The Triumph of Theory.

I don't remember where or when I first heard it, but it hit me like an avalanche. 

Mostly because it might have made me obsolete.

The phrase I'm talking about became popular with the rise of planning. 

Around the time the word "insight," replaced the notion of facts.

I was told and told and told then told some more, that giant purchases were no longer based on rational reasons why. 

Rather they were based on brands forming an emotional connection to people.

Brands had to be cool.

Part of culture.

If they liked the music I liked, or endorsed the causes I believe in, I'd like them.

I grew up in a different era where, I believe, clients and their agencies had more respect for the intelligence of their potential customers. They believed that not every purchase was impulse based. That if someone were buying something that cost a couple of week's salary, they might want an actual reason why one such offering was different/better than another.

Here's one example.

I annotated the copy below and numbered all the facts I noticed. I bet you know more about this 1961 Volkswagen than you do about anything Volkswagen has made in the last 30 years. Or longer.

What precipitated this post was an article I just read in Monday's Wall Street Journal. 

I read it before 7AM on Monday, and I immediately sent it to a group of my ad friends. Senior people of my generation who still care.

If I were an automaker, or I currently had a car-account, it would scare the shit out of me. I've enumerated two bits you might want to pay especial attention to.

1. "Look-Alike Range Rover." I underscored that because a lot of marketing used to be about adding value to a brand or a product by telling people what made it different and better. Anyone can make a car that looks like a more expensive car. If you don't tell people of the intrinsic value of your product or service, they'll almost invariably choose the cheaper look-alike.

Generics work for pharmaceuticals where the composition of a drug is regulated. You can't change the formula. It has to be the same. Generics don't work for products that vie for customers' dollars. But most advertising advertises generics. Most advertising fails to include useful consumer information proprietary to the brand or product paying for the ad.

This sameification of everything has destroyed countless brands--and just about every agency brand and every agency creative. No, it's not enough to say you're award winning, or borderless, or anything else. You have to find, establish, inculcate and own your intrinsic better-ness. 

2. U.K.'s bestselling vehicle in September. In September, 2025, Chery, the Chinese-owned manufacturer of the ersatz Range Rover was barely in the top-20 in UK sales. A year later, they're #1.

Of course brands like Range Rover left themselves vulnerable. 

They stopped (just as ad agencies and copywriters have stopped, and politicians and hotels and restaurants have stopped) telling people why they're worth more.

I do understand how these ads could get me to spend more on a particular product or service.

I am unable to fathom what these ads do to help a brand attract a premium price.

There are a lot of theories behind the decline and fall of advertising. 

If you ask ten ad people, you'll probably get twenty different reasons. Maybe thirty if one of those people is in senior management.

The fracturing of the media landscape.

The rise of the holding companies.

The demise of the commission system.

A lot of people will blame consumers. 

They'll say they don't care.

Can't read.

Don't watch.

Care more about influencers and peer reviews.

I don't really buy any of those reasons.

I think the reason people stopped caring about advertising is that advertising stopped caring about people.

Advertising stopped giving people useful information so they could make better decisions that would get them the most for the money they've spent.

Advertising stopped serving people and started pandering to them.

You probably think all of this is stupid.

But if you were writing your dating profile or selling your apartment, you'd probably find a way to differentiate yourself, to make what it is you have to sell desirable among thousands of look-alikes.

I wrote the ad to sell my Connecticut home already, though it's not for sale.

Here's the first sentence.

"We're as close to the sea as you can get without being in a flood zone. But if you're a light sleeper, beware. The sound of the waves and a distant clanging of a buoy bell might keep you up at night."

This is the shit people usually write:

"Meticulously maintained and beautifully updated, this exceptional home offers refined coastal living in the desirable Fenwood Beach Association."

You choose.

Napoleon Blown Apart.

About three decades ago, or ten amerikkan invasions of sovereign Middle-Eastern countries ago, I read an article in The New Yorker. A portrait of a high-ranking general who decried the current modus operandi of war. The infrastructure of how we fight.

The general, whose name I forget, talked about the amerikan war to oust sadaam hussein and he talked about the materiel needed to fight that war.

How we had to move thousands of tanks, thousands of trucks, thousands of humvees, ping-pong tables, air-conditioners, cots, coke-machines. Not to mention millions of tons of weapons and munitions and food.

He used a phrase that stuck with me.

He called all that "moving the metal mountain."

