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I called up a guy who won the PA lottery. He got $8 million in the lump sum, give or take. A few weeks earlier I was having lunch with the editor of “In Pittsburgh” magazine, the local free paper. He was a new editor. I wanted to write for them to get the experience. […]

I had to run to the second level basement at the New York Public Libary on 42nd Street. Every day. I worked across the street at HBO and I would usually hold it in until I really had to go the bathroom. But there was no way I was going to go to the bathroom […]

This a summarized and expanded version of the Twitter Q&A I do every Thursday from 3:30-4:30. I get about 100 questions during that hour and answer most of them in sort of “blitz answer” mode. I then take about a dozen of the questions and expand them out further here. The results will eventually be […]

I was completely lost, four years old, running around the department store looking for my parents who I was afraid had abandoned me. I saw one pair of pants legs that looked like my dad’s: brown, dark shoes, the business uniform. I ran straight into them, crying with relief. Then I looked up, I saw […]

A lot of people who know me personally think I have ZERO common sense. For instance, Claudia says, “you went to freakin’ Carnegie-Mellon for a PhD and you can’t figure out how to operate a coffee machine”. To which I have two things to say: A)     I was thrown out of Carnegie Mellon’s grad school […]

[This was a guest post I did for TechCrunch this weekend]: I’m in even worse trouble now. A few weeks ago I had to speak at Barry Ritholz’s conference but that turned out to be “only” a panel. It was a great panel but I knew I would only have ten minutes of time so […]

The last time I used a phone booth I ended up with shit all over my head. I had to get tampons or diapers or some other family-related product that in 33 years of living I had never had to get before. So in the three minutes it took for me to walk from my […]