Brain Matter(s)

Of Mail Electronic

Sun, 24 Feb 2013 08:29:00 -0500

People love to hate on e-mail. I find this kind of amazing, given how essential it has become in our lives and how much better it is as a communications tool than anything that came before.

I sent my first e-mail in 1994. Work account, not sure I had ever truly considered the odd @ sign on the keyboard before that. I remember being on the phone with a friend who lived across the country and batting back and forth our own versions of “Mr. Watson, come here” messages with the click of a button, amazed they were actually showing up on the other side. “You know, we can attach documents to these things,” he said at one point, a notion that was beyond my ability to comprehend at the time. How would we do that? Where do the pages go? Won’t they fall off?

And now, it seems universally despised. This advance that replaced the ludicrously inefficient process of picking up the phone and actually demanding to speak with someone, right then, to exchange thoughts or information. This thing that took the last real example of jaw-dropping communications technology, the fax machine, and rendered it completely obsolete. This thing that turned the Postal Service into the Pony Express.

Why is this so? I’m taking a shot here, but let’s start with the sheer volume of messages we receive, and how few we actually care about. Quick scroll through Twitter and you’ll find no shortage of sophisticated and technologically aware people venting and flirting with declaring e-mail bankruptcy - a mass delete that results in a kind of First World nirvana known as in-box zero.

Spam, phishing, chronic “reply all” offenders, there are plenty of systemic downsides to this particular form of interaction, to living at an address with a @ in the middle of it that a whole host of nefarious characters can find, barrage, hack or otherwise abuse.

But, to me, that hardly makes up for the enormity of the advance that e-mail represents as a communications tool. Biz Stone went on Charlie Rose with Ev Williams a couple months ago to talk about their new platform, Medium. But the most interesting and true thing he said had to do with e-mail:

“E-mail is like the most intimate witness to our lives, in some capacity, and yet it hasn’t changed since the days of Hotmail and before. We keep files in there, we share pictures of our kids in there, there are receipts in there. E-mail knows a lot about our lives. I’ve been dying for someone to recreate e-mail and just come at it from a completely different angle. Like, show me all the pictures in my e-mail as a photo album right now. Show me all the Excel spreadsheets. Just present it to me in a different way … it’s ripe for reimagining, and someone will do it.”

Biz is right. Again. Particularly in an age of social media and selective sharing, e-mail is true, e-mail is real, e-mail is us. It’s the most accurate and unfiltered version of ourselves, at least the part that relates to corresponding and sharing with others.

Our first personal e-mail accounts were on AOL, like everyone else. Accessed via dial-up modems on Dell computers. Think about that, our primary link to a Web-enabled world was placed in the hands of AOL, Dell and dial-up modems over telephone lines, and it still felt magical. The first real advance we experienced in electronic communications, after the arrival of “always-on” cable modems around 2000, was getting on Gmail in 2005. A revelation. Essentially unlimited storage, messages didn’t auto-delete after a few days, a truly “searchable” archive, clean and functional design. We loved it, stopped paying AOL and never looked back. We had the best e-mail service in the world, and have enjoyed it for years, without ever spending a dime or clicking on an ad - but that’s probably another post.

And the messages piled up. Hundreds, thousands, we lost count, lost control. The occasional mass delete, clicking boxes on dozens of Google Alerts and e-commerce solicitations that missed the mark. But the database was always there, growing, “managed” in name only, like a garden hose waved vaguely in the direction of a California brush fire. Like walking through life hauling the digital equivalent of Santa’s sleigh behind you.

The second great advance in the relatively short history of e-mail was mobile. Suddenly, we could carry our in-boxes around with us, on our person, liberated from the desktop and able to correspond from anywhere.

The combination of Gmail and mobile leads to the third great advance in our e-mail experience, an iPhone app named Mailbox, specifically designed (for now) to be used with Gmail accounts.

A few weeks ago, the cool kids on Twitter were buzzing about this new application, which was taking reservations for accounts. I threw my name on the list, about 100,000 people ahead of me. Waited my turn and, upon activation and a tap of the screen, my entire Gmail account was archived – I had a clean in-box for the first time since, well, 2005.

It was a little jarring at first, to see this comprehensive database just disappear, but the messages were still there, they just weren’t in my face every time I went into my e-mail account. It was a fresh start, a new beginning. A better version of bankruptcy, one that didn’t result in credit problems or having to hire a lawyer.

The whole objective of Mailbox, as far as I can see, is to give users the tools to maintain this important state of equilibrium. Messages arrive and are dealt with through three basic swipes that – respectively – archive the message, delete the message or snooze the message, which is then delivered again after a period of time you designate. Deal, delete, or delay.

The vast majority of the mail I get falls into the instant delete category, so I rarely opt for the snooze function, but it’s a terrific and customizable option. The whole experience has changed my perceptions of e-mail management. I feel like this communications tool, incredibly important in my life, is finally under control and able to be processed in an orderly and effective way.

This is what my in-box usually looks like now, and I hope it never changes.

I’m all done.

Please, someone, quick, send me a message. I know just what to do with it.

"He was my best friend for 25 years, and he’s just irreplaceable. Irreplaceable in our industry and..."

Thu, 24 Jan 2013 12:51:00 -0500

“He was my best friend for 25 years, and he’s just irreplaceable. Irreplaceable in our industry and irreplaceable as my friend … I have great respect for that company. I have great respect for Tim Cook. But, I’ll say it again, Steve’s irreplaceable. We’ve all lost something. He was our Edison, he was our Picasso, there’s no one like him. Apple will continue to thrive, but not like when Steve was around.”