That's good writing. (Better writing than you'll likely find in advertising.)

I read this about the year 2001.

Moving the metal mountain, it occurred to me is an apt metaphor for a giant ad agency pulling together eleven-teen teams, 97 planners and 44 account people to concoct a pitch for a client that won't likely yield any profit for at least four years, by which time the account is once again in review.

Diego Garcia, indicated by the red dot. It's more out of the way than the Chocolate Factory
was when I worked at Ogilvy the second time.

The general proposed an alternative to moving the metal mountain. Highly-mobile units that can sweep in, apply irresistible force, accomplish their objective and be back on Diego Garcia before dark. The US and UK have thousands of troops on the archipelago, but you're more likely to get a straight answer from Cindy Rose of WPP than you are to find out much more about the deployments there. (Though iran six months ago iran launched two Khorramshahr-4 ICBMs at the base. We're told they did no damage.)

The iranian-built Khorramshahr-4 can travel at 16 times the speed of sound over 1,200 miles and can carry 3000 lbs of explosives.

Around that same time as reading about the metal mountain, I also read an article in the paper version of the Atlantic. It was about a fourth generation fighter pilot who was now flying and killing at that time in Afghanistan, and probably Pakistan, though that would have been omitted for various geo-political reasons. 

I remember the pilot saying that his was the last generation of pilots who will actually fly. It would not be long, he asserted, that unmanned killing machines will be run like video games from underground bunkers in Langley air force base under well-manicured lawns in suburban Virginia. 

This pilot talked about drones back when the word referred primarily to bumble-bees, not warfare.

I bring all this up because last week, humble little GeorgeCo., LLC, a Delaware Company got an RFI that was closer to the sort of RFIs that went out in the 1950s than what the world of advertising looks like today. As they used to say, Napoleon's armies looked more like Roman armies from 1800 years earlier than they looked like World War I armies from just a century later.

I have the sense that a similar dynamic reflects today's withering ad industry. Like the military proclivity where generals prepare to fight the last war, or in the case of pete hegseth, the rape and enslavement of most of the amerikkkas by spanish conquistadors (and small pox.)

In fact, the very structure of the holding company seems as outmoded and dated as an un-tattooed art director. The ad industry (that phrase is also spectacularly obsolete) isn't riveting in an age of welding, the ad industry is riveting in an age of 3D printing.

Many years ago, and I've written about this before, I read a bit by two-time Pulitzer-winning historian, Barbara Tuchman:

Disaster is rarely as pervasive as it seems from recorded accounts... After absorbing the news of today, one expects to face a world consisting entirely of strikes, crimes, power failures, broken water mains, stalled trains, school shutdowns, muggers, drug addicts, neo-Nazis, and rapists. The fact is that one can come home in the evening—on a lucky day—without having encountered more than one or two of these phenomena. 

This has led me to formulate Tuchman's Law, as follows: "The fact of being reported multiplies the apparent extent of any deplorable development by five- to tenfold" (or any figure the reader would care to supply).

On the other hand, comrade Lenin is reputed to have said, "There are decades when nothing happens, and there are weeks when decades happen."

In the case of amerikkka, and the industry formerly known as advertising, I'm inclined to agree with Lenin over Tuchman. 

So much has changed so completely. 

And there are three ways to deal with giant changes.

1. You can deny it and conduct business as usual.

2. You can deny it and fight to hold onto previous practices.

3. You can embrace that change and prosper.

Very few people and social organizations ever come close to path number three. One and two will bring you to eventual obsolescence either quickly or quicklier. 

Those are the choices followed by most clients and most agencies. They know something is rotten in the state of advertising, but they're used to it so they try to make it work.

It never works.

My point in all this, though oblique, is simple. The dominant complacency of the ad industry--the holding company--is almost wholly obsolete. Outside of enriching a few already rich men, I can think of no functional reason why anyone would need a holding company.

When Marion Harper, the progenitor of the first advertising holding company formed IPG, it had a reason for being. If McCann had the Buick account, they were shut out of growth in the automotive space. That's not good for shareholders. 

But if a company owned McCann and Campbell-Ewald, you could have Buick and Chevy. Buy more agencies, buy more growth potential.

Later when so much big business went global, a client like IBM needed a central advertising brain--located in New York--and a lot of satellite offices around the world to follow orders from the main office. No one at the time wanted 164 different campaigns in 163 different countries.

