Tedium: The Dull Side of the Internet.

The 1980s proved surprisingly fruitful for licensed greeting card mascots. It turns out American Greetings understood the Marvel playbook before Marvel did.Today in Tedium: One of the most-common complaints that you hear about modern media is that it’s often a retread of retreads. (One word: Marvel.) The Big Bang Theory, a show that was on the air for a...

I’ve seen a strange problem in my inbox that I haven’t been able to put into words. A saga involving a botched app release helped me figure it out.

I remember when I came up with my first idea that I shared with the world.

It was a dating site for people who didn’t want to share photos of themselves, but build text-only connections. I didn’t know what I ...

When we lost Glen Hansard last week, his work still fresh and lively, it was a reminder that the world has changed more than we think it has.

A few months ago, when I was walking around a mall on a ninety-something-degree day. I made a claim to my wife that I thought profound, but she kind of saw through pretty quickly.

“If you walked through a mall 20 y...

The pricing gun should have been a dead technology years before it actually was. But state laws artificially kept it around as a shield against the scary barcode.Today in Tedium: Determining how much something costs shouldn’t be difficult, but in an ecosystem where everything is driven by highly personalized data, concerns are rising that prices might not be on ...

My brain-breaking trick for weaning off of Facebook involved creating a fake URL for Google News. Blame the home row.

Old habits die hard, and the one that led to this post died a lot harder than some of the others.

Recently, I made a realization: I have been unwillingly addicted to Facebook for a long time, and it’s not even because I like Facebook. Rat...