- Larry Ellison, to CNBC’s Maria Bartiromo, Oct. 2, 2012

Some sand, some water and some lounges. Missing Aruba already.

Mon, 21 Jan 2013 09:10:51 -0500

Some sand, some water and some lounges. Missing Aruba already.

Permanence

Fri, 28 Dec 2012 09:35:00 -0500

We were lucky enough to go to the recent 12-12-12 Concert for Sandy Relief, a six-hour benefit show featuring a pretty incredible lineup that Mick Jagger described from the stage as the “largest collection of old English musicians ever assembled in Madison Square Garden.”

As we sat there, watching Bruce Springsteen, Roger Waters, Eric Clapton, Billy Joel, The Rolling Stones, Bon Jovi, Paul McCartney, The Who and others captivate 20,000 in the arena - and many millions watching on televisions around the world - with songs that were written 25, 30 and even 40+ years ago, I started thinking about permanence.

Here were artists who had worked out these words and melodies on paper in the 60s and 70s, basically as kids, up there on the stage - themselves in their 60s and (almost) 70s, performing for people who had made their creations part of their lives. People who had saved up to go to record stores to buy them, waited to hear them played on the radio, obsessed over the lyrics and stared at the cover art, featured them at weddings, parties, memorial services and alone in the car on cross-country drives and trips to the deli.

I couldn’t help but wonder whether this kind of experience would even be possible, decades from now, in the fast and fragmented media world we’re living in - with Pandora streaming, status updates, thoughts expressed in text messages, 140-character Tweets, photos that are filtered, posted, “liked” and largely forgotten. Words, sounds and images that are precious to us held in the cloud, instead of in our hands.

Forty years from now, who would take the nostalgic place of The Who doing Baba O’Riley or Roger Waters singing Another Brick in the Wall? The “reunited for one night only” Jonas Brothers? Taylor Swift rolling through We Are Never Ever Getting Back Together?

“Oh, I remember this song, I bought it on iTunes in the summer of 2012 and played it non-stop for about three weeks until Kesha came out with something new, and that got me to Labor Day. You should follow me on [insert 2052 version of Instagram], by the way.”

Really? There will always be stars, of course, but will there always be this sense of established and communal history?

Music served as a vessel for this particular observation, but the notion of fleeting permanence can be applied much more broadly. Almost across the board, things have gotten easier, more efficient and productive, but also more transitory. There has clearly never been a better time for taking and sharing high-quality photos. The family vacation to Florida that used to produce four rolls of 35 millimeter film, the trip to the drug store to get them developed and discover eight decent images now comes home as 368 digital files, sorted and culled right there on the lounge between sips of slushy drinks. Easily exchanged via e-mail, thumb drive, social media or DVD slideshow. But when’s the last time you sat on the couch and flipped through an album, and what happens if the hard drive fails?

Remember saving the newspaper the morning after your team won a championship, or some historic event happened, when you were a kid? What’s the modern version of that? Is there one? “Yeah, that was a great story, I have a link bookmarked somewhere, I think. No, not there, you’re in Safari, I was on Firefox when I read it, or maybe Chrome.”

Print to digital, 500 channels instead of 12 - all better, all improved, all letting us move faster than ever in a thousand different directions, but where are those long-established shared and lasting moments going to come from, decades from now? Does it matter? Are they necessary?

A part of me thinks they are, thinks they give all of us something to hold onto that’s bigger and more significant than the second we’re in, or the one five minutes ago. Connective tissue. A rich and continuing narrative.

One of the unexpectedly unifying moments in the 12-12-12 show happened pretty early, when Jon Bon Jovi urged the crowd to take lead vocal on the chorus of Livin’ On A Prayer, a song released in 1986. Everyone knew the words, and the building thundered back at this aging rocker.

Whooah, we’re half way there
Whooah, livin’ on a prayer
Take my hand, we’ll make it - I swear
Whooah, livin’ on a prayer

Hold on, what did that guy say again? I want to Tweet this.

thedailyfeed: Ah, 2012, the year we named people after popular...

Sat, 01 Dec 2012 13:05:49 -0500

thedailyfeed:

Ah, 2012, the year we named people after popular electronics.

This year’s list of popular baby names is here! And Apple, Mac and Siri all moved up the list.

Good to see both “our” names are still top 10. Madison was already mainstream when we chose it in 2001, like to think we helped drive the revival of Ava, nine years ago.

Disasters Big And Big

Sun, 04 Nov 2012 22:43:00 -0500

(Northport Harbor, L.I., morning of October 30, 2012)

Like many others in the Northeast, over the last several days we have been dealing with the aftermath of Hurricane Sandy, which rolled through our quiet community in an unquiet way early last week, knocked out power almost immediately and knocked down many trees after that. Our house is still dark, our neighborhood slightly shell shocked, normalcy returning, slowly.

Living through Sandy got me thinking about the disasters I’ve experienced in my life, natural and man-made.

The Northridge earthquake threw me out of my Sherman Oaks bed early on the morning of January 17, 1994. I’d moved to California a few years earlier and had encountered a few quakes by then, but usually the shaking stopped right around the time you noticed it. Not this time. When this one was over I was crawling around my apartment in the dark, trying to navigate shelves and furniture that had tumbled onto the floor, broken dishes and other debris. Finally found a small transistor radio, you’d be amazed how reassuring and life-affirming an authoritative voice in the dark can be.