But those bonafide reasons have disappeared.

Clients care little about conflicts anymore. And very few clients want a world-wide "one-voice" campaign. 

So while the reasons behind the holding companies have disappeared, they dominate still the industry.

Just as the way the world fights wars has changed but we still equip ourselves as if we're fighting World War II. 

When the British fought the Argentines over the Malvinas (Falklands) the 430-foot HMS Sheffield, built at a cost of $25,000,000 was sunk by an 18-foot long exocet missile costing about $1,000,000.

$1,000,000 missile.

Destroys $25,000,000 ship.

This sort of change has happened in warfare.

And it's happened in advertising.

Do you really need hordes of people to write a pharma commercial or a Buick commercial or a Verizon commercial? No, but that's how we do it.

We haven't woken up to it yet.

Shelve It.

I thought I had it solved but it turns out that some problems can't be solved.

I'm talking about my book problem, my book buying problem.

Back about a decade or so ago, when my New York three-bedroom could hold no more books (each room, except the kitchen) was lined with bookshelves and each shelf, floor-to-ceiling was double-stacked with volumes, I made the reluctant transition to reading e-books.

There's a convenience there that outweighs their suckiness. But not every book, can really be enjoyed digitally. The books that can't, really, are the books that are too big or too map-filled or too illustrated to even be read while sitting in your favorite chair. These are the books that I spend my non-digital-book dollars on today.

Many of them are as large as a one-year-old, and you need a table in front of you to manage them. Those books you have to buy physical copies of. This week, for instance, a used but pristine copy of Bartlett's Quotations arrived at my Connecticut doorstep. You need this as a real book, not a digital facsimile. Sure there's an indexability to having a compendium of quotations. But the real beauty of a bound edition is the serendipitous joy that comes from random perusal. Each page contains at least one present. 

The key word here is random. The random and magical joy of finding something you weren't looking for.

In any event I thought I had solved librum inundatio when my wife, L, directed the almost-complete rebuilding of our Connecticut seaside cottage. Again, each room, each corner, each cranny and each nook was lined with bookshelves. I thought I'd finally have a place for everything--and perhaps everything in its place.

But now all those places have no place for any more. 

Even in our dark age, or perhaps, Dark Age, the thinking, the writing, the art keeps coming. And I keep buying.

It's all made worse by the near instant accessibility of everything. I must get six book emails a week. From university presses (their UI almost always sucks) to small independent book-sellers that seem to know my head with their astute and curofferings and therefore seem to proffer exactly what I'm looking for that I never knew existed.

Just now I got such an email from John Sandoe books in London.

I woke up this morning, and I'm traveling today, hoping to write a blogpost but having no topic. That's when I opened up the email from John Sandoe. 98.79-percent of people in advertising could learn how to talk to people with respect from an email with writing like this, where the audience is not treated like they're imbeciles.

On Sandoe's site I saw this book. 

I've read books by Edmund De Waal before and I like him. 

More, as I re-begin my weekly work of writing this blog, and I have no ideas at the ready, nothing burning me up inside, nothing to write about, I tripped over this title.

"How to begin" is the central question creative people face pretty much every two minutes for the entirely of their lives. (How to end being the other central question. How to continue being the third of the unholy trinity.)

Of course I bought the book.

I don't have any room for it.

And maybe not having enough room for books is the greatest blessing a person can have.

The Religion of AI.

If you believe as I do in ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny, that is the hypothesis that the development of the embryo of an animal emulates the evolution of the animal's remote ancestors, you may see similarities between the rise and rise and rise of AI and how modern religion came into being. 

Anemones. Just for the Haeckel of it.

Of course, I don't believe in the literal science of Haeckel's  debunked theory of ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny (ORP) but I believe that most things--belief systems included--are birthed through a set of similar steps. 

A child learning to ride a bike might resemble a person beginning to learn to ski or fly an airplane. Learning to read might follow a course not entirely dissimilar to how you learn to use the Adobe creative suite or fill out a timesheet on something called "workday." Similarly, a child learning to walk might resemble a large social organization 'learning to walk,' that is navigating its way through a new market or territory.

To my old but 20/20 eyes, AI is today accompanied by an omni-presence and a zealotry such that it looks a lot like Christianity from almost 2,000 years ago. A lot of what the world did as it adopted that belief system is just what the world is doing now as it adopts the AI belief system.

