(If you’re my client reading this please skip to the second paragraph)
When Carolyn and I first arrived at Chamber Music America’s 32nd annual conference in New York City this past weekend, as “Jazz People” people there representing the Hyde Park Jazz Festival, we thought “what are we doing here?”
At the outset people self-identified as either [...]

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Hey you racist, why did you mention only Serena Williams race in last week’s post about the Mother Nature/Tampax ad?
Luckily that comment didn’t come in, but as I was riding the train (or the “L” as we call it in Chicago) downtown yesterday, I realized I did mention Serena’s race, but not “Mother Nature’s”.  Why?
As [...]

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My college roommate used to love to start conversations at parties by asking “Do you think good and evil are objective or subjective? (This was the same roommate whose favorite Charades word was Dostoevsky’s “Gulag Archipelago,” but that’s another story…)
A lively conversation always ensued. Is murder always bad? What if the person is terminally ill? [...]

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 When Marc and I first met, I didn’t know what to think.  We were in the “Green Room,” aka the Counselor’s office at Robeson High School in Chicago, getting ready to visit classrooms as motivational speakers, as part of the Black Star Project.
 “I tell them about careers in marketing, and to believe in themselves and [...]

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As someone not as connected to the spiritual side of Christmas (is Santa connected to the spiritual side of Christmas?), this ad for “Boost Mobile”  is funny, definitely a good visual image to convey the message of “wrongness”, although I hope it doesn’t run during Saturday morning cartoons!
How does this, or does it, fit into the “War [...]

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Last year I shared this survey on Language and Identity conducted by Sarah Bunin Benor and Steven M. Cohen from the Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion, so it’s only fitting that I share the just released results.
While I wasn’t surprised to see Yiddish use increase by age, I was surprised to see Hebrew use decrease. 
As a Jew [...]

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The short version of this post is a summary of the workshop I presented today at the C-E-O conference for collegiate entrepreneurs in Chicago.  One person who arrived at the end had asked if there was anywhere to capture the information in the 50 minute workshop.  So, here is the “objective” short version:
We covered the “Why” budding [...]

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I never realized how “American” I was until I had to do business in Brazil a number of year’s ago.  After sitting through a nearly two hour lunch and then retreating for a ‘cafezhinho’ (shot glass sized cup of delicious, syrupy sweet, strong coffee) with still no mention of the business about which we had [...]

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I was searching for demographics for Chicago’s Hyde Park Neighborhood for background information for a call for volunteers I am posting for the Hyde Park Jazz Festival.  Known to be the home of the University of Chicago, the Museum of Science and Industry, and a very diverse neighborhood, I was surprised to find that 2000 [...]

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It is a little ironic that some of the line of questioning in the comfirmation hearings for Supreme Court nominee Sonia Sotomayor question whether she is too tied to her cultural identity to be impartial.
It’s ironic because it assumes that those already on the bench, primarily white males, are NOT influenced by their racial, cultural [...]

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