Instinctively made my way to my car in the garage below the building (bad idea, I know) and drove to the Ventura County bureau of the newspaper I worked for to try to put the office back together and start getting “color,” which back then amounted to asking shell-shocked people to describe what they experienced and how they felt, and then phoning it in to the desk. If the scene played out today I would have been Tweeting and Instagramming away, in the mid ‘90s the process involved a pad, a pen and a payphone.

I remember driving along Ventura Boulevard on my way out of The Valley and seeing all the smashed plate glass widows in front of the businesses, people standing together outside apartment buildings in their pajamas. Virtually everyone I knew was back East, and my building near the epicenter had not yet been deemed safe to return to, but by the end of the day I found my way to the small circle of friends I had out there and we coalesced around a uniquely jarring experience and some wine.

Seven years later, I’m married and living in New York City, we have a six-month-old and I’m waking into my Midtown office building when I notice a small group of people huddled around a radio outside – not a typical sight. Exit the elevator into the lobby of the PR firm I’m working for and find my colleagues crowded around the television bank, watching two tall buildings burning.

We went to our offices and stayed for a while, at one point someone rushed by and said “the Pentagon just got hit,” which just seemed otherworldly. No one knew what was happening, or what we were dealing with. The buildings came down, we watched it together, and then everyone left.

When I hit Fifth Avenue and looked downtown I saw a cloud of smoke that looked exactly like the huge brush fires I used to cover in California. Could not believe what I was seeing. Mass transit was completely shut down by then, I walked to our apartment on 79^th Street and later that night my sister and her boyfriend, now husband, joined us and we sat close to each other and watched Rudy Giuliani on the television tell us everything was going to be OK. More wine. 9/11, a most unnatural disaster, but a disaster all the same.

About a year ago, with Hurricane Irene bearing down on Long Island, we slept in the basement with our two daughters just in case the huge trees around our house had any ideas about joining us. They didn’t, but Irene knocked out our power for most of a week. I got tied up with work and the girls drove east to stay with my parents, who had electricity, and made the best of it as I returned to a dark house at night and wandered around with candles and flashlights.

And then, Sandy. We were as ready as you can be, parked the fully-gassed cars in the garage, stocked up on bottled water, ice and batteries, watched the wind blow for most of Monday afternoon, saw that half a tree had come down into a neighbor’s yard and headed down to the basement for another night of unsettling sounds and uneasy sleep.

Woke up Tuesday and joined others gingerly wandering around our neighborhood with cameras, taking shots of downed trees and wreckage that made Irene look like amateur hour. Two doors down a car was crushed by an enormous oak that fell across the road in a snarl of power lines – a particularly dramatic but not at all incongruous image that morning.

School was canceled and the girls drove up to Vermont Wednesday morning, joined there by my parents. After a week of basically round-the-clock work, I wound up spending the weekend with my two sisters, in the home of the one of us whose house had power.

Four disasters, all big, all different, but all ending in the same place, with people coming together, friends and family in the foreground, leaning on each other and finding a way through.

As off-key and ill-timed as Tony Hayward’s “I’d like my life back” comment was in response to the BP oil spill, there’s an undeniable vein of truth that runs through it when it comes to people trying to recover from a disaster and endure. We all just want our lives back. We want a return to normalcy. And, more often than not, we find it first in the people closest to us.

If This, Maybe Not That

Thu, 20 Sep 2012 22:02:00 -0400

A little more than a year ago, I got an invite (from a Twitter buddy) to try out a new Web service called IFTTT.

The basic construction was built on connecting online services in a simple causal relationship - If this, then that. Initially skeptical that I could find any use for a tool like this, I started playing around, creating recipes in IFTTT terminology, and actually found it pretty valuable.

Send me an e-mail if the pollen count is going to rise above a certain level tomorrow, or if it’s going to snow. E-mail me a link to the photos I post to Instagram. That kind of thing.

But, by far, the most useful integrated service has been Twitter, in a few different ways.

From time to time, I can be professionally interested in Tweets that contain certain search terms, or certain people Tweeting. I’m still on Twitter all day, still run all kinds of manual and saved searches, but IFTTT is a trusted partner, an ally, a fail-safe that automates some of this and ensures I don’t miss anything by e-mailing me the relevant Tweets. Like a Twitter Google Alert. All Things D’s Mike Isaac described this better than I could.

I also created and shared a recipe, which has been used by about 2,000 other people, to automatically send a link in any Tweet I “Favorite” to Instapaper. I know, there are all kinds of ways to do this, but the beauty of the IFTTT recipe is that it is accomplished in a single click, a single action.

Finally, I set up a recipe to archive my own Tweets on Evernote. I’ve never even looked at them, but I know they are there, and I guess that makes me feel good.

And now, based on an e-mail IFTTT sent to its users earlier today, it’s all about to end. This seems to be the key customer-facing information in the message:

“On September 27th we will be removing all Twitter Triggers, disabling your ability to push tweets to places like email, Evernote and Facebook. All Personal and Shared Recipes using a Twitter Trigger will also be removed.”

Way beyond my pay grade to understand the finer points of Twitter’s evolving API or how it relates to the other services that exist in its orbit. All I know is that, as a user, this stinks. It means that something that was useful to me, an integration that made my life easier and made technology function at a higher level, won’t anymore. I think that’s not the way it’s supposed to work. I think it’s actually the reverse of the way it’s supposed to work.