Here are twelve similarities I've noticed. (BTW, I'm working on this as an idea. It is not yet fully-formed, so go easy on me.)

ONE: Religion and AI are incredibly powerful and potentially a force for good. They can transport you (and all of humankind) to worlds of staggering wonder and goodness.

TWO: Religion and AI are incredibly powerful and a potential  force of Armageddon. Left unchecked, or without proper beliefs guiding them, they can destroy all.

THREE: Religion and AI are incredibly complex. Do not question how they work, how they've obtained their wisdom and prescience, just accept their rightness. In fact, to question religion and AI is dangerous and heretical.

FOUR: Religion and AI, like catholicism and protestantism, rule the world. All seeing 'market-forces' like the inter caetera bull of Pope Alexander VI in 1493, will divide the world between different AIs as it sees fit. This dividing line--which is imaginary-- is also law. What's more, it applies even to realms, lands, companies, and others as yet unknown and undiscovered.

FIVE: Religion and AI are not to be questioned. Even thinking about questioning their supremacy is a sin--punishable by essential excommunication and/or death or accusations of 'Luddism.' As Nat 'King' Cole sang, "you're the lowest form of human, you're a square."

SIX: Believers in Religion and AI have the only path to salvation, light and eternal life. Non-believers are destined to either burn or be enslaved and tormented.

SEVEN: Burning, enslavement and torment for non-believers is not cruel. Non-belief is so evil it warrants the punishment received. You're either with us or against us.

EIGHT: Religion and AI will run into people who have different belief systems and different ways of managing their world. But because a different way of living and thinking is different, our form of Religion and AI are unable to see or consider it. Different is wrong.

NINE: Religion and AI had high aspirations. As John Donne wrote in "Paradise Lost," religion was originally meant to "justifie the wayes of God to men." Likewise AI--in its original intent was meant to find a cure for cancer, alleviate traffic, help solve eternal riddles. Before long and via widespread and practical adoption, Religion and AI will be used primarily for fund-raising for Religion and AI and to make cat videos quickly and for IPOs (fund-raising.)

TEN: Religion and AI are so complex and inscrutable that only a few "priests," can understand their language (code or Latin) and speak to the gods. Priests/tech bros become conduits to the all-powerful and therefore must be all-obeyed.

ELEVEN: Religion and AI will create their own 'virtuous circle.' They will use their powers to make themselves more powerful and anything contrary to their accumulation of power is cum hoc ergo propter hoc is to be ignored, disparaged or destroyed.

TWELVE: Religion and AI will remain unchecked and propagated by those made richest by Religion and AI. The richest will promote and thereby get richester.

--

1493. Papal Bull.

We trust in Him from whom empires and governments and all good things proceed, that, should you, with the Lord’s guidance, pursue this holy and praiseworthy undertaking, in a short while your hardships and endeavors will attain the most felicitous result, to the happiness and glory of all Christendom. But inasmuch as it would be difficult to have these present letters sent to all places where desirable, we wish, and with similar accord and knowledge do decree, that to copies of them, signed by the hand of a public notary commissioned therefor, and sealed with the seal of any ecclesiastical officer or ecclesiastical court, the same respect is to be shown in court and outside as well as anywhere else as would be given to these presents should they thus be exhibited or shown. Let no one, therefore, infringe, or with rash boldness contravene, this our recommendation, exhortation, requisition, gift, grant, assignment, constitution, deputation, decree, mandate, prohibition, and will. Should anyone presume to attempt this, be it known to him that he will incur the wrath of Almighty God and of the blessed apostles Peter and Paul. Given at Rome, at St. Peter’s, in the year of the incarnation of our Lord one thousand four hundred and ninety-three, the fourth of May, and the first year of our pontificate.

 

2026. Silicon Bull.

We trust in AI from whom empires and governments and all good things proceed, that, should you, with the Altman's guidance, pursue this holy and praiseworthy undertaking, in a short while your hardships and endeavors will attain the most felicitous result, to the happiness and glory of all humankind. But inasmuch as it would be difficult to have these present letters sent to all places where desirable, we wish, and with similar accord and knowledge do decree, that to copies of them, signed by the hand of advertising agencies, pr firms and social platforms (which we own) and sealed with the seal of any trillion dollar valuation company and officers thereof, the same respect is to be shown in court and outside as well as anywhere else as would be given to these presents should they thus be exhibited or shown. Let no one, therefore, infringe, or with rash boldness contravene, this our recommendation, exhortation, requisition, gift, grant, assignment, constitution, deputation, decree, mandate, prohibition, and will. Should anyone presume to attempt this, be it known to him that he will incur the wrath of Almighty Altman and of the blessed apostles Amodei, Zuk, Huang and Musk. Given at Silicon Valley, in the year of the incarnation of our Lord two thousand and twenty-six, the second of October, and the year of our pontification.

