This is brilliant. To me this video is a commentary on a generation of pseudo-talent that has, against all common sense, been affirmed into failure by well-meaning parents. If these guys are for real, then, well, bless their hearts! http://vimeo.com/moogaloop.swf?clip_id=9625670&server=vimeo.com&show_title=1&show_byline=1&show_portrait=1&color=00ADEF&fullscreen=1 Can we go too far in affirming our children into an unhealthy, unrealistic place?

You can’t  predict it. You can’t prepare for it. But when it happens you can choose to embrace it or reject it. “The encounter” is what I call it: a time when someone, a total stranger walks into your life and your worlds collide. For whatever reason you find thrust into the middle of another’s life story and the choice is clear: I either engage or choose to walk away.  If you know me, you already know the answer to that dilemma. I engage.  Just this past weekend I was reminded of a particular memorable “encounter.”  Greg and Joanie Anderson showed up at an event I was hosting in Palm Springs in partnership with a publisher. The interesting thing about them is that I didn’t know who they were and had not invited them. But they made it into the publisher’s list somehow and showed up at our event on…

As social media changes the way we interact, speculation has abounded for years on how the web may be disconnecting us from intimate interactions in favor of meaningless quests to rack up followers and “friends.” I have heard it for numerous times how social media is robbing us of authentic, honest relationships. Not so, says Stefana Broadbent, who explains that social networks function the same way online as they do in real life. While we may have lots of friends, we only really communicate regularly and meaningfully with a handful of them, and social technologies like e-mail, texting, and tweeting allow us to do so more often across time and space http://video.ted.com/assets/player/swf/EmbedPlayer.swf How has social media impacted the way you communicate?