I’m a huge fan, user and supporter of Twitter, and I understand the need to drive consistency through the experience, for a whole host of reasons - the ability to sell ads high among them - but the way I use IFTTT doesn’t seem to conflict with any of this. I watched Twitter CEO Dick Costolo’s excellent appearance on Charlie Rose earlier this week and, when asked about the Twitter ecosystem, he took issue with developers putting out competing clients, but went on to say he wanted Twitter to become “An API and a true platform that allows third parties to build on top of Twitter in a way that creates accretive value for the user.”

Sounds reasonable and right. Sounds like IFTTT.

"Traditional marketing has been about the megaphone. ‘Here’s our message, we’re going to shout it..."

Thu, 20 Sep 2012 00:05:20 -0400

“Traditional marketing has been about the megaphone. ‘Here’s our message, we’re going to shout it through this megaphone and you listen to it.’ That’s changing dramatically as people migrate to mobile, and the ad, the marketer’s message, has to be content. The screen is simply too small, with too little real estate, for people to be paying attention to or bothering with being shouted at. You have to be delivering content to them, that they want to see, in the context of everything else they’re seeing.”

- @dickc, to @charlierose, on mobile marketing

Defending The Indefensible - A Few Words About Embargoes

Tue, 04 Sep 2012 07:55:54 -0400

Everyone hates embargoes. It’s true. I’m talking about the PR person-to-journalist kind here, not the more benevolent version that applies to Cuba or North Korea. If you are ever in the mood for some sausage-making, naval-gazing goodness, just cruise around the Web and read up on how writers feel about this structured, and increasingly prevalent, information exchange. Actually, let me save you some time. As Jerry Seinfeld said to George, when asked for an evaluation of his new toupee, “It’s not good, OK. Not good.”

There are probably a million different ways for a company to put out information, and a million different ways for enterprising reporters to pursue stories. Outreach today can take the form of blog posts, pitches, Tweets and other direct-to-consumer tactics. But, for the purposes of this discussion, let’s limit ourselves to the classic preparation, the press release. A document that, for better or worse, still represents the bedrock and cornerstone of proactive media relations. A document that, at its best, conveys timely information about some meaningful business development - the launch of a new product or service (or company), an enhancement to an existing product or service (or company), some material information that seems to form the basis for trying to “earn” some media attention.

In the case of this time-tested PR genre, there are basically three main distribution strategies to consider:

1. Push “send” on the release, do some follow-up and hope for the best.

2. Offer an “exclusive” to some chosen reporter/outlet, put them in a position to break the story and then follow with the broader release.

3. Work with a range of key reporters/outlets in advance, with coverage (to the extent it materializes) timed to appear as the release is distributed. Yes, the dreaded embargo.

Let’s elaborate on these, one at a time.

First off, just pushing send, which is probably the easiest, least involved and - for the PR person - most irresponsible approach. Remember, this is called earned media for a reason, you earn it, based on the substance/strength of your information and how much thought and care goes into making sure it reaches the right reporters/outlets. You know that thing about how a new car is instantly worth thousands less the moment it is driven off the dealer’s lot? Well, the press release that’s been distributed on PR Newswire, Business Wire or PRWeb before any writer has ever seen it is like that, too. Sure, it might get covered, but you will be swimming upstream from the moment you press the button. Say all you want about the purity of good/legitimate information finding its way into copy, the new car analogy holds. Things move fast, people are busy, and once a release is “out,” it’s out, and it’s typically less valuable and less interesting and you are less likely to get someone to write about it, whatever it is.

Now, let’s turn to the exclusive, the surest fire way to alienate your entire media list in exchange for - you hope - one decent clip. This is generally not recommended.

That leaves the embargo, the hated, maligned, insidious embargo. Let’s break it down. You have a press release that includes some legitimate information you would like the public to know, through the media. So, you sit down and you make a distribution list. In a perfect world, who would write about this? Which outlets do you care about writing about this? This is careful, thoughtful, custom work - it requires relationships, awareness, analysis of past coverage and of the quality/significance of your own information, let’s say you wind up with 5-10 really key people at the end of this process. Maybe it’s 10-15. Under no circumstances is it 50.

You pick a date and a time that makes sense in the context of the business development you are trying to communicate, you wait as long as you possibly can to limit your pitfall exposure and then take your list and get on the phone with the reporters who are on it. The conversations go something like this:

“Hey [reporter], we have a release we’re going to be putting out, and I’d be happy to get it to you now as long as you agree not to publish anything until [date, time], are you OK with that?”

If the agreement is made, proceed to Step Two. Depending on the announcement, this may include a variety of elements to supplement the written document - an interview with a relevant executive, a demo, a tour, preview device, whatever. This all falls under the heading of Additional Information Being Provided In Advance Of The Formal Release, or AIBPIAOTFR. I just made that up. Keep in mind, you are not in a position to demand coverage in exchange for delivering the information, the choice to cover or not cover - as always - rests with the reporter, all you’re doing is previewing an announcement and asking them to agree not to burn you in the process by going early.

If it works, everyone’s happy. The people who decide to write, write. A wave of coverage in meaningful outlets occurs and when you actually do press “send” on that announcement it hits the water on skis, behind a 41-foot Sea Ray moving at a decent rate of speed, as opposed to being tossed over the side of the Northwestern like one of those crab pots on Deadliest Catch.