How To.

One of the things that was in full-flower back when I was just starting out as an adult, was buying a daily newspaper or two and spending an hour or two reading them.

We did that before news was ruined because it became ratings-driven, not information driven. And before news became manufactured and sensational because due to a drive for ratings it's always on. I read somewhere not long ago, that if you don't work for the state department, there's no reason to check the news more than once a day. Our "age of anxiety" might be directly related to the ginning up of the words "breaking news."

I've always been a newspaper reader. Not just the fancy-schmancy pages of the New York Times and The Wall Street Journal, but I've always enjoyed local papers, too. When I was in college and the library had fifteen or twenty papers from around the world, I'd often go through a dozen or so of them searching for funny little items and quirky stories. I'd use this page flipping as a way to relax my brain from the onslaught of serious news. Also, I like Blondie and Beetle Bailey and BC and even the Lockhorns.

Back during my college years there was a store along Broadway, I think on the east side of the street between 111th and 112th called "International News." It was a clean, well-lighted place about the size of half a basketball court. It was stuffed to the gills with newspapers and magazines from around the world. Not just seventy-seven varieties of porn, but real periodicals of the type tweed-wearing professors from Columbia would publish in and save. International News had a liberal browsing policy and an attentive but not obstrusive staff. They kept things neat and orderly and didn't mind if you whiled away the hours consultin' with the flowers.

During my five years at Ally & Gargano where the creative department was of the old school, nearly all the writers and art directors were 40 to 50 year old men who would get in around 9, have a cuppa and go through the paper. This was, for the most part, considered an un-interruptible time, not just leisure. We were filling our heads with what was going on in the world. Happenings, trends, ideas that would make us richer, more-informed humans and would therefore make our work richer and better informed as well. The search for simple, timeless human truths is rarely revealed in a sensational blonde-vectored sound-blather.

One of the positive side-effects of reading with regularity a daily newspaper or a weekly news magazine is that you got to "know" the writers. You were familiar with their styles and you could collate of list of writers you admired and imitated. These were people you didn't like to miss, people you could learn from.

In those days, from the Times I never missed Anthony Lewis or Russell Baker on the op-ed page. From the sports page, Red Smith and Dave Anderson were musts. The Times had a guy called Phil Dougherty who wrote a five-times-a-week ad column that had more genuine advertising news in each column than the current advertising trade press reveals in a year.

I'm not sure this affinity for particular writers exists today. Sure people might tune into Rachel Maddow or schmucker carlson or someone else I can barely pick out of a lineup. But hearing the news--hearing writing of any sort from news to a podcast--is an inefficient way of getting information. Aloud, we can take in about 150 words per minute. Even a slow reader can read about double that--and skilled readers can often take in five to six times that number. Reading, of course, also allows you to skip over the boring parts, and go back and read again the things that strike you. You can likely get the idea of the Brothers Karamazov while ignoring most of the individual brothers.

As the written word has more and more disappeared, as more and more people consume spoken media and do less and less reading, a large part of me (and I have several large parts) thinks we a losing certain bits of our humanity.

The tools we have at our disposal often dictate the things we make and how we go through life. If Wilhelm Spätula hadn't invented his eponymous tool back in 1577, we probably today wouldn't have the pancake today. Form, as the Bauhaus argued, follows function. If a fine-point pen hadn't been developed and engraving technology, then William Hogarth or Albrecht Dürer might have wound up being short-order cooks, not fine artists. You can say the same about the Ashcan amerikkkan, John Sloan who brought life to life with mere pen and ink.

My point in all this might be inchoate and complicated. But as we've neglected and maybe abandoned the thought that is generated by long-form writing, we might be neglecting and abandoning the discipline and thoughtfulness that is often implicit in that writing. We might be forgetting how to think, how to store, how to separate important from trivial, even how to share.

