Bernie and the Samurai: how to use chatGPT to make your own entertainment
It’s 2025. You and your spouse are sitting down to some serious education. You ask, “So what do you feel like?” Your spouse says “how about Bernie and…
Author: Grant
The future comes for Vogue…and the rest of us
A power struggle is playing out at Vogue. Several things hang in the balance. The future of a publication that helps construct our sense of taste. The future of…
Just in Time (how to be an anthropologist in business)
As the academic world continues its slow motion descent into financial and sometimes intellectual insolvency, some anthropologists seek employment in the world of business. The Journal of Business…
Secrets of Power and other leadership lessons from Elizabeth I
Marissa Shrum and I talk from time to time. Today, we got talking about Elizabeth I. Today is November 17 and that makes it the anniversary of Elizabeth’s…
Culture: brought together, kept apart
brought together but kept apart I felt like I was being chased up the beach by a tidal wave. Run for your life, anthropologist, run for your life! I…
Will “Only Murders” be funny? It depends.
Martin Short, Steve Martin and Selena Gomez to star in the new show Only Murders. Variety tells us that the new show called Only Murders and staring Selena…
Welcome to the Curatorial economy
Curatorial ability. You have it. And up until til now, you just gave it away. We are all culture curators one way or another. We are passionate about…
How an anthropologist thinks about the travel industry
As you may know, we are on the verge of a new Culture Camp. Details here: www.culture.camp! This morning we got a query from a guy in the…
Two new books!
My apologies to readers. I haven’t posted in a while. But I have an excuse. Two excuses actually. I spent the first half of 2020 scrambling to finish…
Creativity in a COVID era (Web 2.0 all over again?)
“You can find awesome rhythm in everything. People will hear certain breaks that I make and be like, ‘Where’d that come from?’ I’ll be like, ‘That was the…
This morning Twitter Kissed Culture Hard on the Mouth
Originally published on Medium, January 21, 2020 Recently the marketing team at Twitter put culture at the heart of what they do, in that most precious territory, the…
Death of the superhero?
Reading the future is hard. It takes sharp eyes. It takes lively imaginations. It takes smart models. (There is a “good head on your shoulders” joke to be…
Urban decay and how HGTV can fix it
I was reading Axios today and came across an article that describes the desperate conditions of some American neighborhoods. Working with data collected by Lincoln Institute of Land Policy,…
Business anthropology: some thoughts
A couple of weeks ago, I participated in the 2019 Global Business Anthropology Summit held on the New York City campus of Fordham University. Melissa Fisher organized the…
Martha Stewart: the old guard departs
Time Magazine invited Martha Stewart and the stars of Fixer Upper, Joanna and Chip Gaines, to the TIME 100 gala early this week. Chip says, “She didn’t have the faintest…
Why massacres happen and how to stop them
[written as an anthropological response to the New Zealand massacre of March 2019. I was in the field, doing ethnographies.] I’ve spent the last month out of the…
How to fix the Conde Nast business model
Peter Kafka has a great piece on Conde Nast, specifically how this once dominant publishing enterprise now struggles and what this means for incoming editor Roger Lynch. “The magazine industry…
Someday we will all play for the Patriots
Tom Brady says new plays were inserted into the Patriot’s playbook on Sunday. “At the team hotel, the Westin Crown Center in Kansas City, the offensive players were…
Beth Comstock and Kara Swisher on Irritants and De-riskers (coming to a corporate culture near you.)
[This essay was published on Medium on Sunday (December 2)]. This is a wonderful interview. Two smart people expressing themselves at speed with power and precision. Swisher stops from…
Color is culture (disruption watch)
Watching for the future feels optional. Watching for disruption, that’s more urgent. One way to look for disruption is to watch our color palette. Cause color is culture.…
How to read a t-shirt (and the future)
Listening for the future is a tricky thing. If we listen far enough out into the future, we are dealing with very weak signals. Or, better, we are…
The Bill Belichick disruption (and what we can learn from it)
(This post was originally published on Medium two days ago. It is reproduced here with light editing only.) How do they do it? How do the New England…
Are podcasts a wasteland? (with a post script about Kurt Wagner)
This image of Rebecca Walker is from the Wikipedia entry for Third Wave Feminism (I can’t find an attribution for the image on this page or the one…
American culture* and problem solving (case study #7)
At the Culture Camp in June, we will be applying our knowledge of American culture to the following topics. 1: Futures of work (the physical, hierarchical and emotional…