So what could go wrong?

Well, a lot of things. Don’t forget, there are human beings on both sides of this exchange and, depending on the relative greed or nonstrategic nature of the PR person offering the information, there might be a lot of them. The chain is only as strong as its weakest link. It seems like the vast majority of embargo backlash originates in the tech press, where an expanding array of start-up companies fighting for attention, funding, successful exits and single-family detached housing in Palo Alto supplement their internal media relations staff - to the extent they have any - with PR firms. Boots on the ground. Dialers for dollars.

This can be a problem, because the integrity of the embargo depends on everyone playing by the agreed-upon rules. If someone breaks the arrangement, no one wins. Well, one person wins, but just for one day, and they mess everyone else up and should subsequently be excommunicated from all future discussions/outreach. You can (and should) blame the offending reporter/outlet, especially if the breach was deliberate, but if you want to trace the affront all the way back to its source, it starts with the PR person who put that person on the list. Did they know them? Had they worked with them before? Did they go into the discussion thinking they would ever speak with them again? Because someone, somewhere, looking at an Excel spread sheet with names and phone numbers decided it was worth risking a continuing relationship with a smart and important guy like Ryan Lawler of TechCrunch in pursuit of blog post #36, by someone named Franz who just finished hiking through Europe and took a writing job to generate a new round of hostel money. Not the greatest of bets. You might also want to think through the broader company events happening in the general vicinity of your announcement. Maybe holding a party with beer and wine, a little bit of food and a room full of tech bloggers is not such a great idea when you still haven’t gone public with the fact your company exists. These are all things to consider.

As a PR person, It also helps if you start with a piece of information worthy of this kind of framing discussion, worthy of embargo treatment. If you are going to ask someone who writes for a living to hear something and not write until a designated time, that content better be worth hearing. If the information is pretty marginal, maybe just choose option #1 above, push send and get on the phone. Don’t call established journalists and crank up the gravitas because the dominant color on your company’s revamped website just changed from pink to magenta. Whatever you do, don’t be this guy.

I’ve been a part of dozens of embargoed announcements, maybe more, and have had things go wrong just once or twice, and that was in the early days of the Web, when the magic around when an outlet posted coverage online was typically controlled by one guy who worked in the basement and no one liked to talk to. The process, approached responsibly and with an appropriate level of thought and care, works. This may be one of those rare instances when “don’t hate the game, hate the player(s)” applies.

So, media relations people considering an announcement and a round of embargoed outreach need to ask themselves a simple question. Do you want to be Al Pacino at the end of Scarface, wild-eyed, shooting bullets and rockets in your own house and ultimately lying dead in your ostentatious indoor fountain? Or do you want to be Al Pacino at the end of The Godfather, having strategically taken care of all family business and reviewing porcelain tile samples for the patio outside the new place in Lake Tahoe?

Here’s a hint. There was no Scarface Part II.

Authentic Bread

Sun, 05 Aug 2012 17:52:00 -0400

Authentic. It’s a powerful word. It can be applied to a million different things, in a million different ways, but has just one universal, accessible meaning. Authentic. Genuine. Real. Right.

We spend a good amount of time in Vermont (authentic state) and at some point started to patronize a sandwich shop that offered “sourdough wheat” as one of its bread choices. It was amazing.

After a few dozen memorable sandwiches, we finally asked about the source of the bread, and were told it was the creation of a local baker in West Rupert, VT named Jedediah Mayer (authentic name) and was also available in a handful of stores in the Manchester/Dorset area under the name Rupert Rising Breads.

That was about a year ago. We found the bread and started buying - many loaves of the flagship sourdough wheat, he calls it “Pain Au Levain” - and also probably the best cinnamon raisin we’ve ever tasted, appropriately named Rupert Raisin. When we hit town, probably 10 times a year, finding the Rupert Rising is always at the top of our “to do” list, and this local artisan has become a mini celebrity to our foodie daughters, 9 and 11.

There’s an e-mail address on the Rupert Rising label, and last spring I sent Jed a message to confirm his delivery schedule and the list of shops lucky enough to get a piece of his very limited distribution. Got a very nice response. Picked up the thread a few weeks ago to let him know we had hit our summer Vermont phase and would love the opportunity to stop by and see his operation, maybe grab a loaf right out of the oven and just say hello and express our thanks in person for the many, many overachieving egg sandwiches he had enabled.

That visit happened Thursday, one of the three days each week he dedicates to making this incredible bread, in a town of about 700 people, surrounded by mountains and farmland. When we arrived, around 6 p.m., he had finished his dough work and already formed the thick loaves of sourdough wheat, the smaller baguettes and cinnamon raisin rounds. They were waiting in linen (sourdough), or in small wicker baskets (cinnamon raisin) to be carefully placed into the wood-fired oven he had made by hand almost a dozen years ago. Authentic.

Watching Jed make bread reminded me of watching Anthony Mangieri make pizza, which - unfortunately - is not something you can see in New York anymore. Simple preparations, high-quality ingredients, an exacting, single-minded approach, and complete commitment to the product, which defines the product. Authentic.

He makes about 200 loaves on a production day. When we got there he said he started off in this little room off the back of his house, which used to be the kitchen, around 5 a.m. He and his family could not have been more gracious or welcoming to a group of strangers known only through appreciative e-mails.