Maybe we no longer know about the differences between a $35,000 car and a $90,000 car because explaining those differences often takes words, and words are often, today, undervalued. When it comes to something complex, like AI, there are dozens and dozens of companies offering different AI systems, I can't recall a single one (that I didn't work on) doing a consistently decent job explaining why this one is better than that one.

Call it arrogance but I believe if, for example, kamala harris ran ads like these, consistently and persistently she would have won. Instead,   we all lost. Badly. Tragically. Cataclysmically.

----

----

Without the means of explaining how or why or what for, it seems to me that we stop valuing that knowledge and even things that are innately differentiated become genericized. Like political candidates, in extremis, because in forgetting how we eventually forget it even matters.

We lost a lot--maybe we lost the Sapiens part of Homo Sapiens--when we went from the top ad here to the bottom ad. Not only did we lose a lot as a species, our clients' businesses lost a lot, as did the entire advertising industry.

If I had to train writers today, or if anyone who is reading this cares anymore, I'd suggest they begin again to find writers they admire. Writers whose thought patterns and their ways of expressing those thoughts strike them as interesting. I'd urge anyone who wants to write to keep a list--in your head or written down--of people whose work they like and to make sure they read that person as often as they write.

One writer I like has the unlikely job of being the automotive writer for the Wall Street Journal. His name is Dan Neil and I've been reading him for about two dozen years. No one buys the Journal for auto reviews, so if that's your job, you have to find a way to do it with élan. Like Anne Wroe does over at The Economist.  

The Economist is a weekly and Ms. Wroe writes their obituaries. Usually when someone dies, she's scooped by all the major news outlets. Daily papers scoop weekly papers. So, in addition to being confined by the Economist's strictures to one page of text, Wroe needs to find ways of writing her obit that others haven't already written about.

This is Mr. Neil from Saturday's Wall Street Journal. His review of a car I would never for a moment consider buying, the "entry-level" $440,000 Ferrari. 

Neil says this about the coupe. 

It made me laugh, underscore and remember it. 

It prompted these thoughts.

That's what good writing can do.

I might also, one day, write for a client "douchiness per cubic foot."  Or "drowning in their own testosterone."

I read a lot.

I especially like writing I haven't read before.

Neil's January 1996 review of the Ford Expedition described a back-seat encounter with his girlfriend. 

Neil wrote this was "loving, consensual and--given the Expedition's dual airbags, side impact beams and standard four-wheel anti-lock brakes--safe sex."

These online ads for the Expedition miss the mark. Though I suppose "Cleverly designed with families in mind," comes closest.

Yu Mve 2 Fst.

 It seems everyone today sings from the same hymn and hyr books.

Everyone is blathering on about how fast this technology or that technology can do this or that.

They're not, they're never talking about how things can be done better. 

Instead they're talking about how things can be done faster.

We spend so much time talking about how fast we can do things that I believe in aggregate things that longer because of all the time we fiddle away talking about how fast we can do them.

Not too long ago, I was asked to work on a pitch for a giant holding company ad agency.

Our meetings sounded more like a track-practice than an ad agency.

The pitch was a marathon punctuated by a series of sprints. Along the way there were heavy lifts and of course the inevitable hurdles.

A friend of mine worked on the pitch, too. 

We IM-ed (it's instant, after all) when the whole thing was over. 

To re-write Yogi Berra, "It ain't over till you get paid."

We each had the prevailing sensation of underwhelmed-ness.

There were hundreds of pages of deck.

But not a single scintillating idea. 

Or even a simmering one.

It all reminded me of that old Peggy Lee song, writ by Lieber and Stoller, "Is That All There Is?"

I had the distinct feeling that my friend and I, if left alone for three days, could have come up with more and better work without subjecting ourselves to the throes of constant racing.

We could have had ideas. Thought them through. Penciled and pensived them. And could have do better work, more efficiently. As the Romans aphorismed, we could have Festina Lente. Made haste, slowly. And everybody, especially the agency and the client would have been better off for it.

Talking about how fast you can do something is an odd measurement. Usually, human calculus of time is off by about 25 to 50-percent. If you claim your commute takes an hour, it likely takes an hour-and-a-half. Likewise a flight to LA, a twenty-minute recipe, or the "just one more story" ten-minutes before bed-time. 

I read somewhere that in the 15th Century you could make better time on the Inca Trail from today's Lima to Machu Picchu than you can today. I think taking the train from New Haven to New York is slower today than it was a century ago. If I were smarter about physics, I could probably bring in some Einsteinian relativity here.

