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The Work of Molly Crabapple

Posted on August 28, 2014 by Robert Basil

Molly Crabapple‘s only peer as an illustrator / artist / journalist is the great Joe Sacco. The tone of their work is very different, though. Whereas Sacco’s reporting is dispassionate and ironic, Crabapple’s is emotional and argumentative. Sacco’s art – black … Continue reading →

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“No Fireworks on the Fourth of July?”

Posted on August 23, 2014 by Robert Basil

Virginia Postrel‘s book The Future and Its Enemies: The Growing Conflict over Creativity, Enterprise, and Progress, published in 1999, has long been one of my favourite libertarian works: smart, funny, level-headed (that is, not dogmatic). Her more recent work has focused on … Continue reading →

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Where are the women in the high-tech industry?

Posted on August 23, 2014 by Robert Basil

Vivek Wadhwa crowd-funded the publication of his new book, Innovating Women: The Changing Face of Technology (cowritten with Farai Chedey). He also “crowd-created” it with the help of more than 500 women who contributed research and writing. In this podcast with … Continue reading →

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Acting Together

Posted on July 23, 2014 by Robert Basil

For its first two and a half years I was the “knowledge dissemination adviser” for the Acting Together research project. Based at Kwantlen Polytechnic University and funded by a federal Social Sciences and Humanities Research grant, the project’s goal was … Continue reading →

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