The only slightly awkward moment across our entire 45-minute visit was when we asked about buying a little stockpile for ourselves and for friends, and it quickly became clear every single loaf in the room was spoken for. He tried to give us one - oddly shaped, a factory second - we insisted on paying, and once we started tearing the thing apart it didn’t stand a chance of making it to our car.

Authentic.

Perfect "Mix-Less" Margarita

Fri, 03 Aug 2012 09:11:00 -0400

Margaritas and summertime are a study in symbiosis, and one we’ve been happy to extensively explore across our adult lives.

We like them by the pool, we like them when the kids are out of school, we like them at the beach, they’re never too far out of reach. At the end of the day, most any kind of way…

The only real problem is that, historically and by convention, margaritas require some kind of extraneous “mix,” as part of the tequila delivery system. Over the years, we’ve experimented with a number of homemade recipes, trying to overachieve the wide variety of sugary bottled mixes that are out there - the radioactive lime green Jose Cuervo high fructose corn syrup concoction probably the primary offender of the bunch.

I think we finally got it right, and so - with a month of summer left and the solemnity with which Christopher Walken conferred “the watch” to Bruce Willis in Pulp Fiction - I give the recipe for the perfect homemade mix-less margarita to you.

Ingredients:

Limes

Tequila (good - we’re talking El Tesoro, Patrón, something of that quality - this is not a Jose Cuervo moment)

Cointreau (again, this is not a “triple sec” opportunity, there’s not a lot of masking happening in this concoction)

Agave Nectar (You could substitute granulated sugar for this, but why would you want to? Agave Nectar is basically the greatest thing on earth.)

The preparation could not be simpler.

Juice the limes - we cut them in half and use one of these to move through them quickly, squeezing the juice right into a measuring cup. Then follow the following proportions - you can make more, or less, just do the appropriate math.

Combine 2/3 cup of fresh lime juice with 2/3 cup of tequila, 1/3 cup of Cointreau, two or three teaspoons of the nectar (to taste - I think two is perfect) and a little ice in a metal shaker - not enough to really dilute the mixture, just to get a little turbulence and cooling going on - then shake vigorously.

Pour over ice in a glass, accessorize with salt or an extra lime slice if you want.

You’re welcome. Or, depending on how far things go, I’m sorry.

Perfect Pizza Dough

Fri, 06 Jul 2012 09:00:00 -0400

We’ve been making pizza at home for years. It’s a great casual and rolling family meal, even better with family and friends. You get your ingredients together, heat up a pizza stone to around 500 degrees in the oven or on the grill, and just start cranking out pies. Red sauce with mozzarella, white with mozzarella, or goat cheese, or a combo of both and toppings like spinach, caramelized onions, broccoli rabe, mushrooms, sliced cherry tomatoes, shredded chicken breast - all kinds of ways to get creative and embrace your inner Ed LaDou.

The foundation of all of this creativity and savory goodness, of course, is the dough. It all starts with the dough. It’s funny, when you first introduce the notion of homemade pizza, the fundamental stumbling point for people is almost always this essential platform, and how it’s sourced. Finally, you convey the unthinkable - you made it yourself - a revelation that is met with the kind of verbal and non-verbal reactions David must have experienced right after Goliath hit the dirt.

Over the years, we have experimented with many, many dough recipes - white flour, white whole wheat, whole wheat, sugar, honey, olive oil, hand-mixed, Kitchen Aid-mixed, active dry yeast, rapid rise yeast, overnight rest, rise at room temperature, rise in the refrigerator, punched down three times, not punched down at all, kneaded while the name “Frank Pepe” is rhythmically chanted, you name it. I think the first dough we ever made was right out of The California Pizza Kitchen Cookbook, and it was good and respectable, a fine start. Then, we moved on to a kind of modified Peter Reinhart and stayed there for years, happy, while continuing to tinker.

But, a few weeks ago, I had a random encounter with a personal chef named Lisa Schoen and, as is to be expected, we got to talking about pizza. More specifically, pizza dough. Esteemed cooking school, a few years as a baker, time in the kitchens of NYC restaurants you’ve heard of, the inevitable brush with Food Network fame, she had all the prerequisites to be taken seriously, and when she offered up her recipe for arguably the most important handmade concoction to ever come out of a kitchen, I broke out the iPhone and started typing.

We took our maiden voyage last weekend and it was like my eyes opened for the first time. We found it. We found the perfect pizza dough, and that brief encounter changed my life - changed all of our lives - because in a complicated world, this very important piece is now set. Forever. And, like the culinary equivalent of Jerry Seinfeld’s “move,” it’s too good not to be passed on, but appropriate care is required.

So here it is:

1 package, active dry yeast (1/4 oz.)

1 Tbsp, sugar

1 Tbsp, kosher salt (seems like a lot, go for it)

4 cups white flour (can substitute white whole wheat, whole wheat, etc.)

1 cup warm water

1 cup ice cold water (may need a little more based on dough consistency)

Olive oil drizzle on bottom of holding pan, and for the top of the dough balls

The preparation of this dough could not be easier, which was surprising given how far superior it was to versions we have slaved over, here are the detailed instructions, in steps.

1. Combine the packet of yeast with one cup of lukewarm water and the Tbsp of sugar, stir and leave to the side, the yeast will react with the sugar and start bubbling, you will see it is “activating” and working.

2. Put four cups of flour and the Tbsp of kosher salt (course) in a food processor, with a plastic dough blade. Pulse a few times to mix the flour and the salt.