At my elbow right now as I write this is this book.

Which I bought having read this review in The Wall Street Journal.

Let me ask you something.

Can this really be a blog on advertising, can this really be a book review from The Year of Our Altman, 2026, if AI is not mentioned? 2700 years ago, the Pre-Socratic Greek philosopher Protagoras said, "Man (meaning humans) is the measure of all things." 

That belief is wholly abrogated and abnegated today, when in essence we hear and spout and link and post and proffer and pontificate "AI (and its accompanying hype) is the measure of all things."

The review, which I'm pasting in its entirety below is short. It's just 381 words long. Which at an average reading speed of 250 wpm, should take you about one-hundred seconds. Less than two minutes.

Since I know you're pressed for time, rushing someplace, on a deadline or in the middle of a sprint, I've highlighted some bits for you:

A waterway splits the earth in Ginger Riley Munduwalawala’s painting “Nyamiyukanji, the River Country” (1997). Mottled green daubs represent grass; lounging amoebic growths stand in for rocks, perhaps mountain peaks. Above the fracas of color float three white clouds, from which raindrops hang like strings of beads dressing up a doorway.

Noticing every detail of a work of art, and of the world in front of us, is what Olivia Meehan urges us to do in “Slow Looking: The Art of Nature” (Thames & Hudson, 320 pages, $60). The author is far from the first to decry the “din of 21st-century life” or to worry that a digital deluge threatens to dull our senses, but she begins her book more pointedly, asking: “Have you considered your looking practice?”

Probably not, since for most of us looking isn’t so much a practice, a la prayer or meditation, but a necessity of life. The average time a museum visitor spends taking in an artwork matches the average social-media “swipe-away mark of 2-3 seconds,” Ms. Meehan laments. She has gathered nature-inspired artworks in “Slow Looking” to draw us in and get us to look for longer, though she dangles the rewards at a distance: “The beauty will not automatically reveal itself.”

The author promises discoveries as well as a fresh take on the familiar, including 19th-century paintings by Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot and Charles-François Daubigny, a violet Caspar David Friedrich moonscape and plenty of Georgia O’Keeffe. The volume isn’t meant to be read in a linear fashion, nor to be shut with finality when you turn the last page. It’s more like a museum: Aimlessness is welcome, lingering encouraged. Ms. Meehan guides us through a slow-looking exercise before releasing us into the curated wilds.

Some of the book’s best advice might seem laughably obvious. When looking at an artwork, “try not to take your phone out.” Museum labels may distract as much as they inform. But Ms. Meehan writes touchingly about the fruits of attention—surprise, imagination and wonder among them—which can be so difficult to find in “an ‘on-demand’ world.” And she reminds the reader: “There is no immediate need to share your reaction or response with others.” The looking is the point.

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Years ago, I read a book about one of my favorite film directors, Preston Sturges. Sturges--in less than a decade--wrote and directed four movies on the American Film Institute's One-Hundred Funniest Movies of all time. Considering Sturges has been dead for 80 years, had his short heyday in the 1940s and lists of this sort are afflicted by grievous recency bias, four out of one-hundred is an incredible mark. Only Woody Allen with five movies has more. Not Mel Brooks, not Billy Wilder.

The tyranny of "do it fast," is worse than the imperative to sprint. What it really means is "do it my way." 

Sturges was not trusted, of course, by Paramount, his studio. Often producers would come by the set on day three  of shooting only to find Sturges had shot zero feet of film. They would be apoplectic. 

Sturges was instead rehearsing his cast.

On days four and five he would shoot tens or dozens of scenes. Catching up.

The studio said he was slow.

He was fast.

Today everyone wants not really speed, they just want it their way. They want to see where you are every eleven minutes, and eleven minutes after the original eleven minutes and eleven minutes after that. They want to see that pages in phantom deck are being filled, never considering what they're being filled with.

Somehow I write this blog every day.

And have for 17 and a half years.

91-percent of the time, I post within fifteen minutes of 7AM.

As Mussolini might have said, "I made the trains run like george."

I don't have project managers chasing me down.

I don't have thrice-daily check-ins.

I don't have tissue sessions.

And generally speaking, the quality of output is pretty high.

I'm not sure speed as such should be a barometer.

I think good should be.

Four selections. Random. Like life. (Ten-seconds' worth.)