Note: The way this recipe was given to me, only white flour is used. We’re pretty partial to whole wheat flour around here, so for the initial run we made two batches - one with all white flour, the second with half white flour and half white whole wheat. They were both incredible, and the next time out we’re going to try half whole wheat and half white whole wheat and see how it goes. I’ll report back.

(Editor’s Update: We tried this recipe over the weekend with equal portions of King Arthur whole wheat and white whole wheat flour - full health - and it was terrific. More dense than the other versions, very good and crisp crust. One thing to keep in mind is that you do lose some elasticity when you are working with this wheat version of the dough, you have to be much more gentle with it to avoid it pulling apart and creating holes when you’re in the stretching out process.)

3. Add the warm water/yeast/sugar mix to the flour in the food processor, and pulse a few times to combine.

4. Begin to slowly add ICE COLD water to the mixture, continuing to pulse. The amount of water you need will be about one cup, maybe slightly more, watch the dough in the machine and when it becomes a fairly solid clump moving around together with each pulse, you are there. If you over-water, add more flour, but try to avoid adding too much water and having to “save” the dough in this way.

5. Remove the dough from the food processor, put on a counter or cutting board that has been liberally dusted with flour and knead the dough for about five minutes. You want to end this process with a nice uniform ball.

6. Cut the dough into four equal portions - one cut from top to bottom, the other from side to side - and shape the dough into individual balls. You want a smooth top, so work from top to bottom and use the sides to sort of fold the dough over onto itself, pulling together the “loose ends” on the bottom of the orb.

7. Drizzle some good olive oil on a baking pan and place the individual balls on the pan, smooth side up, leaving enough space between for them to about double in size. Then use your fingers to lightly coat the “perfect” top sides with olive oil and cover the tray in plastic wrap. Doesn’t have to be snug or too loose, doesn’t need to be air tight - the oil on the top of the dough is intended to keep the plastic from sticking to it. Once you have completed this step, it looks like this (white/wheat mixture on bottom, all-white on top):

8. Place the pan on a counter and leave aside to rise, the dough balls will roughly double in size over the next hour or two. When this has happened, put the tray directly into the refrigerator to rest overnight. Don’t punch the dough down. Don’t put on fresh plastic wrap. Don’t do anything else. In the immortal words of Nigel Tufnel, “Don’t touch it, don’t even look at it.”

9. About a half hour before you are ready to make your pizzas the next day, pull the dough out of the refrigerator and let it come back to room temperature. These will now be pretty flat and, as you work with the individual balls, you’ll want to get them into flour pretty quickly, work them, stretch them out on a pizza peel, top appropriately (a lot of discretion here, see above) and slide onto a searing hot pizza stone in the oven or on the grill.

One step left at this point, let’s call it #10.

Get ready to be happy.

Breathing It In

Sat, 23 Jun 2012 23:34:00 -0400

I remember making a concerted effort to pause a few times over the course of my wedding day and really breathe it in. I wanted to be able to appreciate the things that were happening around me, to access them again in my mind, and not just get lost in the blur of this Big Day as it moved from step one, to step two, to steps three through ten and then - before I knew it - step over.

You could apply the same dynamic to daily life, and moments big and small, because there are reminders everywhere, in myriad forms, that “step over” will arrive before we ever see it coming. Robin Williams in Dead Poets Society, making his students stare at the intent and earnest faces of their long-gone predecessors staring out from class photos and reminding them that we are all “food for worms,” or Anthony Hopkins, at an elaborate birthday celebration to end Meet Joe Black, wistfully asking, “Sixty-five years… don’t they go by in a blink?” or a guy named Seth in a nursing home telling a young David Carr in The Night of the Gun, “It goes so fast; so, so fast. Never forget that it goes by very fast. One minute you’re sitting there, just like you, a young man, big and strong, and the next, you are lying here like me, all dried up and almost done. I have memories, but my life is mostly gone.”

Compelling, real, and very hard to remember or honor in the moment, because we’re usually moving too fast, and - from our current vantage point - the path stretches out ahead as far as the eye can see.

Our girls wrapped up another school year yesterday, we’ve tied the ribbon on 3rd and 5th and will be moving into 4th and 6th next fall. They’ve been with us for a decade, give or take, have become full-fledged human beings, and I still remember taking the money out of my wallet to pay the cab driver an extra $10 for the 10 block ride between the hospital and our NYC apartment so Madison wouldn’t break. Feels like yesterday, and a million years ago. Thank goodness for digital photos and video. Parenting pro tip: Don’t ever hesitate, don’t get lazy - shoot it, shoot all of it.

The Internet and our always-on devices are great in many ways, but they haven’t exactly helped further a “stop and breathe it in” agenda. “Dad, put your phone down!” is probably the most distressing admonition I hear in life, so I’ve been trying to focus on not offering up the opportunity.

It’s hard not to climb into that screen, no matter how small, but no Tweet, no word with a friend, no Instagram feed is worth being absent or distracted when surrounded by the people who make up our actual lives. There’s a balance, and a way to make “present” a priority.

Taking Ava to soccer practice and spending a good part of the hour staring down at my device is not the same as sharing her experience. It’s not really watching TV with Madison if the show is a background track to go along with an open laptop. And even if we’re sitting right next to each other and her eyes are glued to the screen 96 percent of the time, the other 4 percent - when she turns to the side to see if I saw the thing that just made her laugh - matters. I’m trying to remind myself to lock into those moments, to see them as opportunities instead of just incremental or incidental interludes, because Seth was right. It goes so fast. So, so fast.

"To try to model yourself after Steve Jobs, I mean, again, it would be like, ‘Well, OK,..."

Fri, 01 Jun 2012 08:09:00 -0400

“To try to model yourself after Steve Jobs, I mean, again, it would be like, ‘Well, OK, I’d like to paint like Picasso, what should I do? Should I use more red?’”

- Maybe the best line to come out of this week’s D10 conference, Larry Ellison, to Walt Mossberg, on his friend Steve Jobs

"I think the marriage of some really great client apps with some really great cloud services is..."

Fri, 25 May 2012 09:21:52 -0400

“I think the marriage of some really great client apps with some really great cloud services is incredibly powerful and right now, can be way more powerful than just having a browser on the client.”

- Steve Jobs, with @waltmossberg and @karaswisher, at D5 - May 30, 2007. Five years ago. Five. Years. Ago.

D10 is next week. Who’s going to say something that shines as clear a light on 2017?

They Might Be Giants

Fri, 04 May 2012 08:12:00 -0400

The Cablevision cable TV sales reps walked through my suburban Long Island neighborhood in December of 1975, promising better reception and a new channel called HBO.

They carried these little “HBO On Air” guides with them, left behind as part of the sales pitch, a featured film on the cover, full listings inside. “The Towering Inferno” was on the cover that first month, “Young Frankenstein” the next.

These miniature books captured my imagination, along with the notion of television channels that didn’t go to bed every night, after playing the Star Spangled Banner to footage of the American Flag blowing in the wind. People younger than 40 probably don’t remember that TV wasn’t always an around-the-clock proposition. It actually ended, in the neighborhood of midnight, and then fired back up again the next morning. There was no Sig Hansen on the Bering Sea at 3 a.m., no Tony Robbins offering encouragement in the dark, nothing.

We subscribed to cable, largely at my urging, and the guides - which soon transitioned from “HBO On Air” to the broader “Cablevision” to reflect the expanded programming options and listings - kept coming. I started saving them, my Frank Costanza moment, and wound up with a pretty complete set from that first edition through 1983 or so. The dawning days of an industry. I still have them in a box.

When The Weather Channel turned 30 this week, I dug them out and took a little stroll through 1982, looking for the first sign of a channel that has been my default background option for more than 20 years. The first mention of Cablevision having added TWC showed up in October, followed the next month by a full-page ad.

Since I had my little time capsule out, I flipped through a number of the guides and found a few more programming ads from that same period (1980-82) that seemed worth sharing, promoting in their infancy channels that went on to become household names, and preeminent global brands.

An ESPN ad invited viewers to call a toll-free phone number for the night’s programming line-up, one from C-SPAN offered a free booklet called “Gavel to Gavel,” that outlined “all the key congressional terms,” so viewers could fully appreciate its “coverage of Congress in action.”

Nickelodeon used a New York Times clip to pitch a new channel for kids, blessed by the National Education Association, that entertained “without relying on violence,” and CNN promised “a world of information, analysis and opinion conventional networks simply haven’t had time to explore.” HBO was experimenting with the notion of “HBOnly” more than three decades ago, The Movie Channel was willing to “suffer through the bad movies, so you don’t have to.”

Today’s Goliaths, before they even dreamed of being Davids.

"Women say things to each other, and the next day they go shopping. Men say things to each other, and..."

Mon, 30 Apr 2012 11:29:00 -0400

“Women say things to each other, and the next day they go shopping. Men say things to each other, and they don’t talk for 30 years.”

- So many great nuggets in this brief NYT Q&A with Garry Marshall, including this line. Quick read, worth it.

“He found a promoter who nearly fell off the floor. He...

Fri, 27 Apr 2012 13:10:00 -0400

“He found a promoter who nearly fell off the floor. He said, ‘I never engaged in this kind of thing before, but - yes - I think it can be very easily done…’” #PRJams

Link to the full playlist, up to 20 songs: http://open.spotify.com/user/jimmaiella/playlist/7x20P1372Rqxwhy0SVhQvT

Next one, next week.

"Even after he went back to Apple, there was nothing Jobs liked more than spending time at home. Not..."

Thu, 19 Apr 2012 13:41:06 -0400

“Even after he went back to Apple, there was nothing Jobs liked more than spending time at home. Not that he wasn’t a workaholic. We were iChat buddies for several years, so his name would pop up whenever he was working at his computer at home. Almost invariably, he was in front of his Mac until after midnight. We’d occasionally have a video chat, and if it took place early in the evening, I’d often see one of his children in the background looking on.”

- One of my favorite graphs from The Lost Steve Jobs Tapes, Brent Schlender’s terrific look at Steve Jobs and the critical role his “wilderness years” played in the success that followed

Taking advantage of the new @tumblr-@Spotify integration for...

Fri, 13 Apr 2012 14:05:24 -0400

Taking advantage of the new @tumblr-@Spotify integration for this week’s edition of #PRJams.

In Don’t You (Forget About Me) by Simple Minds, Jim Kerr puts the psychological trauma behind every “did you get the press release?” follow-up phone call or e-mail to music.

Here’s a link to the full #PRJams playlist, now up to 17 tracks, and an earlier post with some background on the (continuing, but largely neglected) effort.

Back next week with #18.